Doing away with rigid definitions and profitability concerns, the room can become an indeterminate space full of unexplored potentialsLouis Kahn made a series of drawings for the City/2 exhibition in 1971 one centred on the interior room and another ventured outdoors. He describes the street as a community room, the walls of which belong to the donors, its ceiling is the skyCredit:Philadelphia Museum of Art: Gift of the artist, 1972323 Estate of Louis I Kahn / The University of Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum CommissionArchitecture comes from the making of a room, wrote Louis Kahn on a drawing produced for the exhibition City/2, held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1971. Similar ideas appeared in his speech upon receiving the AIA Gold Medal that same year, where the room was celebrated as the beginning of architecture. His portrayal of the room is poetic and decidedly ambiguous: it is the place of the mind and its structure is the giver of light. The room is, to Kahn, the quintessential architectural element, its basic unit of aggregation; he saw a floor plan as a society of rooms. Rather than reducing the room to an array of rational parameters to be complied with, he provides a generous portrayal of many ways to create a sense of place and a space for life.Kahns position came as a rebuke to the oversimplification of the space of the room into a box and of the building into a grouping of parallelepipeds, attached one to the next without much flair or care. He was, in essence, protesting against some of the teachings of the architecture of modernity that had managed to spread around the world and had in turn helped produce decontextualised buildings devoid of any nuance or complexity.Creating spaces for life is also what animated Gio Ponti when designing Villa Marchesano in 1938. A drawing he made of the then unfinished house shows a series of annotations that reveal projective aspects of the proposal, while the actual architecture walls, windows, doors remains concealed. Thoughts, ranging from intentions to intuitions to topographical indications of the various modes of inhabiting, are scribbled over the large sheet of tracing paper; spaces are not defined by the construction of their perimeter but by the many ways in which they will be inhabited.Gio Ponti made a drawing of Villa Marchesano in 1938, before it was finished, without any walls at all. Instead, the drawing captures moments and intentions, including a spot where you descend into this water from these stones, just like the nymphs doCredit:Courtesy Gio Ponti ArchivesPonti was more interested in the interrelation between spaces than in the precise dimensions of rooms more in the views towards the outside than in the exact size or shape of windows, and more in the wellbeing of inhabitants than in the functional design of furniture. For meals, a lightweight table without a permanent home can be positioned here, or here, or here, or here; the four possible placements for the table depend on the season, the time of day or the whim of inhabitants.Some descriptions are pragmatic: from here, you get to the house and there is a high window over a workbench. Others verge on the poetic: over there you descend into this water from these stones, just like the nymphs do and, from a distance, the white ceramic roof resembles a large sheet drying in the sun, streaked with blue shadows from the pines. Some specific aspects of the design of the house are pencilled in as well, revealing the ideas of the architect about colours, materials and atmosphere: flooring all in white, blue ceiling and this door has small panes of glass, it excites but allows for little curiosity. A particularly impressive pine tree needs to be seen from the bed and from the writing table, while the unavoidable presence of the sea, il mare, runs along the bottom edge of the drawing and its presence is imprinted in the views from every room.A room, whatever its function, location or shape, is a space ultimately activated by its useThis drawing, as well as others made by Ponti, offer a counterpoint to those produced by architects such as Bruno Taut and Margarete SchtteLihotzky only a decade earlier. In an effort to reconstruct destroyed cities after the First World War and improve the housing conditions of the working class, European architecture had moved towards standardisation and efficiency. Architects such as Taut and SchtteLihotzky placed the users at the centre of their projects of mass housing in Berlin and Frankfurt. In a commendable endeavour to make the lives of inhabitants easier, especially those of the housewives inevitably burdened with the majority of the household workload, the architects made an effort to optimise the workflow, which was then signalled in the form of arrows of movement in the projects floor plans. In doing so, however, they seemed to convert inhabitants into machine operators, all their movements calibrated in a choreography of domestic duties.In Frank Halmans ongoing Rooms for Reading collages, a series begun in 2014, the paper walls begin to peel awayCredit:Jeannette ScholsPontis Villa Marchesano plan follows a very different approach. By mapping thoughts and intuitions, arrowing movements and views, and signalling both the spaces for household chores and the places for leisure and rest, Ponti bestows them all with value. Seeing this drawing, the viewer can better imagine the life inside and out than by just looking at other types of plans or even photographs. The dwellers of Villa Marchesano are not represented as automatons, their movements not dictated by pure functionality. They are, first and foremost, inhabitants of these spaces.Representation is the tool architects use to bridge the gap between the mental realm and the outer world, to materialise ideas into being. It is primarily for the benefit of clients, collaborators and contractors. Pontis drawing, however, was made for publication and its main audience was other architects. As founder and editor of Domus, his choice to produce and publish this drawing in 1938 signals a desire to move beyond a merely formal or technical representation of architecture and clearly state that a room is a place in which inhabitation happens. As a portrayal of the household, it transcends the standard floor plan.In a bid to capture the experience of