Yuri:
Welcome to MINDED. It is a pleasure to have you here. You have spent your life studying architecture, cities, technology, and how these things shape the human experience. Before we go into AI, I want to start with something very human. When you look at the world today, what concerns you the most and what gives you the most hope?

Picon:
Thank you for having me. What concerns me most is the tension between two revolutions happening at the same time: the technological revolution and the ecological one. We tend to focus on technology and forget that we are also dealing with climate constraints, energy limits, and fragility in our systems. Technology gives us tools, but it also creates vulnerabilities. And we are not always honest about the limits we face.

What gives me hope is that humans are remarkably adaptive. We have always negotiated change, even when it was uncomfortable or disruptive. The question is not whether we can adapt. The question is whether we can adapt wisely. That is the real challenge of our time.

Yuri:
You have been talking and writing about cities for decades. Today, when people imagine the future, they often picture smart cities with sensors, data, and perfect efficiency. But in your work, you highlight the fragility of these systems. Why?

Picon:
Because cities are ecosystems, not machines. When you add layers of digital infrastructure, you add both capacity and fragility. If a traditional city loses one system like water or energy, it may still survive because it has redundancy. A smart city may be highly optimized, but optimization creates dependence. If one part fails, the entire system can collapse.

We have seen this with heat waves, flooding, hacking, and power failures. The more you optimize, the more brittle you become. Technology magnifies both strengths and weaknesses.

Yuri:
So cities become like a nervous system with too many exposed nerves.

Picon:
Yes. And nerves can misfire. They can be overloaded. They can be attacked. Technology does not eliminate risk. It redistributes it.

But the deeper question is simple. What kind of city do we want? Technology should serve a vision. It should not replace it. That is the philosophical gap we face today.

Yuri:
Let us move into AI. In architecture, there is fear that AI tools will replace designers, draftspeople, and even architects. But your view is more nuanced. How do you see AI influencing design?

Picon:
AI continues a historical trend where machines progressively take over some aspects of design work. But this does not eliminate architects. It changes the nature of their work.

A good comparison is the introduction of perspective in the Renaissance. Some tasks became easier, but architecture itself changed in response. Architects shifted their attention toward intention, meaning, and judgment.

AI will do the same. It produces possibilities. It generates variations. But the architect still decides what matters. AI will force us to define more clearly than ever: Why this design? What is the intention? What is the meaning?

If anything, AI will reveal what architecture truly is.

Yuri:
When we think about creativity, there is always this deeper question behind the work. It's not just about what something looks like, it's what it reveals about how we live, how we make decisions, how we imagine the future. I think your work touches that intersection of imagination and structure. And I want to go into the question of AI, not just as a tool, but as a shift in how intelligence is produced.

Picon:
Yes, absolutely. The important question around AI is not what AI can do. Everyone talks about capabilities, but that is not the point. The point is: what does AI tell us about ourselves. What does it reveal about the mechanisms of thought, about perception, about the limits of human cognition. That is where the real interest is.

Yuri:
Most people talk about AI replacing tasks. But you approach it more as an architectural or epistemological shift, almost like a new layer of reality.

Picon:
Exactly. AI is not simply a tool that automates things. It becomes part of the environment in which we think and act. It is similar to what happened with the emergence of scientific instruments in the seventeenth century. The telescope did not just allow people to see further. It transformed the idea of what it means to observe, to measure, to know.
AI is producing a comparable shift today.

Yuri:
And that makes the role of designers, architects, and creative thinkers even more important, because we are shaping the interface between intelligence and experience.

Picon:
Yes, and this is why architects should not be afraid of AI. Architects and designers never only produce buildings or objects. They produce frameworks of interpretation. They create ways of seeing.

AI challenges those frameworks. It forces us to rethink the relationship between matter, information, and form.

Yuri:
There is a tension between the precision of AI and the ambiguity of human imagination. Do you see that tension as productive?

Picon:
Very much so. Human creativity thrives on ambiguity. It thrives on contradiction. It thrives on things that do not fit neatly together. AI, on the other hand, is fundamentally a machine of pattern recognition. It tries to reduce ambiguity. The creative opportunity lies in the friction between these two modes of thinking. That is where we will see new kinds of design intelligence emerge.

Picon:
What AI makes us confront is a very old philosophical question. What does intelligence tell us about what it means to be human? For example, are we really defined by our capacity to reason? Or are we defined by our capacity to interpret, to imagine, to engage with complexity? AI forces us to reconsider those assumptions.

