architektonima

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architektonima, by Maya Christodoulaki, is a creative architectural practice forging a distinctive approach to spatial creation: it is both embedded in the materiality and the making of buildings, as well as, active in research and theory. The space-making methodology is rooted in a profound engagement with mathematical thinking and natural philosophy, and is practiced and applied using architecture, signals and weaving.





Throwing dice for non-gamblers
2024


40th Anniversary Symposium on Cooperation and Exchange between Southeast University and ETH Zurich in Nanjing, China.
Reimagining Architecture: Navigating the Impact of Computing and Artificial Intelligence
Starting with a tapestry from 1959 called Les dés sont jetés (The Dice are Cast) by Le Corbusier (1887-1965), this paper aims to open up the Greek word διακυβεύω, meaning ‘to play at dice with’, or ‘mit Einem würfeln’. Jørn Utzon commissioned the Swiss Architect to create a piece that would hang in the Sydney Opera House. The decorative work with its declarative title leaves no room to connect with the aleatory and statistical prehistories of probabilistic thinking. And yet, since the dice are thrown, they allude to the modernist prerogative of not dealing with uncertainty and ignoring the universe of a yet-to-be-thrown dice. Given the etymological connection of the hazardous with the dice, the paper aims to explore the chances that a non-gambler like Le Corbusier would engage with the probabilistic without the popular apocalyptic para-philology. As a physical object, the dice was shaped by the uniform materials like ivory (Hacking, 1999) that would ensure a certain objective equidistance from the cases to be. As a digital object, that technical material property that safeguards the game is missing, producing a gap, in our relationship with uncertainty. What is the διακύβευμα, the result of throwing the dice, then? Is there anything puritanical in the way we see chance today? What tapestry are we weaving and how do we think within the naughty, self-referential environment of Large Language Models? 

Category
Research, Conference, ATTP

Le Corbusier, 1959, Les dés sont jetés, www.jstor.org/stable/community.9485523

The Canvassed Opinions of Frankenstein
2022

www.academia.edu/104812561/The_Canvassed_Opinions_of_Frankenstein
This essay was written for Dixit Algorizmi, a publication on the history of technology and its relationship with contemporary artistic production curated by Sheida Ghomashchi and Space Caviar for the 2022 Pavilion of the Republic of Uzbekistan at the Venice Biennale.
Category
Research, Frankenstein, Venice Art Biennale


Transtextual Invention
2022-2026
The dissertation presents a study of the Early Renaissance sculptor and architect Antonio di Piero Averlino (1400 – c. 1469), known as ‘Filarete’, by examining matters of rhetoric, probability, law and fallibility. The primary goal is a methodological enquiry of architectural writing in the light of advances in non-linear processing. These subjects provide the necessary relational structures to examine the stochastic conception behind the architect’s single literary work, the Libro Architettonico, and connect to matters of probabilistic rhetoricity in data-driven architectural production. The thesis proposes a reevaluation of the theoretical frame of his opus that focuses on formal concerns, and the substantiation of intellectual and mathematical trajectories, like non-linear argumentation, that are fitting to the dialogical narrative and metaphorical drawings of the Libro. The thesis connects the unfavored treatment of Filarete to an emphasis on stylistic concerns that prioritize architectural attribution pertaining to key references like Leon Battista Alberti and instead suggests a wider observational canon of dialogical literature. Recent studies on premodern rhetorics will play a vital role in informing Filarete’s exposure to humanist, neoplatonic and scholastic literature. The principal objective of this project is to examine how Filarete’s persona centered around the idea of virtue relates to transtextual invention and the humanist use of ‘the probable’, as well as how quasi-propositions influence his unique architectonic conception in a manner sufficient to challenge any notion of inferiority as-a-thinker, as well as an-author.
Category
Research, Filarete, ATTP, TU Vienna, Architecture Theory

The Artificial Waiting Room
2022

www.academia.edu/104617434/The_Artificial_Waiting_Room  
The Artificial Waiting Room is a metaphor for the imitation and generation of Architecture with the use of Machine Learning. It summarizes the search for a critical approach that firstly does not appropriate architectural history for the justification of Artificial Intelligence, and secondly one that can review AI’s effect on Architecture.

