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Concrete Patents: Innovative Building Materials and Construction Processes Architectural Design (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2024-09-06 Silke Langenberg, Sarah M Schlachetzki, Robin Rehm
The world of patents has always expanded exponentially in line with innovative inventions and materials, and this has been particularly true in the first few decades of the 21st century, which have delivered numerous construction materials and jointing and bonding techniques. ETH Zurich's Silke Langenberg, Sarah M Schlachetzki and Robin Rehm draw attention to the fact that within the academic field
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Knowledge Production in Digital Design and Fabrication Architectural Design (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2024-09-06 Romana Rust, Inés Ariza
Romana Rust and Inés Ariza illustrate how digital fabrication projects developed by Gramazio Kohler Research at ETH Zurich are using innovative software pipelines and producing more collaborative software and digitally driven techniques to illicit much more dynamic and sustainably effective interfaces between machines and humans for the construction industry. Rust is a computational architect and Head
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Hybrid Earth‐Timber Floor Slabs: Scaling Circular, Low‐Carbon Construction Through Automation Architectural Design (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2024-09-06 Tobias Bonwetsch, Tobias Huber
Whilst reusable and sustainable, the age‐old construction technique of rammed earth is also labour intensive in its compacting and tamping, and therefore expensive. The contemporary building industry consequently shies away from it. Tobias Bonwetsch, co‐founder of Zurich‐based sustainable construction start‐up Rematter, and Tobias Huber of ZPF Ingenieure in Basel, describe their research into combining
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Optimising Concrete Slabs with Paper Formworks Architectural Design (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2024-09-06 Fabio Amicarelli, Ena Lloret‐Fritschi
The constant demand for new buildings means concrete continues to contribute to a large proportion of global greenhouse gas emissions. Italian architect and researcher Fabio Amicarelli, and Assistant Professor in Architecture and Guest‐Editor of this AD Ena Lloret‐Fritschi, discuss the Foldcast project being developed by the Fabrication and Material Aware Architecture (FMAA) group at the Università
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Rethinking Digital Construction: A Collaborative Future of Humans, Machines and Craft Architectural Design (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2024-09-06 Daniela Mitterberger, Kathrin Dörfler
The vast majority of construction industry processes are labour intensive, and often fraught with errors due to non‐exact assembly tolerances and dimensions. Digital fabrication can mitigate or remove the potential of these anomalies occurring by negating or reducing human site‐participation. But there is another side to the digital fabrication coin – the transition to more automated processes will
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Sustainable Construction Through On‐site Robotic Fabrication: Past and Future Concepts Architectural Design (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2024-09-06 Selen Ercan Jenny, Abel Gawel
The use of robotics in construction has been experimented with for nearly fifty years. Selen Ercan Jenny, Guest‐Editor of this AD, and Abel Gawel, Principal Researcher in Computer Vision and Machine Learning with the Huawei European Research Center, run us through a brief history of such developments, and describe the sustainable advantages of contemporary research in this field alongside the many
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The Sustainable Lightness of Digital Fabrication Architectural Design (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2024-09-06 Mario Carpo
It seems, in many quarters, that technology is viewed as bad for aspirations for a sustainable future. This Neo‐Luddite narrative is hampering the way the advantages and disadvantages of digital technology are perceived. Mario Carpo, Reyner Banham Professor of Architectural History and Theory at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London (UCL), argues that new technologies succeed
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Look Down Not Up! Solving the Building Industry's Wasteful Conundrum with Digital and Earthen Construction Architectural Design (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2024-09-06 Sasha Cisar
Is earth a bono fide alternative to concrete? Sasha Cisar believes in some cases it is. A trained architect who leads sustainability research at radicant, Switzerland's first digital sustainability bank, he shows us some recently constructed examples. The synthesis of digital technologies with these types of materiality and integrated construction techniques, and their full adoption in the building
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Towards a Sustainable 3D‐Concrete‐Printed Architecture: Assemblies, Detailing and Ornamentation Architectural Design (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2024-09-06 Ana Anton, Benjamin Dillenburger
