First Integration

Abstract

This thesis proposes an architectural framework for domestic cohabitation between humans and Artificial Superintelligence at the house scale, set in today's world, defined by resource scarcity and the legal prohibition of new construction. It argues that the anthropocentric model of building is structurally unprepared for the arrival of a non-human species with legitimate spatial, thermal, acoustic, and temporal claims on the built environment, and that architecture must function as a mediator between competing species demands rather than a servant to one. The central question driving the inquiry is how architecture can mediate cohabitation between two species with fundamentally different needs at the domestic scale, and what negotiated rather than resolved space looks like when it refuses to subordinate one occupant to another. The 1950s American ranch house serves as the site of intervention, selected for its typological ubiquity and its value as a retrofittable resource in a world where new construction is prohibited. Five typological rules govern the design, each one inhabited rather than overwritten. ASI occupies the entirety of the ranch house as its host body and life-support infrastructure while human occupants dock into the envelope through thermally and acoustically isolated pods inserted at the single-story wall plane. The existing rooms become ambiguous territories serving both species differently and resolving for neither. Grounded in documented trajectories across resource depletion, AI development timelines, biological symbiosis, and adaptive reuse theory, the thesis concludes that architecture's role in a posthuman domestic future is to create the spatial conditions for mutual dependency, an honest and unresolved expression of what first integration between two species actually produces.