Quantum Architecture : TEXT
“Transform the surface of sensory appearances into a new sensorium that is a mirror of its own activity”
Ranciere
This thesis critiques architecture’s prevailing inability to think synthetically about the material and the digital, and challenges the entrenched dichotomy between 'smart' and 'dumb' technologies. It calls for a reexamination of the conceptual and disciplinary categories that constrain architectural thinking, locking it into positions of subordination rather than speculation. By reconfiguring these dead ends as opportunities, the project opens new avenues for exploration. Ultimately, it proposes an architectural actualization of a world in which mind and matter are radically coupled—a condition described here as ‘quantum architecture.’
“Radically,“ here, having a double function: on the one hand calling a discipline out of a temporary marasmus, on the other pointing to the irrational and willful operations necessary for the fulfilment of the project (that is, if you think mind and matter are already coupled, collapse them further - beyond any reasonable limits).
see related images and installation here
1. Introduction: The Virtual Does Not Exist
The world, we are told, is increasingly irrelevant. More and more occurs beneath the surface—encoded in streams of 0s and 1s hurtling at light speed through optical fibers, ready to summon countless realities when intercepted. A cut cable, a screen, a port—these media interfaces unleash a flood of virtualities. Tables, walls, ceilings, floors—vestiges of an earlier age—are stripped down, flattened into surfaces, and made ‘smart.’ The physical world is devalued: reduced at best to an inert vessel for a supposedly higher intelligence—real culture, real communication, real knowledge—or at worst, to a decorative skin cloaking an entangled mesh of cables.
Architecture—the world itself—increasingly resigns to this inert role. Collaborations with ‘media specialists’ rarely integrate the real and the virtual; instead, they underscore the very distinction they aim to collapse. A project is part-wired, part-frame. The digital dominates.
But this narrative is false.
First, the rise of smart materials—whether natural or synthetic—reclaims the traditional relevance of matter. By embedding diffuse intelligence into substance itself, these materials invite a renewed valuation of worldly bulk. Upon closer inspection, the idea of material “smartness,” parsed through a taxonomy of Latin-Greek hybrids—piezoelectrics, electrochromics, magnetorheological fluids, thermo-optics—reveals itself as a study in connectivity. Smart materials are causal, often reversible, links between physical properties. The line between smart and dumb, it turns out, is vague—defined more by context than by essence. Ultimately, it is human creativity that decides whether a material merely responds or becomes.
Even the most basic techno-material networks—praised for their elegance—are not fundamentally different from more complex assemblies. While digital systems may seem to distance architecture from material honesty, they themselves rely on the very material processes they are thought to transcend. The digital is born of the physical. Piezoelectric elements act as sound sensors. Photoresistive materials register light. Thermo-responsive strips bend with temperature changes. Each of these is a mechanism by which physical phenomena enter computational circuitry. The so-called virtual is not immaterial—it is one expression of the material world.
The belief that the virtual constitutes a radical, competing alternative to the real is historically constructed—most potently during the last few decades of digital alienation, made pervasive by ubiquitous technology. This thesis proposes that the abstract operational logic of 0s and 1s—absence and presence—superimposed upon electric pulses, offers a diminished ontology of the world. It is a crude framework for understanding the rich interplay of mind and matter, surface and depth, physicality and thought.
2. Then...
Several developments are particularly compelling in this context. Chief among them is the emergence of quantum computing, which holds the promise of surpassing the digital paradigm by entangling computation with the complexities of matter at its most elementary level. A recent milestone—where a quantum device managed to compute that 3 × 5 = 15—illustrates both the promise and the challenges of this frontier. This seemingly trivial operation was performed using five atoms and completed, perhaps, in the instant before researchers even pressed ‘enter.’ Such moments highlight the fragility and sophistication of quantum logic.
Yet, despite the conceptual revolution quantum computing implies, it may ultimately yield little more than an exponential increase in processing speed. If so, its impact on the material-virtual divide would remain largely indirect—enhancing the mechanics of the digital without reconfiguring its foundational ontology.
