Brains, machines and buildings: towards a neuromorphic architecture

We introduce neuromorphic architecture, exploring ways to incorporate lessons from studying real, biological brains to devise computational systems based on the findings of neuroscience that can be used in intelligent buildings, adding a new biologically grounded perspective to the more general view that future buildings are to be constructed as perceiving, acting and adapting entities. For clarity, the term ‘brain’ is reserved for the brains of animals and humans in this article, whereas the term ‘interactive infrastructure’ refers to the analogous system within a building. Key concepts of neuroscience are presented at sufficient length to support preliminary analysis of the possible influence of neurobiological data on the design and properties of interactive infrastructures for future buildings. Ada – the intelligent space, a pavilion visited by over 550,000 guests at the Swiss National Exhibition of 2002, had an interactive infrastructure based (in part) on artificial neural networks (ANNs), had ‘emotions’ and ‘wanted’ to play with her visitors. We assess the extent to which her design was indeed grounded in neuroscience. Several sketches for rooms that exemplify neuromorphic architecture are used to demonstrate the way in which research on how its brain supports an animal's interactions with its physical and social world may yield brain operating principles that lead to new algorithms for a neuromorphic architecture that supports the ‘social interaction’ of rooms with people and other rooms to constantly adapt buildings to the needs of their inhabitants and enhance interactions between the people who use them and their environment.