At the moment we define drones as quadrocopters, it's flying, flying objects basically.

The drone itself is a kind of sophisticated helicopter.

Drones are like an expanded consciousness, it's almost like an extra eye that allow us to reach to places that otherwise we would never reach.

It is something co-opted from the military and has a really dark side to it.

It's an autonomous machine that kills people.

On the other hand there's Martha Stewart with her drone flying around.

It's a drone with a camera.

And you've seen that happen with the internet, you know, when all of a sudden this technology which began in the hands of the military appeared on everyone's desk or in everyone's pocket.

Drones 10, 15 years ago were immensely expensive, complex objects and now you can just buy them at a toy shop.

We're now at a point where there is more civilian drones flying in the air right now than there are military drones.

And that's a really profound moment.

Currently the growth in drones is very much in areas like agriculture and checking of infrastructure.

But also I think going to places where it's very difficult for humans to go.

Gathering information continually.

What drones are really good at, as many robotic objects are, it's repetitive and accurate physical activities which humans aren't terribly good at.

Day to day we use a drone a lot.

It's a really useful tool for an architect.

Whether we're surveying a new site, it is fantastic for flying over and surveying all the trees.

Certainly in Japan they're using them to inspect the solar panels.

They can fly over and check the heat spots on them and work out which solar panels are dead or alive.

Now you do an aerial scan and you just get it precisely by the cubical meter.

They will just fly over and give you a 3D model with a texture map of the location.

And you just get a data set you could not acquire by any other means, no way.

You would never have that precision and that resolution.

And that's incredible.

That's a real game changer.

The most incredible moments with flying drones are those when you are not required as an operator anymore.

When it just hovers or when it just does things.

You just press a button and it does a maneuver you could never perform.

What we're seeing now that drones are in the hands of every person on the street, they're potentially as disruptive as the internet.

And they're going to fundamentally change the way that we relate to each other across space, across territory and across the city.

There is a lot of implications in terms of drones changing the way architecture is perceived and eventually also in the future the way architecture is built.

The first thing is of course the verticality of it.

The roof used to be very much part of the invisible cities.

It was often a place where people would put the trash or storage or all kinds of things.

It now all of a sudden becomes very much part of the visible city.

There is this overview effect that you experience that astronauts used to experience.

You know, they see the world and the Earth from a point of view that was previously restricted to people who could go that far.

But with a drone, anyone could momentarily experience flying while still having your feet grounded.

And that's really incredible.

It is changing architectural photography because it's giving us a whole range of new perspectives on a building.

Whereas before we were limited to the ground.

I think the use of drones in photography will start to change the way architects design their buildings because these buildings will be seen from all sorts of angles.

It's kind of fascinating, this year's Serpentine Pavilion by Francis Kure of course emphasises a lot the roof because he built a canopy which serves as a funnel for water from inside the pavilion and from also outside.

You just see the funnel but you don't really see this extraordinary roof, this extraordinary platform which of course through the drone becomes visible.

I think I've always been influenced as an architect by a passion for flight.

For decades I've piloted and been continuously intrigued by the aerial perspective.

The reality of our existence is at the ground level and the perception at the ground level.

But you certainly do see the big picture from above and you do see that fifth elevation.

And so the experience of flight is to heighten that sense of awareness.

The Apple campus is a great example.

You wouldn't be able to perceive the building from ground level.

It was almost designed to be seen from above.

It's been built like most Apple products in a lot of secrecy so it's really difficult to see but because of drones you can see above and there's a drone sequence of it each week so you can see the progress.

I was frequently opening my phone and seeing drone coverage of our Apple project.

So in that sense it was and is very much in the public domain.

Architects are using drones. Some of them are using them to actually build buildings.

They're kind of weaving the buildings through drones.

Others like Carlo Ratti use drones to paint facades, to basically do large-scale paintings because all of a sudden a very big facade of a building which used to be very complicated and needed scaffolding becomes very easy.

The drone becomes the brush.

Drones in construction is something which is happening quickly.

I mean we've probably all seen the video of the drones in construction.

The aerial construction research project investigated the potential of using flying robots to build tensile structures.

Flying robots provide access to three-dimensional space in entirely new ways for architecture.

Effectively this allows us to use drones to build buildings.

We're using drones to build buildings.

We're using drones to build buildings.

We provide access to three-dimensional space in entirely new ways for architecture.

Effectively this allows us to access points in space we couldn't access before.

We can assemble things differently.

It doesn't matter anymore whether we necessarily build from the ground up.

I believe that there will be a huge impact on the built environment once we actually start using these machines in construction.

I think drones are essentially going to be an extension of public service infrastructure.

In the same way that a garbage truck moves about the city providing a service to us, so too will the drone.

They'll deliver our packages.

They'll bring us fresh milk in the morning or freshly baked bread.

We can imagine them being an extension of the network.

Any service we can generate through the network, they can bring to us in physical form.

We're working with a project in Tokyo already where the drone question is coming up.

It's for a large warehouse.

The actual location of the project has changed.

The warehouse is coming closer to town.

They're getting smaller because the drones can only take smaller packages.

But it's going to be very, very quick.

Delivery drones are here right now.

You can go online and look at them delivering objects all over the world.

