D[3] – DATA, DREAMS & DIFFUSION:

Matias del Campo

2022-2023
M.Arch Graduates

An excursion into Architecture, Artificial Intelligence & Synthetic Imaginations

The aim of this studio is to apply the techniques learned in the seminar in the past semester, and to contribute to the ongoing discussion about AI and architecture with a project interrogating these novel methodologies. A cornucopia of architectural imaginations produced in a common effort between humans and artificial intelligence, which served as the preparation for the design in the thesis studio.

The title of the studio D[3] – Data, Dreams & Diffusion refers to the main computational methods behind Midjourney, Dalle-E 2, Disco Diffusion, etc. They are called “Diffusion Models”. The studio contains a small section about the technicalities of the models, but rather focuses on the immense contribution of the method to the architecture discipline in terms of its transformative power in practice and theory. Questions such as the ontology of the architecture emerging from diffusion models (“Can a neural network based on existing datasets create something genuinely new?”) The epistemology deduced from the results (“Now that I see the results of the diffusion models, does it change the way architecture is designed, conceived, and presented?”) are discussed with the projects created in the studio.