The work is structured in three parts. In the first chapter, we look at the definition of AI by reviewing not only its public sentiment as a cautionary tale
through the story of Frankenstein, but also its historical and theoretical base and its transition to Machine Learning. It is accompanied with a collective timeline of events from the AI-contributing disciplines that aims to show the flexibility of assimilating machinic architecture in the history of Machine Learning.

In the second chapter, we engage with the hypothesis of a historical continuity of Machines and Architecture and study a selection of recent books/atlases that place the machine as a connector of architectural examples. The case studies range from Claude-Nicolas Ledoux to Nicholas Negroponte. In each case, parallels to ML examples are drawn in an attempt to bridge them with the theoretical frame and historical timeline of AI that was reviewed in the first chapter.

Finally, the approach shifts from a case-by-case study to the images of AI Architecture. Having identified machinic architecture as unfitting to critique itself, three cultural flagships are chosen as facilitators of this computationally spatial practice. The AI room is built upon the significance of computational models, three-dimensionality, and playfulness, transforming along expectations and aesthetics. The appearance of the AI room as a known, vernacular, mere object, makes it an obvious and wanted object. Beyond the technological shortcomings of architecture, and with the theoretical arguments of Brian O‘Doherty and Arthur C. Danto, the AI room is compared to the contemporary gallery to observe its persistent deification.
Category
Research, Thesis, University of Innsbruck, AI, Architecture Theory

Innsbruck Printing Facilities
2021-2024

built project w/ Mario Ramoni
under construction
Design competition to Development for the new centralized printing hub for Land Tirol.

Category
Building, Completed, Austria

Kappl Cemetery
2020-2023

built project w/ Mario Ramoni
Nestled on the steep hillside to the south of the church of St. Anthony stands the new cemetery of Kappl. The work is conceived as a natural platform for contemplation, carefully designed to offer an unparalleled panorama of the Paznaun valley in Tirol that unfolds towards the southwest.

Defined by a formidable concrete wall to the south, the site traverses three distinct levels, seamlessly connected by two gently winding ramps. Upon arrival at the initial terrace from the adjacent municipal road, visitors are greeted by a single-storey concrete structure with an encased oak urn wall. Midway through the site, the visitor pauses where the two ramps change direction. Here, a sheltered outdoor sitting niche beckons with a strategically placed window and a serene water feature, crafting a moment of tranquillity that counters the upper building's presence. The journey through the cemetery's terraces finds completion as the visitor ascends back to the first level via a small staircase, guiding them to the entrance. This gentle circulation contributes to the solemn ambiance of the grounds, inviting contemplation within the serene embrace of nature and architecture.

Category
Building, Completed, Austria


Oosterdokseiland
2016-2017

built project with UNStudio

www.unstudio.com/en/page/11733/booking.com-city-campus

Design Development of the new booking.com Headquarters in Amsterdam.

Category
Building, Completed, The Netherlands

All images courtesy of UNStudio.

Everybody talks about Chance:
An architectonic arrival with Arakawa+Gins

2025

www.attp.tuwien.ac.at/project/architekturtheorie-chance/

 
‘If you want to become an artist, you have to become a scientist first.’ 
– Shusaku Arakawa

‘If the poet … must perforce dramatize the oneness of the experience, even though paying tribute to its diversity, then his use of paradox and ambiguity is seen as necessary.’ 
– Cleanth Brooks in Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction

‘An eternal object realized in respect to its pure potentiality as related to determinate logical subjects is termed a 'propositional feeling' in the mentality of the actual occasion in question.’ 
– Alfred North Whitehead in Process and Reality

How do we go about architecture when Everybody talks about Chance

AI, probability, and stochastics actively shape our Zeitgeist and add new vocabulary to our architectural atlas. A few years ago, the publication Everybody talks about the Weather (2023) addressed another public issue, the climate crisis, with a call to study the climate through art and science. The seminar wants to emulate this coping mechanism to make architecture as a process that is simultaneously natural and artificial, as chance and the weather. 

In the Chance seminar, we will explore the weather as a metaphor – through clouds, storms, air, lightings, pollution, flooding, kairos, the weatherman – to talk about chance as mutation, ambiguity, contradiction and pattern. 