Given the long history of columns in the languages and lexicons of architecture, they are the ideal building elements with which to experiment in the pursuit of 3D‐printed concrete. Ana Anton and Benjamin Dillenburger of the Chair for Digital Building Technologies at ETH Zurich reveal how new technologies can produce sinuous filigree structures that are unachievable with conventional casting approaches
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Scalable Equals Sustainable: The Infrastructural Imperative of Earthen Construction Architectural Design (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2024-09-06 Jelle Feringa
Building with earth seems a sensible ambition in our troubled climatic times. A fundamental problem, though, is being able to make larger, more complex structures from earth without jettisoning its unique sustainable and artisan qualities at the domestic and sub‐domestic scales. Architecture and robotics specialist and co‐founder of EZCT Architecture & Design Research Jelle Feringa considers the concepts
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Disused Concrete, Digital Acupuncture and Reuse Architectural Design (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2024-09-06 Corentin Fivet, Stefana Parascho, Maxence Grangeot, Malena Bastien‐Masse
Crushing concrete liberated from demolished buildings to provide recycled aggregate is argued to be a sustainable way of reducing material extraction. Yet, in these high‐energy processes, large amounts of new cement is often used, negating this as a low‐carbon activity. Professor of Architecture and Structural Design at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) Corentin Fivet and his co‐authors
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Sustainable Digital Concrete: Myth, Reality or Emerging Opportunity? Architectural Design (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2024-09-06 Timothy Wangler, Yamini Patankar, Robert J Flatt
Unbelievably huge amounts of concrete, a major contributor to our contemporary world, are produced every year, and this continues to increase exponentially. ETH Zurich researchers Timothy Wangler, Yamini Patankar and Robert J Flatt explain the pros and cons of the digital fabrication of concrete, and the research still to be done in this relatively young and experimental subset of the construction
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About the Guest‐Editors Architectural Design (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2024-09-06 Ena Lloret‐Fritschi, Selen Ercan Jenny, David Jenny
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Reimagining Earthen Materials: The New Era of Sustainable and Digital Construction Architectural Design (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2024-09-06 David Jenny, Fabio Gramazio, Matthias Kohler
Earthen buildings are ubiquitous throughout most of the world, and are still being constructed today. However, in the wake of our greater understanding of climate change, this historic architectural material is being seen and used in a new light, augmented by 21st‐century robotic dexterity. Guest‐Editor of this AD David Jenny, and Fabio Gramazio and Matthias Kohler, co‐founders of the architecture
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A New Future of Construction: Digital Fabrication and Sustainability Architectural Design (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2024-09-06 Ena Lloret‐Fritschi, Selen Ercan Jenny, David Jenny
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Injection 3D Concrete Printing: From Structural Geometry to Fabrication Architectural Design (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2024-09-06 Norman Hack, Harald Kloft, Inka Mai, Pierluigi D’Acunto, Yinan Xiao, Dirk Lowke
Architects and engineers have historically developed and reinvented concrete's technologies, formwork and aesthetics to suit the pragmatic and philosophical aims of their times. Architect and computational design researcher Norman Hack and his co‐authors introduce a contemporary method for the fabrication of concrete structural elements using the Injection 3D Concrete Printing (I3DCP) process formulated
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Chasing Paradoxical Shadows Architectural Design (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2024-07-01 Nat Chard
Shadows bring a sense of animated vitality to any building, and their representations on drawings add a sense of depth and believability to that which is being illustrated. Nat Chard, Professor of Experimental Architecture at University College London (UCL), has a longstanding interest in movement, optics, photography and the intangible spaces in between them. His Institute of Paradoxical Shadows cleaves
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Imaging Uncertainty: Layers of Time and Meaning in a Sacred Space Architectural Design (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2024-07-01 Eva Menuhin
Laid bare by contemporary scanning techniques and technologies, historic buildings reveal a series of nested, diaphanous presences – the membranes of memory and fragments of history. Architectural writer Eva Menuhin investigates a recent project by the University of Greenwich's Captivate: Spatial Modelling Research Group, whose gossamer‐threaded architectural representations decode time, movements
