In Barcelona, there is a building that learns. The Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia’s headquarters adjusts its skin, its airflow, and its lighting in response to the people inside — not to a schedule, but to a conversation with them. It is, architects say, closer to a plant than to a machine: responsive, seasonal, alive to its own interior weather.
What makes it possible is a three-body architecture — sensors, inhabitants, and a learning model held together in a single loop. This chapter lays out that architecture formally: how to compose hardware, software, and knowware into systems that can, in a modest and very useful sense, think for themselves.