Being Material Agnostic
One of the first striking visual experiences with the use of MidJourney and Dall.E in Architecture seems to be a profusion of alien material applications.
The material palette of this strange new world is greatly expanded, with architecture and design of seemingly inhabitable spaces emerging from the use of materials as diverse as hair, roots, fur, feather, popcorn and balloons.
Furry Cathedrals, Hairy Homes and Monoliths of
Meat all are now just a text prompt away.
What happens to our expectations from reality when we have access to this profusion of aspirational imagery from other material realms?
Our built environments are not as insulated from these experiments as we may imagine. The design and inhabitation of ephemeral environments are an equally important part of our experienced landscape.
These ephemeral structures shrug off the burden of permanence, and are able to explore massive flights of fantasy in their very conception.
/imagine a massive canopy of flowers, sublime heavenly lighting, pink saturated colours, blissful and heavenly.
We regularly build these very prompts as part of the big fat Indian wedding industry, trade shows, carnival parades and couture fashion shows.
MidJourney’s otherworldly material palette has suddenly mixed two worlds together, one deeply fantastical, the other deeply pragmatic. The world of architecture, usually preoccupied with order and symmetry is suddenly run amock with a flurry of blasphemous materials.
A Gothic Cathedral can effortlessly burst into colourful feathered fantasy.
Building facades weave themselves into performative warps and wefts, imbuing our cities with all manner of craft.
What materials will enter our imaginations of cities aided by the chaotic hallucinations of a machine intelligence?
By introducing a host of new materials to architecture we introduce whimsy, fun and playfulness.
We introduce parody and satire, an image that questions the self-imposed tightness of the discipline itself.
A Modernist monument meets Punjabi Baroque for a brief moment, and the results are surprisingly human, believable and evocative.
New materials herald new symbioses. By creating suggestive prompts we may even allude to cities built on fundamentally different principles.
What would a healthy Human-Mangrove symbiosis look like? What would it be like to live in a city in harmony with tidal movement? What materials must we eliminate from our cities, and what future forests remain to be planted ?
MidJourney
shows us delectable vignettes of cities built without pouring concrete.
There may even be a place for building ephemeral, crafted, living material housing for cities in constant negotiation with their waterlines.
We currently inhabit cities where our principal choice of material for construction, Concrete, is physically choking and boiling us. Can evocative new images of cities push us to conceive of better building paradigms? With MidJourney output entering a host of architecture studios as a curiosity of process, maybe we will end up spotting some realistic output that is conceived on fundamentally different principles.