PROFESSOR

Matias Del Campo

STUDIO THEME

"The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” The famous quote by Ludwig Wittgenstein has gained an entire new meaning in the emerging context of natural language text-to-image applications driven by artificial intelligence algorithms2. Applications such as Midjourney, Disco Diffusion, and Stable Diffusion are spreading like wildfire in the architecture community. Two specific results can be observed in the Cambrian explosion of a novel design tool. On the one side, the generation of thousands of astonishing images in a very short period of time, on the other the emergence of a critical interrogation of architecture theory in the face of a posthuman design method.

The purpose of this studio is to discuss the application of artificial intelligence (AI) in the design of an Embassy building, an attempt to use estrangement as a method to emancipate an architectural object from the canonical approach of design methodologies. The main argument in this studio is that the results created by Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs), whether in the form of GANs, CNNs, or Diffusion models, generate results that fall into the category of Estranged objects. In this studio, I would like to offer a possible definition of what architecture in this plateau of thinking represents and how it differs from previous attempts to use estrangement to explain the phenomena observed when working with NNs in architecture design.