A pattern, however, is not a habit. Habits are elements of organization, prediction, framing and comfort in daily life. For the artist Shusaku Arakawa and the poet Madeline Gins, an artist collaboration which began in 70s New York, habits are highly suspicious. In their work - Bioscleave House (2008),Container of Perceiving (1984), Site of Reversible Destiny (1995),The mechanism of meaning (1968-1988) - they favor an art of space-making that is shaped by mutable habits. 

The work of Arakawa+Gins will guide our first explorations and incentivize our focus around points of inflection and changes in direction. We will talk about eternity and destiny when designing within probabilistic setups as a gesture that overcomes the platitude of total randomness, or the comfort of habit. 

From the ‘moving pictures of thought’ that Charles Peirce sees in diagrams, or the ‘strange loops’ of Douglas Hofstadter we will see how the enactment of habits turns into patterns of creation. We will continue with books that look at chance, the weather, ambiguity, contradiction, and metamorphose them into manners, process, magic and ideas to arrive at Architecture. 
Category
Teaching, AI, ATTP, TU Vienna, Architecture Theory

The Architecture Chat
2024

https://www.uibk.ac.at/de/architekturtheorie-baugeschichte/architekturtheorie/events/the-architecture-chat/
The Architecture Chat is the new lecture series of the Institute of Architectural Theory introduced in the summer semester 2024, dedicated to providing space for discussions about the relation of architecture with philosophy and science. It was conceived, designed and organized by Maya Christodoulaki and moderated by Maya Christodoulaki, Tim Altenhof and Miro Roman. 

Communication in architecture is nothing new: a forum, a dialogue, a platform – there are countless formats which allow us to talk to each other. Yet, the Chat has charmed the world as an art of discovery, as for over a year now it transcends its sonorous articulations by reading, thinking and writing computationally through LLMs with us and for us. At this turning point, the Architecture Chat aims to facilitate new concepts and approaches to thinking about architecture, seeking creative ways to bridge intellectual traditions with new narratives in the face of prescient political and natural realities.

This spring we welcome six guests: Stephan Trüby (Uni Stuttgart), Philippe Morel (The Bartlett), Vera Bühlmann (TU Wien), Tülay Atak (Die Angewandte), Jörg Gleiter (TU Berlin) and Andrew Witt (Harvard GSD) in our faculty to listen to and discuss their recent publications. With the Architecture Chat we hope to touch upon current issues in our discipline, exploring boundaries and formats, discussing rhetoric and formulations, and probing what fascinates us and what might go out of fashion.

Category
Lecture Series, University of Innsbruck, Architecture Theory, Teaching

Chance
2024

www.attp.tuwien.ac.at/project/architekturtheorie-chance/

 
What does an architect do within the Machine Learning Cosmos?

There is chatting and rumbling, murmur, and noise - Machine Learning is about dealing with signals that are muddy and unclear in which we look for harmony and sense. 

In this seminar at TU Wien, we will explore ways to work conceptually as a space-maker with the idea of CHANCE. With Large Language Models, an architect’s operation has shifted from designing to architecting, as an act of navigation with and among the myriad nodes and connections that make up the art of space-making.

We set the center of this architecting operation in the kitchen, where CHANCE manifests through a creator/inventor/thinker that improvises with Midjourney, ChatGBT and AskAlice all possible text-to-text, text-to-image and image-to-text productions. In the kitchen we find our tools: we learn to improvise using Machine Learning Models (convolution, GAN, stable diffusion) and use them as storytelling devices. On the kitchen table, we play a game of associations from speech-to-image (DIXIT) to experiment with the backbone of every narration, biographies. Here, we open a communication channel with non-other than (our own) Leon Battista Alberti. He is perhaps best known for his seminal work Ten Books on Architecture (1452), or his treatises On Painting (1435), and On Sculpture (1464). Yet in this seminar, we focus on Alberti’s antiquarianism, art of discovery and autobiographical motif found in his letters, short stories and mythical novels.

With these tools at hand, this seminar examines an architectural hypothesis, suggesting that the probabilistic, self-referential nature of Machine Learning aligns with concepts inherent in architecture and the art of space-making.
Category
Teaching, AI, ATTP, TU Vienna, Architecture Theory
©MMXXIV architektonima Space-making through architecture, signals and weaving.