Yuri:
There is an anxiety that if AI can perform certain “intelligent” tasks, then maybe those tasks were never uniquely human in the first place.

Picon:
Yes, but that anxiety comes from a misunderstanding. AI does not replicate human intelligence. It simulates one layer of cognitive behavior. It is incredibly powerful at producing correlations, but it is not conscious. It does not experience meaning. It does not suffer. It does not create out of desire or fear or memory.

The danger is not that AI becomes human. The danger is that we start behaving like machines, reducing everything to optimization or prediction.

Yuri:
So instead of thinking AI will become like us, we should worry that we might become like AI.

Picon:
Exactly. The risk is not replacement. The risk is reduction. When systems constantly anticipate our choices, we might lose the sense of discovery that comes from uncertainty. Creativity needs room for error, detours, contradictions. If everything becomes predictable, creativity collapses.

Yuri:
One of the things I find fascinating in your work is this idea that technology is not neutral. It reshapes the cultural imagination. It changes how societies think about possibility.

Picon:
Yes. Technology is a cultural project. It always has been. And we are entering a new and decisive phase, where the question becomes: can we cultivate a form of intelligence that remains open, ambiguous, and interpretive? Or will we default to a purely functional, computational model of the world? That is the real debate.

Picon:
Whether AI will dissolve or distort our sense of reality is still an open question. It is too early to give a definitive answer, but the signs are interesting. What we are already seeing is a gradual loss of stability in how people perceive information. When images, texts, and even memories can be produced synthetically, the boundary between what is experienced and what is generated becomes softer. That creates both creative potential and psychological fragility.

Look at what is happening with climate phenomena. Heat waves, floods, fires. These events are no longer isolated. They accumulate. They overlap. They create a shared feeling of instability. AI adds a cognitive version of that instability. It produces a similar sense of uncertainty, but in the domain of meaning.

Yuri:
So climate change destabilizes the physical environment, while AI destabilizes the symbolic environment.

Picon:
Yes, and the two reinforce each other. Environmental instability creates anxiety. Digital instability amplifies it.
We have to acknowledge that the combination of these forces is shaping a new condition for human life. Cities, institutions, and individuals are all navigating this double pressure.

This is why I insist on fragility as a central concept. Fragility is not only a weakness. It can be a source of creativity, sensitivity, and awareness. But only if we understand it and work with it intentionally.

Picon:
Fragility has many forms. There is the fragility we see in natural systems with fires, floods, and storms. And there is the fragility introduced by our technological environment. Today, a city can be brought to a halt not only by a natural disaster, but also by a server outage, a cyber attack, or a supply chain disruption. This is a new kind of vulnerability.

But fragility is also cultural. Look at how information circulates. A scientific study, a rumor, and a piece of fiction all move through the same channels and often at the same speed. Online, everything is flattened. Context disappears. Credibility becomes harder to measure. This is another form of fragility that societies must learn to navigate.

Yuri:
It feels like we are living in an era where everything is exposed and delicate at the same time. The physical world, the digital world, the psychological world. Everything is under pressure.

Picon:
Yes, exactly. The pressures accumulate. Climate instability adds one layer. Technological complexity adds another. Political polarization adds a third. These layers interact. They amplify each other. They shape how people perceive risk and how they imagine the future.

And here is the key point. Fragility is not only a condition to endure. It is a condition to understand. Artists, architects, thinkers, and cultural figures are essential because they help society interpret fragility rather than deny it. Interpretation is a form of resilience.

Picon:
If you look at cities in the eighteenth or nineteenth century, they already had moments where architecture began to look more uniform. But today we are seeing something else entirely. If you ask an AI system to generate a building, a master plan, or an urban district, the outputs start to converge. The visual language becomes similar. The compositions begin to echo one another. 

We are entering an era of stylistic homogenization. This is not because AI lacks imagination. It is because AI amplifies the dominant patterns it sees. If a particular aesthetic is overrepresented, AI reproduces it. It becomes a feedback loop that narrows the field of possibilities.

Yuri:
This is a major concern in design. If everyone uses the same models, prompts, and datasets, then the world becomes visually predictable.

Picon:
Exactly. And this is where the role of education becomes crucial. What are we teaching young designers? Are we teaching them to imitate patterns generated by machines? Or are we teaching them how to think, how to interpret, how to judge?

