AUTOMATOPIA

tutor_Jack Mansfield-Hung | jack.mansfield-hung@rmit.edu.au bachelor of architecture studio_semester 1, 2023

Mondays & Thursdays 6-9pm

The rapid advancement of creative artificial intelligence models has made it possible for almost anyone to generate compelling architectural imagery at the push of a button. With architects already struggling to maintain agency in the creative process, what will it mean for the discipline when anyone can effectively design through the construction of a sentence? This studio will explore the implications, both positive and negative of an omnipresent AI technology. Could these models be used it to imagine new styles of architecture that speak to minority cultures who are underrepresented by the styles of the western canon? Or will it be used to exacerbate existing power structures to continue a trajectory of insatiable growth and consumption.

To explore these hypothetical futures the studio will write speculative, counterfactual fictions. Students will re-envision the future of Melbourne as either Utopian or Dystopian, not through fantasy, but through fact driven speculations on how different stakeholders would re-design the city once the barriers of design are completely flattened.

To engage critically with these themes students will be introduced to a new suite of machine learning models which allow creatives to generate convincing architectural imagery entirely from text prompts. Through these new design methods students will contribute to broader research on how the future of design might look as they engage in a design relationship with a technology which rather than improve efficiency, instead serves as a disruptive irritant, clerk or critic that actively reshapes and redirects the process of designing.

No prior algorithmic experience is required. In fact, an interest in art & architectural history and a drive for critical engagement in counterculture and political discourse will be of far greater value.

For too long, decisions about our built environment have been made behind closed doors; in the boardrooms of corporations and the offices of relevant authorities. Modern life, secularisation and consumer economy has resulted in a dramatic decline of free, publicly accessible space.

We are witnessing less of the city occupied, a surplus of vacuous architecture lies without purpose. The exodus of the labour force leaves the office a relic of its former self, while the church serves a folly, an anachronism in the urban space. How can we make these objects more productive - what is their role in the 21st century?

When did modern society deviate away from the founding principles of humanism?

We believe history has an operative role to play in the present.

The studio seeks to create conditions of change for these untenable artefacts. When a building’s purpose is under duress, one should be sanguine about its potential re-use, simple interventions could open up a multitude of new ideas.

Civil Actors will question contemporary dogmatic approaches to domesticity and the city by engaging in a wider architectural, cultural and historical discourse for re-use, adaptation, modification and intervention.

The studio will explore the notion of the survey, and its multiple forms, to understand how the methods of recording what exists can be used to imagine what might be. Civil Actors will harness the methodology of thinking big and acting strategically, enabling a conversation to oscillate between the scale of the city and the hand. In a series of speculative interventions across multiple sites student’s will question the identity, function and sensibility of these annexed institutions.

Civil - relating to ordinary citizens and their concerns, Actor/s - a participant/s in an action or process. Civil Actors will provide a framework that advocates for the city’s collective role towards an individual needs, wants, and desires.