What Is an Intelligent Building

The word intelligent to talk about a city, building and so on, is so overused today that one carefully avoids delimiting its contours. We admit the existence of varied and variable intelligences based on our knowledge, requirements, and necessities. Among living beings confronted with the environment, some have a more efficient form of intelligence than others. We refer to three concepts as developed by Gilbert Simondon: associated milieu (2005a, 2005b); concretization (1958); mecanologiques generations (2005a); invention (2008). After a very short analysis of the today’s French Thermic Regulation we note the difficulties to exceed the question of standards, and be able to go beyond the addition of technical devices to respond to the question. To go further we need to abandon the concept of environment and rethink the whole complex systemic problem using the concepts of milieu and associated milieu. The presentation of the different generations of technical objects (Lafitte in Reflexions sur la science des machines. Paris, 1932) helps us to locate today’s main challenge. The reasoning from the milieu, enables us to reach the concretization of apparatus and obtain intelligent solutions gathering several co-actors interacting in the same network: the external milieu, the inner one (stricto sensus building), the apparatus, and the inhabitants, sharing information.