SPAN

Out now! The Routledge Companion to Smart Design Thinking in Architecture & Urbanism. Edited by Mitra Kanaani. It contains, among many stellar contributions, Sandra Manninger's and my article "AI and the Morphology of the City".

Thank you Mitra for the generous invitation to contribute to this seminal anthology!

Contributions among others by: Mitra Kanaani, Harrison Fraker, Jim Dator, Michael Stepner, Patrik Schumacher, Branko Kolarevic, Brett Steele, Neil Leach, Mark Tholen, Sina Mostafavi, Ding Bao, Henry Gordon Smith, Stephen Mueller, Brian Cody, Robert Neumayr, Gili Rin, Achim Menges and many more.

Warning! Architecture!

#

A Hotel across the Dolomiten

#

A non-existent gate of the Hofburg in Vienna.

#

I'm honored to have contributed to this new anthology of AI-driven design, edited by Manuel Kretzer. Thank you very much for the generous invitation to provide the prologue to this book. In the text "Blindly Navigating the Latent Space." I try to shed light into the dark corners of the latent space......:

'.....Every so often, a new technology emerges that reshapes how we create and think. For me, AI-driven tools like MidJourney and DALL-E 2 do just that in architecture. Much like the invention of the camera sparked debate over art's nature, AI has prompted us to ask: can what we create with these tools be considered art?

Navigating AI's "Latent Space" feels like steering a ship through darkness, uncovering everything from perfect imitations to strange, unfamiliar forms. This process challenges our conventional ideas of design and opens new avenues for creativity, allowing us to glimpse what lies beyond the boundaries of our imagination.

AI doesn’t just replicate; it learns and evolves. It addresses complex architectural challenges, from aesthetics to sustainability, offering insights we've never had. To me, this isn't just a tool—it's the dawn of a new era in design, pushing us to think differently, imagine more boldly, and redefine the future of architecture......'

Authors include:
VERENA BACHL
ADIL BOKHARI
VERA BÜHLMANN
MATIAS DEL CAMPO
FELECIA DAVIS
MARC ENGENHART
BEHNAZ FARAHI
MICHAEL HANSMEYER
IMMANUEL KOH
MARIA KUPTSOVA
SIMON MARIS
AGOSTINO NICKL
JORGE OROZCO
MIRO ROMAN
JENNY E. SABIN
HANS SACHS
LASSE SCHERFFIG
KARSTEN SCHUHL
MANUEL KRETZER (Ed.)

Thank you, Manuel Kretzer, for the invitation to contribute.

https://www.spurbuch.de/de/produktleser/product/synthetic-realities.html

Sandra Manninger's and my paper "Deep Mining Authorship" has been published in the CDRF Conference proceedings. Springer 2024. Thank you very much to Philip Yuan for hosting such an excellent event.

Here is a short excerpt from the introduction:

".....The idea of the author as a singular, autonomous figure gained further prominence in the 18th and 19th centuries with the emergence of romanticism and the cult of the individual. This period saw the rise of the idea of the artist as a genius whose works were the product of their own unique creativity and imagination. This idea was further reinforced by the rise of literary criticism, which focused on the interpretation and analysis of individual works and their authors. However, as Michel Foucault and other scholars have argued, the notion of authorship is not a universal or timeless concept, but rather a historically contingent and culturally specific one. Different societies and cultures have different understandings of authorship, and these have shifted over time in response to changes in technology, culture, and social values. As it stands now, authorship in its traditional form can hardly be applied in a context where automated collaborations provide more than 50% of the generated material. This is true for multiple art fields. Visual Arts (Mario Klingemann, Sofia Crespo, Memo Atken, Ooouch, etc.), Music (Dadabots, YACHT, HollyHerndon), Literature, etc. Very soon, this will also be true for Architecture......."

You can download the proceedings for free at the link below.

,

Deep Mining Authorship Considering the emerging field of architecture and artificial intelligence, it might be necessary to contemplate the remodeling of the concept of authorship entirely. The invention of authorship is a complex historical process that can be traced back to the emergence...

I just uploaded the introduction chapter of the "Neural Architecture" book to Researchgate....:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/379988429_This_Building_Does_Not_Exist_-_An_Attempt_at_a_Theory_of_Neural_Architecture

feel free to comment and share your thoughts.

Architecture and Artificial Intelligence.....
My lecture "Tectonics of the Latent Space", which I gave last fall at LTU, is up on YouTube.

Check it out below!

Architecture and AI: Tectonics of the Latent Space Join Lawrence Technological University's College of Architecture and Design on Tuesday, September 12th at 12:30pm ET for our first Fall 2023/24 Lunch and Lea...

Thank you for the great questions! Interview with PA, Parametric Architecture dot com:

"Interview with Matias del Campo on AI, computational design, and architectural creativity"

https://parametric-architecture.com/interview-with-matias-del-campo-on-ai-computational-design-and-architectural-creativity/

Thursday this week, I'll be giving a lecture on Diffusion models, their ontology and inherent opportunities for architecture design. Syracuse Univeristy School of Architecture, 5:30pm......join us if you happen to be around!.

In short, this is what its is going to be about......more or less:

In this lecture, Matias del Campo unfolds the captivating realm of AI-generated images, as articulated in his book, “Diffusions in Architecture”. The book serves as a compelling chronicle and speculative inquiry into the transformative impact of AI image generators on the architectural imagination, featuring contributions from six theorists and twenty architects.

Leveraging Ludwig Wittgenstein’s axiom, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world”, the lecture delves into the contemporary surge of natural language text-to-image applications like Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and Dall-E 2, revolutionizing the architectural landscape. This novel design tool has yielded a prolific output of extraordinary images and instigated theoretical explorations, hinting at the inception of a posthuman design methodology. The confluence of these factors marks a seismic shift in architecture, redefining the dynamic between human and machine in the creative process. The lecture navigates the transformative impact of large language models, exemplified by ChatGPT, which have rendered promptism and prompt engineering obsolete. It has made it feasible for even the most inexperienced user to come up with functional code and complex image prompts. All of this resulted in the proliferation of astonishing images, engendering a new epoch of design that blends human creativity with algorithmic intelligence. In doing so, diffusion models have emerged as a possible new design tool. Enabling architects to mine the multilayered, deep historical repositories of architectural knowledge for chimeras, capriccios, and mutants and encouraging architects to discover a new voice for the architecture of the 21st century.

Thursday April 4th, 5:30pm.

https://soa.syr.edu/live/events/1357-march-design-research-lecture-matias-del-Matias del Campo