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
Research, Conference, ATTP
Le Corbusier, 1959, Les dés sont jetés, www.jstor.org/stable/community.9485523
2022
www.academia.edu/104812561/The_Canvassed_Opinions_of_Frankenstein
Research, Frankenstein, Venice Art Biennale
2022-2026
Research, Filarete, ATTP, TU Vienna, Architecture Theory
2022
www.academia.edu/104617434/The_Artificial_Waiting_Room
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.
Research, Thesis, University of Innsbruck, AI, Architecture Theory
2020-2023
built project w/ Mario Ramoni
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.
Building, Completed, Austria
2016-2017
built project with UNStudio
www.unstudio.com/en/page/11733/booking.com-city-campus
Building, Completed, The Netherlands
All images courtesy of UNStudio.
An architectonic arrival with Arakawa+Gins
2025
www.attp.tuwien.ac.at/project/architekturtheorie-chance/
– 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.
Teaching, AI, ATTP, TU Vienna, Architecture Theory
2024
https://www.uibk.ac.at/de/architekturtheorie-baugeschichte/architekturtheorie/events/the-architecture-chat/
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.
Lecture Series, University of Innsbruck, Architecture Theory, Teaching
2024
www.attp.tuwien.ac.at/project/architekturtheorie-chance/
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.
Teaching, AI, ATTP, TU Vienna, Architecture Theory