Hand Made Automation

Intensive Design-Build Masters Studio

Tutor: Gwyllim Jahn

Time: Tues 6-10pm & Fri 5-9pm

Location: 100.10.001

Intensive Weeks 7-14

Hand Made Automation is a design-build intensive studio

Interested in the intersection of low tech construction methods, hand-craft in mixed reality and generative AI. Over 6 weeks students will study and curate an architectural language for mixed reality fabrication from first principles, and test and explore this language through 1:1 prototyping and the construction of a pavilion scale structure. These projects will be undertaken individually and in groups.

The studio is situated at an unusual point in time where generative AI platforms such as Midjourney and StableDiffusion have made it possible to envisage completed architectural concepts as photos or renders almost instantly, but the task of developing and realising these concepts as 3D objects (whether in digital design software or physical reality) remains as laborious as ever. The hypothesis of the studio is that human meaningful design contributions can be manifest in how generated images are translated to physical spaces, forms and acts through skilled craft in mixed reality. Hand craft in mixed reality is uniquely suited to the surreal, fractal and materially diffuse images readily produced by current generation AI. Diffusion models have no particular bias for the euclidian elements and projective geometry that has been pervasive to architectural geometry since the renaissance. Instead we see a new language of clouds, fuzz, fields, blobs, adjacencies, estrangement and fog. This in turn encourages a re-evaluation of a set of architectural assumptions around the necessity of standardised materials, grid systems and orthographic projection, structural efficiency, 5mm tolerance, the rejection of ornamentation, the need for consistency between drawings, the rejection of improvisation in fabrication and so on.