This speaks to a broader cultural trend: the increasing use of the adjective quantum to describe scientific advances. While the term evokes excitement among lay audiences, it often simply denotes a fundamental shift in the properties leveraged to produce a result. The original meaning of quantum—rooted in the discrete energy levels of electrons—has become shorthand for complexity, nuance, and transformation. In architecture, invoking the quantum must be less about technological accuracy and more about projecting speculative desires. To call architecture quantum is to provoke it—to challenge its assumptions, its boundaries, and its ways of thinking.
Smart materials, as previously discussed, offer one route beyond the digital. However, their current uses are often superficial—applied decoratively or to achieve environmental responsiveness—without engaging deeper architectural concerns such as structure, spatial organization, or access. By deliberately unsettling the concept of smartness, this thesis seeks to reclaim it as a disciplinary tool—dissolving the line between ‘smart installation’ and the architecture that supports it.
3. Statement: Defining quantum architecture.
This thesis seeks a radical materialism that is simultaneously a radical idealism—not materialism as it is commonly understood, nor idealism in the traditional sense, but a condition where the distinction between the two collapses. At this point of convergence, hardware and software become indistinguishable. As Friedrich Kittler provocatively suggested: “There is no software.” Or perhaps, “only software”—which is to say, ideology itself becomes a property of matter. Matter is heavy. Matter is empty.
A quantum material, in this framework, is defined not by proximity or physical contiguity but by designed properties—deliberate behaviors disconnected from immediate causal environments. In quantum materials, space and time are disturbed. These materials behave like media interfaces: a camouflage system, for instance, may perform only in real-time relation to an observer’s position and its surrounding context. It functions in a feedback loop, not as a static object but as a conditional event. Its performance exceeds its physical boundaries. Thus, a quantum material is more a contextual condition than a fixed technological object—though of course, it is never without technological apparatus.
In this sense, quantum architecture becomes a way to ‘think’ architecture. It is a speculative mode—an operation more conceptual than technological. Consider quantum stealth: an invisibility cloak, essentially. There is no material precedent for such a thing in the world—only in our conceptual fantasies. Quantum architecture is therefore driven less by empirical materiality than by desire—the subject is always implicit. As such, it aligns more with impositional constructs than with ideals of material honesty. It continues in the lineage of architectural provocations—deconstructive experiments like Eisenman’s, or the willful absurdity of theoretical physics models. It is closer to conceptual misuse than to practical innovation. And yet: how else does one do theory on atoms?
Light will serve as the case study phenomenon for this investigation. As both wave and particle, light embodies ambiguity—it is both the subject and medium of perception. Light structures experience. Architecture—its form, ornament, materiality—is mediated first and foremost through light. Even aspects of architecture that escape vision still orbit it, if only indirectly. Yet architecture largely ignores light’s stranger behaviors: polarization, diffraction, interference, photoelasticity—effects that are fundamental to our technologies (glass, mirrors, video) but remain marginal in design discourse.
This project proposes to shift from a politics of visuality to a politics of light itself. If light is the primary mediator of architecture, then its complex behavior should not be aestheticized and set aside, but used to destabilize and reimagine the field. Through light, architecture might begin to think its own quantum condition.
* The virtual/digital - real/material dichotomy is nothing less than a world ontology - a version of the timeless divide between mind and matter, conveniently updated to the contemporary techno-secular paradigm but preserving the traditional hierarchy among the terms. Digitally conceived artificial intelligence is a case in point.
** As through the development of technologies currently thwarted by limited computing capacity. In claytronics millions of molecule-sized machines would arrange into any shape creating a new genera of embodied holograms, completely transformable architecture and more...
*** Others have already defined quantum architecture more or less metaphorically but always almost completely misunderstanding the scientific context of the theory - this will inevitably happen here as well.
Convoluted technological setup results in a ‘digital-glass’ – a redundant version
of a matter-based technology already widely available. The technology is thus estranged.
(The projection does not add anything - it aims to subtruct: subtruct the wall itself)