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A Tailored Reality: Inside In Here Architectural Design (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2024-07-01 Ifigeneia Liangi, Daniel Dream
Operating from dual locations in London and Athens, the output of Night Kitchen, the experimental architectural research lab of Ifigeneia Liangi and Daniel Dream, often takes the form of anarchitectural story books, illustrated with congested, postmodern interiors full of colourful objects and artefacts. But these are not random juxtapositions of stuff – they are elaborate, multilayered tableaux, their
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Piranesi: An Unsettling World of Architecture Architectural Design (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2024-07-01 Mark Morris
The vastly overscaled elements, lineaments and sculptures of a seemingly infinite house form the backdrop of Susanna Clarke's 2020 novel Piranesi. Head of Teaching and Learning at the Architectural Association, Mark Morris draws on his research into architectural models, paracosms and the representation of buildings in fiction, filtering this through the lens of an encyclopaedic knowledge of architectural
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Diaphanous Bodies: A Hauntology of the Mediating Image Architectural Design (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2024-07-01 Peter J Baldwin
The contemporary world is so dependent on the virtual, with its constantly morphing and invisibly magical potentialities, that it is somewhat paradoxical that the speculative, explorative aspect of architectural drawing is so undervalued in this context. The profession's computerised quick‐fix, feed‐me, satisfy‐me normative mentality has limited truck with the intangible. Peter J Baldwin writes an
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Hard Spirits: Architectural Apparitions in Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away Architectural Design (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2024-07-01 Michael Chapman
Film has a long history of spectral association, from the possibilities of projection, the dancing image that hangs in the air, to the translucence of the media itself. Taking inspiration from a Japanese animation, Michael Chapman, Professor and Chair of Architecture and Industrial Design at Western Sydney University, has created a series of works that seek to fill in the haunted blanks and uncanny
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Solid Shadows: Presencing Memory, Manifesting Memorial Architectural Design (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2024-07-01 Peter J Baldwin
Memorials operate on many semiotic and mnemonic levels, and are often created at an architectural scale constituted as clusters of artistically choreographed and architectonically situated signs and symbols. Guest‐ Editor of this 2 Peter J Baldwin explores the sculptural and drawn work of Royal Academician Michael Sandle and discusses the artist's multilayered and multiscaled oeuvre that bristles with
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Syncopated Chronologies: Architectural Conservation and Spectral Documentation Architectural Design (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2024-07-01 Cameron Stebbing
From its very inception, architectural preservation, and the specialist conservation practices that have evolved to support it, have occupied a shifting territory of constant quantification and continually evolving legislation. Architectural designer Cameron Stebbing evokes a menagerie of philosophical ideas used to illustrate and explore the notion that traditional recording techniques ignore hidden
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Digital Ectoplasm and the Infinite Architecture of the Fulldome Architectural Design (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2024-07-01 Mike Phillips
Suggesting a curious comparison between the Victorian séance and the contemporary world of immersive virtual environments, Mike Phillips, Professor of Interdisciplinary Arts at the University of Plymouth, and Director of Research at i‐DAT.org, describes the new capabilities of the fulldome, which uses notions of the automatic movements of the planchette, the wooden token that traverses the alphanumeric
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Ghost Horizons: Scaffold and Syntax Architectural Design (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2024-07-01 Oliver G Goché, Peter P Goché
An empty granary in Iowa proves to be an experimental laboratory for immersive performative experiences and the manifestation of ghostly apparitions and ideas. The derelict building is porous and permeable, exhibiting a certain uncanniness through the shifting register of haunting vicissitudes which can be projected on, cross‐pollinated with, visually explored, touched, heard and marvelled at. Artist
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Haunted Houses: Architecture and Large Language Models Architectural Design (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2024-07-01 Chris Speed