AI can produce thousands of variations. But the ability to select meaningfully among those variations is still a deeply human skill. This is one of the great questions of our time. We must sustain a form of intelligence that is not passive, not algorithmically driven, but actively engaged with ambiguity, context, and intention.

Yuri:
And definitely a big challenge for educators. Because if students rely too heavily on tools that generate images, variations, and structures automatically, it becomes harder for them to develop their own internal compass. They risk losing the ability to ask why a design works or what it expresses.

Picon:
Yes. And this is why I believe architectural education must go back to fundamentals. Not fundamentals in the traditional sense, but fundamentals of interpretation. Students must learn how to read the world. How to read the city. How to read historical layers. How to understand context, intention, meaning, and consequences.

Otherwise, AI will simply accelerate the flattening of everything.We are living in an era where patterns dominate. If you do not know how to escape the pattern, you will repeat it. That is the danger.
Architecture becomes a permutation of the same project, slightly adjusted, endlessly recycled.

Yuri:
When everything starts to look the same, the ability to discern nuance becomes more valuable than ever.

Picon:
Exactly. Nuance is the essence of architecture. It is what distinguishes a place from a space, or a meaningful gesture from a purely functional one. AI does not naturally produce nuance. It produces probability.

Nuance requires judgment, memory, and cultural understanding. This is why human agency remains vital.

Yuri:
And I imagine this will influence the next generation of architects, maybe even redefine what it means to design.

Picon:
It will. The role of the architect is shifting from one who produces form to one who curates meaning. The challenge is not to fight AI. The challenge is to cultivate a deeper form of intentionality within a technologically amplified world.
That is where the future of the field lies.

Yuri:
Can you tell me more about the comparison you made between fragility in nature and fragility in our technological systems? I really liked the way you connected those two ideas. It feels like a useful framework to understand architecture today.

Picon:
The comparison comes from looking at patterns across different domains. In nature, fragility often appears at points of transition. Ecosystems become vulnerable when they shift from one state to another. In technology, fragility appears when complexity increases faster than our ability to control or understand it.

What is interesting is that both kinds of fragility produce similar effects. They expose limits. They demand adaptation. And they force us to rethink assumptions that we previously took for granted.

Yuri:
So in a way, fragility becomes a diagnostic tool. It reveals where systems are overloaded or where habits no longer work.

Picon:
Yes. Fragility is not simply a warning. It is information. It is knowledge. It tells us where transformation is happening.
Architects and designers have a long tradition of responding to these moments. Cities evolve around pressure points. Architecture has always been a negotiation between constraints and imagination.

Today, the constraints are sharper. Climate forces one kind of transformation. Digital forces another. And they interact. This means the architect must develop a broader kind of literacy than before. Not just material literacy, but systemic literacy.

Yuri:
And maybe emotional literacy too, because people feel this instability on a personal level.

Picon:
Absolutely. Architecture is never only technical. It always has an emotional dimension. When the environment feels unstable, people look for forms that create orientation, clarity, or calm. This is why the role of design is even more crucial in turbulent times. It offers a sense of position within a shifting landscape.

Picon:
What is at stake today is how we will redefine the relationship between nature, technology, and design. For a long time, engineering imagined itself as the discipline that could control everything. It believed that with enough data and precise calculations, the world could be stabilized and mastered.

But we are entering a period where control becomes more uncertain. Climate patterns break expectations. Infrastructures fail in unexpected ways. Digital networks behave unpredictably. The old confidence that everything could be optimized no longer holds.

Yuri:
So engineering is reaching a philosophical limit, not just a technical one.

Picon:
Yes, exactly. And this is very important. Engineering must now confront the fact that systems behave differently when they become extremely complex. The dream of total mastery dissolves.

What replaces it is a form of humility. A recognition that uncertainty is not a failure of knowledge, but a basic condition of the world.

Yuri:
And architecture sits between technology and human experience, so it has to integrate that humility.

Picon:
Yes. Architecture cannot rely solely on calculation or efficiency. It must navigate ambiguity. It must work with the unpredictable. It must design for resilience rather than perfection.

This is the moment when architecture can help reframe our idea of progress. Not progress as domination, but progress as adaptation. The future belongs to forms of intelligence that understand limits and work creatively within them.

Picon:
If you think about it, the nineteenth century believed that engineering could redesign the entire planet. With new materials and new infrastructures, they imagined that nature could be reshaped completely. Today, we know that this ambition had limits and consequences.

We are now seeing the same phenomenon with digital technology.

