For its second year as part of the EDGE Center for Advanced Studies, the MS in Architectural Technologies program at SCI-Arc continued connecting issues of disciplinary relevance with the most advanced technological developments reshaping society and culture at large.
Taught by Program Coordinator Marcelo Spina and Casey Rehm, the program’s final degree studio “The Future of Experience: Speculations on New Cultural Centers” explored how artificial intelligence (AI) and its various forms of automation allow us to visualize, learn from, and reconfigure the world.
With the aim of producing architectural objects and artifacts of cultural significance, the studio, looked at technologies of automation and the role that new forms of artificial intelligence play in reshaping the built environment, as well as their capacity to engender sublime, yet plausible images of near future speculative reality.
Capitalizing on the current ubiquitous use of machine vision, machine learning, and data surveying technology such as LIDAR scanning, the class aimed to position a clear idea of what automation and AI mean not only in architecture but also within the specificity of an architectural context and a set of existing buildings.
The iconic Music Center complex in Downtown Los Angeles served as the site for proposals that speculated on the future and near future of cultural centers, expanding notions of form and experience, incorporating augmented reality (AR) as to reshape the architectural and urban milieu.
Using AI convolutional neural networks (CNN) and other forms of automated and non-automated assembly, Architectural Technologies students developed proposals that ranged in scope, size, and aesthetics and substantially altered existing buildings and their spatial experience. The proposals also raised questions about authorship, authenticity, style, physicality, and material assembly.
Hseng Tai Lintner’s proposal juxtaposed the hyper-dense urban block against a digital veneer to explore the tension between the physical and the non-physical. Resulting relationships and interactions were then investigated through a speculative urban tectonic that was at once physical and digital. Through the development of augmented and mixed reality environments, Lintner examined these digital/physical interactions at various scales-- from the urban block to the human body. The result was a highly articulated, trackable architecture for machine vision overlaid with a digital filter that altered notions of what it means to inhabit and traverse a space. Lintner’s hybrid digital/physical environments created landscapes that enabled data to begin taking on qualities that are phenomenological rather than informative, creating an architecture of spectacle activated through the collective occupation of its inhabitants.
Maxime Lefebvre proposed a new armature for stage design through a project that developed an AI model, which collected, sampled, and re-imagined stages from the past while tracking and mapping a panel system in motion. Embracing decorum as a founding principle of current image-making culture, Lefebvre’s re-invented ‘Periaktoi'-- devices mechanically operated to display and rapidly change theatre scenes -- to achieve visual trickery through elaborate decoration and precise motion detection and mapping. Taken as a whole, the new armature constituted an altered scaenae frons of sorts.
Architectural Technologies students kicked off the annual SCI-Arc EDGE Symposium presenting their proposals in a TED-style format to an audience composed of architects, theorists, curators, artists, cultural and Tech entrepreneurs. Guest panelists and critics included Johann Bettum, Ferda Kolatan, Michael Young, David Erdman, Richard Koshalek, Marrikka Trotter, Mimi Zeiger, Sam Teller, Lars Jan, Joe Day, Megan Steinman, Marcelyn Gow, Jose Sanchez, Kimberly Meyer, David Ruy, and Hernan Diaz Alonso.
One year in length, the MS in Architectural Technologies program is one of the four postgraduate programs offered at the SCI-Arc EDGE, Center for Advanced Studies in Architecture, ideal for students motivated toward building new career trajectories leveraging architectural knowledge. For additional student work, follow @sciarc and #SCIArcEDGE on Instagram.