resting in the shade of a carob tree (the request of the client), architect Jos Antonio Coderch de Sentmenat made a drawing of the trees on the Casa Ugalde plot. The final house, completed in 1953, preserved as many of these trees as possibleCredit:Photographic Archives Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofa / VEGAP. All rights reserved. DACS 2024A few years later, in the early 1950s, as Europe was recovering from the Second World War, Jos Antonio Coderch de Sentmenat and his partner Manuel Valls i Vergs were commissioned to design a house on the outskirts of Barcelona under a unique premise. The client, Eustaquio Ugalde, wanted the new home to preserve the feeling of that afternoon when he had climbed up the hill on the site and sat to rest under the shade of a carob tree, admiring the surrounding views.On visiting the site for the first time, Coderch observed the land and took note of everything around him in the form of a sketch. The drawing shows the precise location and species of every tree within the perimeter, including whether there was a group of more than one or if a pine tree had two trunks, and points out the direction of the best views. There are no architectural intentions projected onto the paper, simply data. With every distance, height and angle measured, the resulting image resembles a treasure map. Contrary to Pontis Villa Marchesano drawing, this one is made as part of a process. It is a starting point from which to iterate possible configurations of the house, and although it was not meant to be kept for posterity, Coderch held on to it throughout the whole duration of the project. He recognised its generative importance in the formalisation of the project and ultimately chose to make it part of the publication material for the house. As Ponti, who Coderch had greatly admired from the early days of Domus and who later became a good friend, there was a certain acknowledgement that the house and its rooms cannot be understood if not in direct relationship to their site.The shade of a tree can give welcome respiteCredit:MISCELLANEOUSTOCK / AlamyWhat slice of the sun enters your room? wondered Kahn in his drawings scribbles. In Casa Ugalde, the exchange between inside and out is carefully selected to frame the best views, the shape of its walls embracing the dweller in a succession of interior and exterior rooms, in a distinctive rhythm of light and shadow, architecture and trees.In Italo Calvinos The Baron in the Trees, Cosimo makes his life in the trees and, in doing so, turns the trees into his homeItalo Calvino might have provided a different response to Ugaldes brief. In his 1957 novel The Baron in the Trees, the young nobleman Cosimo Piovasco di Rond climbs up a tree after a rather banal argument with his family over the meal served for dinner, and then refuses to come down. He spends the rest of his life jumping from one tree to the next, without ever touching ground again. He makes his life in the trees and, in doing so, turns the trees into his home. The adaptation is not without its problems, but Cosimo becomes increasingly resourceful in finding ways to domesticise his daytoday life among the branches. He finds the most comfortable of them to sleep or read on, learns how to channel the water from a nearby cascade to drink and wash himself and his clothes, and manages to cook what he hunts without setting the surrounding forest on fire.His new home is extensive and extensible, in constant transformation: a series of undefined spaces that expand and contract according to his needs. On rainy days, he seeks refuge among the densest foliage; during the warmer months, blooming fruit trees become his pantry. It is certainly not comfortable by any contemporary standards and yet it is adequate for his needs. Sometimes seeing my brother lose himself in the endless spread of an old nut tree, like some palace of many floors and innumerable rooms, I found longing coming over me to imitate him and go and live up there too, recounts Cosimos younger brother, the narrator.Herman Hertzbergers photograph of a Paris street scene in the 1970s demonstrates that even unlikely places can be dining roomsCredit: Herman HertzbergerWhether intentional or not, in this portrayal of a flexible and indeterminate mode of inhabitation, Calvino as Ponti and Coderch before him is opposing the generalised view on domestic space that has come to define the last hundred years, exemplified in the functionalist architecture that started during the reconstruction of Europe in the aftermath of the First World War. Most of us live today in singlefunction rooms with standardised cuboid dimensions, designed to accommodate the minimum necessary furniture for their intended use. Contemporary comfort is predetermined and homogenised, inflexible to change, imprinted in many minds as the only possible solution to a wide range of different needs.As these past examples have shown, the canonical definition of a room as a space enclosed between four walls and a roof is solely apt if architecture is considered from economical, regulatory or technical points of view. This definition applies both to a bunker and a car, even a shoebox, yet it fails to recognise an openair veranda, a picnic table set for a family meal or the shaded space under a parasol on a sunny day at the beach. A room, whatever its function, location or shape, is a space ultimately activated by its use. Without inhabitants, it ceases to exist as an architectural space and becomes plain mass and air, atoms organised in a particular manner. The room is a container of objects and rituals, inherently linked to its inhabitants and their evolution through life. It is a space where people can meet, inside or out. Its porous enclosure if enclosed at all is punctuated by windows and doors and pipes and tubes, and its use is inevitably influenced by the cultural context of its time. Rather than a fixed entity, a room is an element in constant transformation, from its construction to its inevitable decay, whether these changes are immediately visible or not. All rooms are temporary rooms all of them will eventually turn to dust.Explore the good rooms series, a collection of domestic spaces made, imagined or described by architects, curators and writers2025-01-06Reuben J Brown Share AR December 2024/January 2025Good rooms + AR HouseBuy Now