Yuri:
A kind of digital version of the same optimism.

Picon:
Exactly. There is a belief that digital systems can solve everything. That they can make cities efficient, eliminate risk, manage climate, and coordinate human behavior. But we forget that digital systems come with their own vulnerabilities.

They are powerful, but they are not infallible.If you combine digital overconfidence with environmental fragility, you get a dangerous illusion: the illusion that technology can replace the difficult political and social work needed to address real problems.

Yuri:
So the danger is not technology itself, but the belief that technology is enough.

Picon:
Yes. Technology is always part of the solution, but never the whole solution. The real challenge is to think in layers. You cannot address climate issues only through engineering. You cannot address digital risks only through algorithms. You must combine culture, politics, science, architecture, and collective behavior.

That is the complexity of the world we live in. This is why I insist that we should not be seduced by the aesthetics of digital enthusiasm. Whatever happens with AI, the fundamental work of interpretation, responsibility, and judgment remains human.

Yuri:
One thing I appreciate in your work is that you never treat technology as the enemy. You see it as part of a larger historical and philosophical evolution. But you are also very clear about the dangers of uncritical optimism.

Picon:
Yes. Technology is neither good nor bad on its own. It amplifies whatever mindset a society already has. If a culture values depth, reflection, and responsibility, then technology becomes a tool that supports those values.
If a culture values speed, efficiency, and superficiality, then technology intensifies that as well.

This is why I always return to the question of intention. What do we want from our tools? What kind of intelligence do we want to cultivate? These questions matter more than any specific technical capability.

Yuri:
It is striking how much of what you say applies far beyond architecture. It applies to institutions, media, politics, even the way individuals think about themselves.

Picon:
Yes. Technology changes the conditions of thinking. It changes how ideas circulate, how authority is produced, how meaning is constructed.

Architecture is simply one domain where you can see these transformations clearly, because cities are mirrors of their societies. But the real issue is cultural. How do we maintain a sense of purpose in a world where everything becomes automated or optimized? How do we preserve the human capacity to question rather than simply follow predictions?

Yuri:
That becomes even more important as AI accelerates. Because AI can produce answers faster than we can formulate the questions.

Picon:
Exactly. And that is why asking good questions becomes a form of resistance. It is a way of maintaining autonomy, of slowing down the automatic flow of information.

Architects, artists, and thinkers must defend this space of questioning. Without it, we risk living in a world that is technically sophisticated but intellectually impoverished.

Yuri:
You once said that your entry point into architecture was very connected to literature. You wanted to write. You were interested in narrative, in metaphor, in the emotional dimension of ideas. And I think that is why your work resonates so strongly today. It is not only analytical, it is also imaginative.

Can you talk about that connection between writing, imagination, and architecture?

Picon:
Yes, of course. I have always believed that architecture is a form of narrative. A building tells a story about its society, about its time, about the people who inhabit it. Writing helped me understand that. It taught me how to interpret the layers of meaning that exist within the built environment.

Architecture is not simply a technical discipline. It is also an intellectual and cultural one.

Yuri:
And that is something younger designers sometimes forget, especially now with AI. They focus on images and outputs, but not always on the underlying story.

Picon:
Yes. And this is a risk. If you reduce architecture to image generation, you lose the deeper elements that make it meaningful. You lose the historical, emotional, and philosophical layers.

This is why I continue to write. Writing keeps me connected to those layers. It forces me to articulate what is happening beyond the surface.

Yuri:
Earlier, you mentioned you are very interested in the reemergence of nature within architectural thinking. Not nature as decoration, but nature as a conceptual force. Can you expand on that?

Picon:
Nature is returning not as an aesthetic choice, but as a fundamental condition. Climate change forces us to recognize that architecture exists within a larger system. You cannot design without considering the flows of energy, the limits of resources, the behavior of materials, and the fragility of ecosystems.

This reemergence of nature is not nostalgic. It is epistemological. It changes how we think.

Picon:
Nature is no longer something outside of architecture. It is something that architecture must negotiate directly. Climate forces, material limits, energy flows, and ecological fragility all shape how we build. This changes the very definition of what it means to design.

We are moving away from an era where architecture could exist in isolation from its environment.

Yuri:
And it also changes how people live in cities. The experience of heat, storms, fires, and uncertainty becomes part of daily life.

Picon:
Yes. And this is why architecture must become more attentive to context. Not only physical context, but emotional and psychological context. People today feel a combination of uncertainty and acceleration. They need spaces that provide clarity, resilience, and orientation.

