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