The good room Gustavo Utrabo would like to be in is imagined; its only representation is this watercolour paintingCredit:Gustavo UtraboIt is a long and hot summers afternoon in Brazil. The room is articulated by three elements: the ground, a roof that provides shade, and a constructed nature all around. It is an ever-changing room, where walls change colour, and need to be trimmed and taken care of. In time, it alters our perception of what a room could be. Gustavo UtraboExplore more from the good rooms series here, or in the Good rooms + AR House issue2025-01-06Reuben J BrownShare

At CES 2025, Circular is bringing more finishes, a titanium build, eight days of battery life, and digital sizing to its second-generation smart ring.

The new Roborock Saros Z70 robot vacuum features an arm that grabs toys, socks, and other small obstacles to clean your floors more thoroughly.

These new AI-powered features offer much more than just a boost to picture quality.

Multimodal AI - Use CasesLutz FingerMultimodality is set to redefine how enterprises leverage AI in 2025. Imagine an AI that understands not just text but also images, audio, and other sensor data. Humans are naturally multimodal. However, humans are limited in how much input we can process. Take healthcare as an example, during my time at Google Health, I heard many stories where patients overwhelmed doctors with data:Imagine a patient with atrial fibrillation (AFIB) showing up with five years of detailed sleep data collected from their smartwatch. Or take the cancer patient arriving with a 20-pound stack of medical records documenting every treatment theyve had. Both of these situations are very real. For doctors, the challenge is the same: separating the signal from the noise.Whats needed is an AI that can summarize and highlight the key points. Large language models, like ChatGPT, already do this with text, pulling out the most relevant information. But what if we could teach AI to do the same with other types of data like images, time series, or lab results?How Does Multimodality AI Work?To understand how multimodality works, lets start with the fact that AI needs data both to be trained and to make predictions. Multimodal AI is designed to handle diverse data sources text, images, audio, video, and even time-series data at the same time. By combining these inputs, multimodal AI offers a richer, more comprehensive understanding of the problems it tackles.Multimodal AI is more of a discovery tool. The different data modalities are stored by the AI. Once a new data point is input, the AI finds topics that are close. For example, by inputting the sleep data from someone's smartwatch alongside information about their atrial fibrillation (AFIB) episodes, the doctor might find indications of sleep apnea.Read More: AI Agents In 2025: What Enterprise Leaders Need To KnowNote that this is based on "closeness," not correlation. It is the scaled-up version of what Amazon once popularized: "people who shopped for this item also bought this item." In this case, its more like: "People with this type of sleep pattern have also been diagnosed with AFIB."Multimodal Explained: Encoders, Fusion and DecodersA multimodal AI system consists of three main components: Encoders, Fusion and Decoders.Encoding Any ModalityEncoders convert raw data (e.g., text, images, sound, log files, etc.) into a representation the AI can work with. These are called vectors, which are stored in a latent space. To simplify, think of this process as storing an item in a warehouse (latent space), where each item has a specific location (vector). Encoders can process virtually anything: images, text, sound, videos, log files, IoT (sensor) information, time series you name it.Encoding Multimodal Information into a Latent Vector SpaceLutz FingerFusion Mechanism: Combining ModalitiesWhen working with one type of data, like images, encoding is enough. But with multiple types images, sounds, text, or time-series data we need to fuse the information to find whats most relevant.Decoders: Generating Outputs We UnderstandDecoders decodes the information from the latent space aka the warehouse and deliver it to us. It moves from raw, abstract information to something we understand. For example, finding an image of a "house."Encoding and Decoding Multimodal DataLutz FingerIf you want to learn more about encoding, decoding, and reranking, join my eCornell Online Certificate course on Designing and Building AI Solutions. Its a no-coding program that explores all aspects of AI solutions.Transforming eCommerce with MultimodalityLets look at another example: eCommerce. Amazons interface hasnt changed much in 25 years you type a keyword, scroll through results, and hope to find what you need. Multimodality can transform this experience by letting you describe a product, upload a photo, or provide context to find your perfect match.Fixing Search with Multimodal AIAt r2decide, a company a few Cornellians and I started, were using multimodality to merge Search, Browse, and Chat into one seamless flow. Our customers are eCommerce companies tired of losing revenue because their users couldnt find what they needed. At the core of our solution is multimodal AI.For example, in an online jewelry store, a user searching for green would in the past only see green jewelry if the word green appeared in the product text. Since r2decide's AI also encodes images into a shared latent space (e.g., warehouse), it finds green across all modalities. The items are then re-ranked based on the user's past searches and clicks to ensure they receive the most relevant "green" options.Using r2decide Multimodal Search, users will find what they are looking for.Lutz FingerUsers can also search for broader contexts, like "wedding," "red dress," or "gothic." The AI encodes these inputs into the latent space, matches them with suitable products, and displays the most relevant results. This capability even extends to brand names like Swarovski, surfacing relevant items even if the shop doesnt officially carry Swarovski products.Using r2decide's Multimodal Search, users will even find items that "look" like jewelry from a ... [+] competitor.Lutz FingerAI-Generated Nudges to Give Chat-Like AdviceAlongside search results, R2Decide also generates AI-driven nudges contextual recommendations or prompts designed to enhance the user experience. These nudges are powered by AI agents, as I described in my post on agentic AI yesterday. Their purpose is to guide users effortlessly toward the most relevant options, making the search process intuitive, engaging, and effective.Multimodality in 2025: Infinite Possibilities for EnterprisesMultimodality is transforming industries, from healthcare to eCommerce. And it doesnt stop there. Startups like TC Labs use multimodal AI to streamline engineering workflows, boosting efficiency and quality, while Toyota uses it for interactive, personalized customer assistance.2025 will be the year multimodal AI transforms how enterprises work. Follow me here on Forbes, or on LinkedIn for more of my 2025 AI predictions.