This is not a purely technical challenge. It is a cultural one.

Yuri:
You said something earlier that stayed with me. That the return of nature is not nostalgic. It is epistemological. It changes how we think. What do you mean by that?

Picon:
For centuries, Western thinking imagined nature as something stable and passive. A background to human action. But today, we see that nature is dynamic. It reacts. It transforms. It expresses forces that we cannot fully control.
This requires a new kind of intelligence. One that is not based only on prediction and optimization, but on adaptation and interpretation.

Architecture becomes a way of thinking with nature rather than against it.

Yuri:
Almost like a new partnership.

Picon:
Exactly. Architecture becomes a negotiation with forces that exceed our control. This changes our relationship to materials, to form, to space, and to time. In this sense, nature becomes a teacher. It forces us to rethink our assumptions and to approach design with humility and imagination.

Yuri:
It feels like architecture is moving into a new era where it can no longer be separated from ecological thinking. Not as a trend, but as a deep philosophical shift.

Picon:
Yes. And this is where the conversation about AI becomes interesting again. AI is powerful at analyzing patterns, predicting outcomes, and optimizing systems. But ecological thinking requires something else. It requires sensitivity to nonlinear forces, to complexity, to uncertainty.

These are things that AI does not naturally understand.

Yuri:
So AI can help with certain aspects of design, but it cannot replace the interpretive intelligence needed to work with ecological realities.

Picon:
Exactly. Ecological intelligence is relational. It is based on observing interactions, cycles, and thresholds. AI, on the other hand, is based on extracting patterns from past data. But ecological reality is changing rapidly. The past does not necessarily predict the future.

This is why architects must keep a critical distance. They must use AI without surrendering to it.

Yuri:
And they must keep a sense of imagination, because ecological futures will require new forms of life, new spatial models, new cultural narratives.

Picon:
Imagination is essential. Without imagination, architecture becomes reactive. But with imagination, architecture becomes anticipatory. It becomes a tool to explore possible futures, not only to respond to emergencies.
The challenge is to combine imagination with responsibility. That is the balance we must find.

Yuri:
When you think about the future, what gives you optimism? Because despite all the fragility, uncertainty, and complexity we have talked about, you still speak with a sense of possibility.

Picon:
What gives me optimism is the resilience of human imagination. Throughout history, whenever societies faced disruption or instability, creativity expanded. People invented new ways of living, new forms of expression, new relationships with their environment.

We are in a similar moment now. The challenges are immense, but so is the potential for reinvention.

Yuri:
So you believe this period can lead to a new cultural renaissance.

Picon:
Yes, if we allow it. But it requires cultivating forms of intelligence that are not only technical. We need philosophical intelligence, emotional intelligence, ecological intelligence.

AI will not replace these. If anything, it will make them more necessary.

Yuri:
That is a powerful way to frame it. AI expands what machines can do, which forces us to expand what humans must do.

Picon:
Exactly. It pushes us toward the qualities that cannot be automated. Nuance. Judgment. Interpretation. Responsibility.
These are not weaknesses. They are strengths. They define what it means to be human.

Yuri:
If architects, designers, thinkers, and cultural leaders embrace that, then maybe we can help society navigate this transformation with more clarity and less fear.

Picon:
Yes. And this is why I remain hopeful. Creativity has always emerged from moments of tension. We just need to continue asking meaningful questions and engaging with the world in all its complexity.

That is how we build the future.

Yuri:
Thank you for this conversation. It was an honor.

Picon:
Thank you. It was a pleasure.

Quotes:

“AI doesn’t replace architects - it replaces part of the work, and forces us to rethink what the work really is.”

“Smart cities are efficient, but they are also fragile.”

“Ornament has always been a paradox — surface and meaning at the same time.”

“The digital age changes how we see. It changes our perception before it changes architecture.”

“We live between two revolutions: the technological revolution and the ecological revolution.”

“Education is entering a cyborg phase - human and machine intelligence intertwined.”

Top Insights

• AI will shift architecture from creating forms to curating options.

• Smart cities introduce both efficiency and new urban fragilities.

• Digital perception reshapes how we experience materiality and scale.

• Ornament remains essential: it connects sensory experience with meaning.

• The biggest challenge ahead is reconciling digital innovation with planetary limits.

• Education is entering a 'cyborg phase' where human-machine authorship merges.

• Cities must redefine their relationship between the artificial and the natural.