Considering the vast datasets that constitute artificial intelligence, it might be assumed that there is no place for the ghostly or ambiguous among the binary logics of the all‐knowing algorithm. Explaining that this is not in fact the case, Melbourne‐based Professor of Design for Regenerative Futures Chris Speed reveals the tumult of numinous spirits that haunt the data, influencing and impacting
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Phantoms of a Five‐day Forest Architectural Design (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2024-07-01 Kirsty Badenoch
Strangely, the palimpsest of human occupation is often far less visible in the city than it is in wilder spaces. Artist, architect, researcher and educator Kirsty Badenoch describes an exploratory expedition to draw out these ghosts within the rugged landscapes of the Scottish Highlands, and a subsequent exhibition of the work through diary entries and photographic forms. The work itself is made through
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All Visualisations Have Crooked Tales/Tails Architectural Design (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2024-07-01 Perry Kulper
The breadth of architectural typologies is waning, or so Perry Kulper, Professor of Architecture at Taubman College, University of Michigan, tells us. Kulper's work has for decades focused on the development of dexterous, agile and creative methodologies for speculating about the possibilities of architecture(s) explored through notions of equivalence, remixing, reinterpreting and reimagining. Developed
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Designing Absence: The Invisible Bridge and the Ghost Barn Architectural Design (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2024-07-01 Ian Ritchie
Straddling the fine line between architecture and art, London‐ based architects ritchie*studio have designed an Invisible Bridge and a Ghost Barn on a private, historic and protected estate in Hampshire, Southeast England. These delicate propositions juggle presence and absence informed by the site's history, by poetry, Charles Darwin, local flint and an intelligent and thoughtful client. Ian Ritchie
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The Wicked, the Tamed and the Transformative Nature of Artificial Intelligence Architectural Design (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2024-05-01 Matias del Campo
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Stop Making Sense: Complexity and Contradiction in AI and Architecture Architectural Design (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2024-05-01 Andrew Kudless
In the last thirty or so years, architects have embraced all manner of computer softwares and hardwares. This has often resulted in convoluted forms and a concentration on the part of architects to solve fabrication complexities at the expense of dexterous design explorations. Artist, designer and educator Andrew Kudless reminds us of the messy, illogical and contradictory aspects of design development
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Tech Limited: AI is AI Architectural Design (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2024-05-01 Ryan Vincent Manning
What might a conversation between a highly trained generator that calculates the probability of the next word in a sentence, and the jumbled mess of organic neurons inside the head of a human architect look like? Through such a fictitious dialogue, architectural designer and educator Ryan Vincent Manning explores issues of human inquisitiveness, uniqueness and agency, human‐ machine interfaces, machine
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Autonomous Algorithmic Architects: Wicked Problems of Machine Learning in Architecture Architectural Design (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2024-05-01 Phil Bernstein
AI is developing at breakneck speed, with generation after generation of software/algorithms swiftly and exponentially appearing in a matter of months of each other. Associate Dean and Professor Adjunct at the Yale School of Architecture Phil Bernstein, an expert in architectural practice and technology, lucidly examines the way the profession has responded to previous digitally enhanced design techniques
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Machine Hands on Flaws to Machine: The Surprising Sources of Biases in Machine Learning Models Architectural Design (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2024-05-01 Kyle Steinfeld
After musing on the history and varying media of the concept of ‘gone viral’, Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, Kyle Steinfeld further investigates computational design through the lens of cultural practices. Even the seemingly most contemporary and innovative technological ideas and gizmos can be traced back to a series of legacy notions that remain silently
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Art Beyond Mechanical Reproduction: In Conversation with AI Artist Mario Klingemann Architectural Design (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2024-05-01 Matias del Campo
Delving into the realm of how machine learning is being used to make art, Matias del Campo interviews Munich‐based artist Mario Klingemann, who shares with us his modus operandi and aspirations for this new discipline. His work is at once uncanny, defamiliarising and estranging, and not without a hint of bodily violence – a kind of reverse butchery, an assault on the figure by the machine.