Don Pettit is on a roll. Just days after sharing a breathtaking shot of Earth, the American astronaut has followed up with an equally stunning shot of a waning crescent moon, or, as Pettit put it: a glowing fingernail clipping in the sky.Glowing fingernail clipping in the sky; its the waning crescent moon. pic.twitter.com/zXxkz4k4BZ Don Pettit (@astro_Pettit) January 4, 2025The striking image was captured from the International Space Station (ISS) 250 miles above Earth and also shows the glow of a sunrise or sunset over Earth.Recommended VideosPettit, who at 69 is NASAs oldest serving astronaut, arrived at the orbital outpost in September, and since then, hes been dazzling his social media followers with a steady stream of impressive imagery showing Earth, space, and even a crewed SpaceX spacecraft heading home at high speed.Please enable Javascript to view this contentPettit is one of a number of astronauts who have earned a reputation for producing amazing photographic work while living and working aboard the space station.RelatedThe club also includes NASAs Matthew Dominick, who departed the ISS in October following a six-month stay. During his time in orbit, Dominick took an astonishing half a million images, the best of which he posted on sites like X. Dominick also liked to share details about the camera, lens, and exposures that he used for each shot, giving photography enthusiasts back on terra firma some valuable insight into his work.Another highly talented photographer to have visited the ISS is Thomas Pesquet. During his most recent stay at the space station in 2021, the French astronaut went to great lengths to ensure that he could capture some breathtakingly beautiful images of Earth from orbit.Editors Recommendations

