Together with Emma Chris Avramiea, we developed a speculative work which was exhibited at the BK Exhition DATA DATA DATA. We developed both a conceptual framework and visual work that questions the interaction between the Architect and machine / computer.
Original text
THE DESIGNER/MACHINE INTELLIGENCE
“Every great architect is — necessarily — a great poet. He must be a great original interpreter of his time, his day, his age.“ Frank Lloyd Wright
Computer vision has emerged to automate various design tasks in Architecture. In this context, an opportunity arises for Architects to collaborate with computer scientists and gain insights from the interior workings of AI models. In this process, the Architect determines the problem setting and has the capability to argue for its relevance.
The displayed visual work portrays a data-driven AI collaboration experiment, conceptualized on a floorplan of the Robie House, one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s celebrated designs. The building “blocks” are unique residential floorplans, instances from the RPLAN machine learning dataset. The purpose behind creating RPLAN is to enable the training of data-driven models. In this particular instance, the dataset - the individual floorplans represented within the pixel space of an image - is used to train a model that can automatically categorize the rooms of a floorplan yet unfamiliar to the computer’s “eyes”.
Having such powerful tools and a vast amount of already developed architectural visual data, we dare ask: why leave it passive? What could Architecture evolve towards if we re-collected the knowledge developed throughout centuries and were able to let drawings speak again about the architectural solutions they encode?
Poster
(originally, a white background version was exhibited at the exposition, but we liked it’s black background twin a little better, size: approx. 2 x 4 m)
Interested in the code that I developed to generate the poster (e.g. to create a similar visual for another floor plan of your preference)? Please contact me; and if there are several requests, I will modify and open-source the code such that it becomes universal to use for any floor plan.