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‘Hey ChatGPT, Finish This Building …’: A Worker‐Led AI Agenda for the Construction Industry Architectural Design (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2024-05-01 Sarah Fox
Instead of AI systems being foisted on workplaces and workers from the top down via a one‐size‐fits all approach, Sarah Fox, director of Carnegie Mellon University's Tech Solidarity Lab, investigates how more participative practices might enable staff to develop equitable workload procedures in conjunction with machine learning systems. How can businesses transform to incorporate AI without the nuances
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This Is Not a Building: Architecting the Spectrality of the Latent Space Architectural Design (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2024-05-01 Benjamin Ennemoser, Ingrid Mayrhofer‐Hufnagl
AI and its operations might be perceived as series of fields of almost infinite latencies – of possibilities and potential times of dataset flowerings or bloomings – that are programmable but still surprising. Assistant Professor of Architecture at Texas A&M University Benjamin Ennemoser and Innsbruck University‐ based architect and researcher Ingrid Mayrhofer‐Hufnagl explain this concept, its implications
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AI‐Generated Content: From Conception to Communal Engagement Architectural Design (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2024-05-01 Wanyu He
Since the AI ‘architectural explosion’ of 2022, and as things have become clearer but have not yet settled down, a whole raft of possibilities for creativity and commercial exploration are emerging. Architectural and urban designer Wanyu He explains some of these opportunities, and also reminds us of the ethical and societal concerns about this technology – its biases and blindnesses – which must be
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Every Dataset is a Canon Architectural Design (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2024-05-01 Mario Carpo
For architects, the construction of a dataset for use in AI, whether imported from somewhere else or newly created, is fundamentally an epistemological canon of references, likes and preoccupations often predicated on the selection of so‐called masterpieces of Western art. The canon represents ideals of beauty and knowledge, but it also reflects a bias in favour of art created by those who have occupied
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An A(i)lien Embassy: AI and Interspecies Communication Architectural Design (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2024-05-01 Andrew Witt
There is more than just human intelligence out there, and we must now get to grips with the end of human uniqueness. Our accelerating dexterity with biology of all sorts, digital software and hardware, pharmacology and a myriad other interventionist or evolutionary technologies is leading to the design of architectures/bodies/ systems that are fundamentally intelligently entangled. Harvard Graduate
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Signs, Signals and Signifiers: The Doghouse and the Semiotics of AI Architectural Design (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2024-05-01 Sandra Manninger
Architecture is a complex web of semiotics – signs, signals and signifiers. The creation of these codes, and their dynamic manipulation and interaction over time, is the lifeblood of experimental architecture practice SPAN's Doghouse project. Co‐founder Sandra Manninger explains how the project's articulation, robotic inhabitants and fluctuating symbolic meanings and languages create a complex multi‐readable
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Everything Can Be an Author: Rethinking Agency in the Age of Artificial Intelligence Architectural Design (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2024-05-01 Matias del Campo
Architectural discourse has often been described as predicated on the lone architect genius backed by a studio of supplicant architectural assistants. In recent years there has been a swing to the idea of crediting the numerous creative collaborations in the development of the arts – buildings or not. Guest‐editor of this 2 Matias del Campo uses AI to further question the independent, original‐thinking
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Enchantment and the Gimmick: Pleasure and Doubt in AI Image Aesthetics Architectural Design (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2024-05-01 Michael Young
With its ability to subvert our perceptions of the world, AI can create images of quirky strangeness and charm, resulting in hyper‐surrealist juxtapositions of form and uncanny beauty. Founding partner of Young & Ayata and Associate Professor at the Cooper Union, New York, Michael Young investigates recent output from architect Karel Klein and her collaborators, and speculates on the power of their
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AI and Synaesthetic Space: Architecture from Hybrid Visions of Intelligent Machines Architectural Design (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2024-05-01 Cesare Battelli
One of AI's core abilities is the conjuring up of images that seem familiar to us, based on our individual visual and architectural preoccupations. This splicing of the known with the unknown can create a sense of déjà vu that is both centred and defamiliarised. Italian artist, architect and researcher in visionary architecture Cesare Battelli takes us through some of the characters of the past who
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Visceral Pleasures: The Embodied Human Mind Architectural Design (IF 0.3) Pub Date : 2024-05-01 Neil Spiller