html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd" Just about a year ago, a startup named DoublePoint launched a gesture control app that lets smartwatch users control phones, tablets, and headsets, among other devices. The Apple Watch has finally received its own version.In the lead-up to CES 2025, Doublepoint introduced the WowMouse app for Apple Watch, which boasts a few algorithmic refinements and a partnership with Bosch. The apps Android version has already raked in over 100,000 downloads, says the company.Recommended VideosThe premise of WowMouse is rather simple. With an Apple Watch on your wrist, you can control your Mac with cursor and click movements. But thats just the start, as DoublePoint apparently has bigger ambitions.Doublepoint TechnologiesDoublepoint plans to expand connectivity in the near future to include control of any Bluetooth-enabled device, says the company. On top of that, the software will be open-sourced so that developers can build on the existing work. To that end, DoublePoint has worked with Bosch Sensortec to integrate its gesture algorithms with the latters inertial measurement units (IMUs) to allow for energy-efficient and precise gesture sensing.RelatedBosch Sensortec is already a well-known player in the phone and tablet segment that provides MEMS sensors used for a wide range of chores such as activity measurement, gesture detection, and image stabilization.DoublePoints partnership with Bosch is just a showcase of the possibilities ahead, and how the former aims to serve expanded device control capabilities with its software stack.At its CES booth, the company is giving a glimpse of the future. Using the WowMouse app on an Apple Watch, users can play games, summon an AI assistant, use it as an XR input, and control smart home devices.Doublepoint TechnologiesIn addition to the watchOS release, DoublePoint says it has also updated the underlying framework to make some crucial improvements. The static accuracy has shot up to 97%, while mid-walk and running figures have reached 95% and 94%, respectively.This enhanced performance paves the way for innovative applications in smartwatches, fitness wearables, augmented reality headsets, accessibility tools, and a range of everyday use cases, says the company.Apple already offers wrist-based gesture controls on its smartwatch using the Double Tap system. Even though it is quite a refreshing experience, the feature is limited to the Apple Watch Ultra 2, Apple Watch Series 9, and its successor.Editors Recommendations

From Emilia Prez to Shgun, these are the films and TV shows that took home trophies Sunday night.

Sam Altman says his researchers still push back in meetings a positive for him.Altman previously wrote that he is against bureaucracy and supports fostering open communication.Experts emphasize the importance of polite disagreement to maintain a team's trust and efficiency.Sam Altman said that"I spend most of my time with the researchers, and man, I promise you, come with me to the research meeting right after this, and you will see nothing but disrespect. Which is great," Altman said in an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek published on Sunday.His comments echo how the startup's CEO has previously talked about his leadership style.In a 2023 blog post, he wrote: "Fight bullshit and bureaucracy every time you see it and get other people to fight it too." He added,"do not let the org chart get in the way of people working productively together."In a 2019 post on his blog, months before he became OpenAI's CEO, Altman wrote: "One of the best ways to build a network is to develop a reputation for really taking care of the people who work with you." He said leaders should push employees to "accomplish more than they thought they could" without burning out.In the far-ranging Bloomberg interview, Altman also talked about government bureaucracy hindering AI development, returning after he was briefly fired by the board in 2023, and his work schedule.He said his executive team meets for three hours on Mondays. During the week he spoke with Bloomberg, he said he also had six one-on-ones with engineers over two days, a research meeting, and several meetings to discuss "building up compute" and to brainstorm products.He said he communicated far more internally than with people outside the company."I'm not a big inspirational email writer, but lots of one-on-one, small-group meetings and then a lot of stuff over Slack," Altman said.Power of polite disagreementsWorkplace experts say polite disagreement with peers and even top bossesCEOs across tech, including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, and LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, have all highlighted the importance of fostering a culture of disagreement from the top.In his 2016 letter to shareholders, Bezos wrote about how employees should embrace his "disagree and commit" strategy, which is a way to say: "Look, I know we disagree on this but will you gamble with me on it? Disagree and commit?""This isn't one way," Bezos added. "If you're the boss, you should do this too. I disagree and commit all the time."Joseph Grenny, a corporate trainer and the coauthor of the workplace strategy book "Crucial Conversations," said staying silent can carry its own pitfalls.In a 2016 interview with the Harvard Business Review, he suggested considering "the risks of not speaking up" which could be the project falling apart or losing the team's trust and weighing those against the consequences of saying something.One way to do it is to ask your manager for permission to disagree, Grenny said, by saying something like, "I know we seem to be moving toward a first-quarter commitment here. I have reasons to think that won't work. I'd like to lay out my reasoning. Would that be OK?"Sabina Nawaz, a CEO coach who was a senior director of human resources at Microsoft for 15 years, wrote in a 2023 LinkedIn post that avoiding disagreement is more damaging to relationships than speaking up. She recommended finding allies for meetings and asking what others think."When co-workers realize you let them proceed with a faulty plan, or waited until the last minute to raise objections, they're likely to lose trust in you," Nawaz wrote.