And I think the next step is going to be humans traveling in drones.

The technology is there.

And I think this is going to happen quite quickly.

Dubai has relaxed some of the regulations in flying around the city.

And they're saying that 2018 will be the year of the drone.

So I think it's happening.

It's just in what form.

I think you could well see the development of aerial highways.

So if you have a motorway, the airspace above that would be a natural route in the same manner that the heli routes in London would be a natural route.

We used to think of cities as being agglomerations built around large, permanent infrastructure networks, road networks, water, power.

What the drone has the potential to do is totally rewrite that.

Because all of a sudden you're dealing with a nomadic form of infrastructure that can move and drift around the city.

And I think that's going to be a huge challenge.

I think that's going to be a huge challenge.

All of a sudden you're dealing with a nomadic form of infrastructure that can move and drift around the city.

Up till now, cities have been very much developed on roads.

And once we're released from that, it allows development in different ways.

It's almost as fundamental as some of the first railways then that came to cities.

If you think of here in London, Metroland.

And the development of the early metro system which allowed the city to expand.

It was a linear development because of the infrastructure.

And I think with flying autonomous vehicles, there could be an equally big step change in cities.

Because we're not bound by linear infrastructure.

Because you can fly wherever.

I was approached by an individual who had an idea that you could combine the technology of the drone with a building type to answer the needs of continents like Africa.

Which doesn't have the infrastructure which we take for granted of roads and railways.

So how do you leapfrog that?

And the idea is that you use the drone, it can move economically, quickly and deliver urgent supplies.

And that was the genesis of the drone port.

In the future you're going to be entering buildings in a completely different way.

You're going to be entering probably from the roof, from a balcony.

That formal approach to a building is really going to change.

You know, the classic house with the front door or the car in front of it or a flat.

If you're beginning to access buildings from different levels, then of course it opens up complete new opportunities in city development.

Parking for the drones would all be on the roof.

Recharging for the drones, potentially on a roof.

When suddenly the ground plane is moved up into the air, there'll be different layers of transport happening.

I think at the lowest level it could be people flying at a couple of hundred meters.

Above that it may be the packages.

And above that you've got commercial aircraft.

So suddenly you're going to get this layering in the sky.

But they won't have to follow roads.

They'll be able to go from point to point.

They'll be able to sense one another.

So instead of you seeing this kind of building-to-building, they'll be able to go from point to point.

They'll be able to sense one another.

So instead of you seeing these sort of streams of ants in the air,

I think it's going to be, you know, probably this cloud of wasps all over the place.

We just developed a film called In the Robot Skies, which is the first fiction film shot entirely through autonomous pre-programmed drone technologies.

And what we're trying to do there is explore a world where drones have become as ubiquitous as pigeons.

They surveil a London council estate and they monitor wayward youth who have been caught swearing at police or drinking in public and have been confined to their tower blocks.

And the drones watch over them, the equivalent of an ankle bracelet.

I think we should question whether we want drones to be part of the civilian space of our cities.

The fact that it's available as a technology doesn't mean that we want it to be part of our lives.

Our idea about the public space has already changed.

We are already used to the idea that some sort of machine or gaze is looking at us.

Drones probably will be a step further.

In our studio at Superflux, we wanted to explore the cultural, political and social consequences of living with civilian drones.

We created a speculative film called Drone Avery to understand what it might be like to live in a city with drones flying over our heads.

We were interested in aspects of autonomy and artificial intelligence that these machines might have.

We specifically looked at what sort of civilian drones might exist in our cities and our landscapes, how might we interact with them, what might it mean to live in a city where a drone is watching you, collecting data about you and perhaps making decisions based on that data that you might not be aware of.

As drones become more and more frequent in the airspace above us, as drones become more and more frequent in the airspace above people's houses and buildings,

I think there will be an issue of ownership of that space.

You wouldn't want drones constantly buzzing around your windows.

That does raise whole issues of privacy, which is one thing with viewing an apple building from the air, which you can do from high up in an aircraft, which I've seen frequently, or whether it's low down with a drone.

But on the other hand, if this is your private apartment and there's a drone on the other side of that pane of glass and you have to draw the curtains, then that does raise a whole series of other issues.

So like any emerging technology, it raises other social issues.

What now is a very attractive space in the top floor of a high-rise with wonderful views suddenly becomes the perfect scene for drone surveillance.

So questions about privacy and security are being redefined because of the drones.

And that affects the way in which we think about buildings as architects and designers.

There are already drones in cities. The police are using them.

And there are drones used by protesters.

Before, the power was in the hands of the police.

But now, a crowd can launch a bunch of drones in the air and they can document police violence or they can make people accountable.

It's surprising how little has happened with commercially available drones that you buy on Amazon because there is stuff that can carry considerable payloads.

And there's been a lot of near-misses at airports, but also just dropping things into a crowd.

It's a real option. It's a real option.

And gladly nothing has happened there yet, but it will.

In Syria, there's reports of handmade drones.

So some of the rebel groups, they build their own surveillance drones and fly them.

And ISIS do the same. So apparently ISIS had a sort of drone lab.

And all of that is obviously scary.

But it's a real option.

And ISIS do the same. So apparently ISIS had a sort of drone lab.

And all of that is obviously scary.