Call for Qualifications: Towards the Sentient City


The people at the Architectural League of New York have been at the forefront of the debate about the Mobile City. In 2006 they organized a symposium on Architecture and Situated Technologies, and in 2007 they launched the Situated Technologies Pamphlet Series. Now it seems, it is time to put the theory into practice. They have released a ‘Request for Qualifications’ for an exhibition on the relation between pervasive computing and urban architecture, next spring in New York.

The Architectural League of New York invites architects, artists, designers, technologists, engineers, urbanists, or teams thereof, to submit qualifications for an exhibition that will critically explore the evolving relationship between ubiquitous/pervasive computing and urban architecture. The League will commission five to seven teams to develop urban interventions–to be installed in and around New York City in spring 2009–that will imagine alternative trajectories for how various mobile, embedded, networked, and distributed forms of media, information and communication systems might inform the architecture of urban space and/or influence our behavior within it. Commissioned projects will receive support ranging from $5,000 to $25,000.