VIRTUAL Manchester Livable Cities

Abstract

We are currently witnessing a genuine reversal of roles. Whereas in the past the architect shaped places through their own intelligence and envisioned their future trajectories, today it is increasingly the places themselves that delimit the architect’s possible actions. As a result, architecture is often required to relinquish formal ambition and instead operate as a tool for critical interpretation and creative enhancement of the existing—particularly in urban contexts saturated with built events and progressively deprived of collective spaces. In my talk, I introduce what I define as “context‑ual intelligence”: an intelligence that emerges directly from the context and is capable of influencing architectural practice to the point of generating new layers of meaning. Places thus become protagonists and, in the best cases, bearers of new “narratives” that are reshaping the urban environment in distinctive ways. Architecture increasingly functions as a “critical interface”—acting on social, technological, or symbolic levels—while also marking our era aesthetically, which I have described as “an age of Rembrandt‑like beauty,” rooted in a particular form of “aesthetic realism.” Through a combination of theoretical reflection and selected case studies, the contribution addresses the conference theme by examining three interrelated dimensions of context‑ual intelligence: 1. its capacity to redefine architectural practice by foregrounding processes over forms; 2. its role in generating new aesthetic values grounded in contextual specificity; 3. its function as a catalyst for emerging modes of collective urban experience.