Towards a ‘Non-Universal’ Architecture: Designing with Others through Gestures (1:1 Scale) | Barcelona, Spain | Unit 21 | 2024
ioana.drogeanu.18@ucl.ac.uk
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The project highlights the collaborative potential of digital tools in creating deeply personal and culturally resonant architectural experiences by integrating intangible cultural heritage into tangible forms. By tracing Spanish cultural gestures at a 1:1 scale in VR, we embed personal traces directly into architectural elements. Co-authorship with users and ML algorithms allow for a collaborative design process, where gestures become indexical signs, linking the space to its community. Through workshops, gestures are transformed into recognisable surfaces, and variations based on human body dimensions are generated with a 3D-DCGAN, creating a rich dataset of architectural fragments.

The structures are organised using SOMs and positioned using Python scripts that align the gestural meshes based on their timelines in space. The result is a series of community spaces like playgrounds, cafe-hubs and performance areas that reflect the rhythms and dimensions of their users. This design process challenges the notion of buildings as static entities and instead portrays them as living, breathing extensions of human expression, shaped and continuously reshaped by the community.    

Tracing Gestures in VR – 1:1 Scale
Spanish cultural gestures are captured in VR at a life-size scale, and human body size variations are generated for the 3D DCGAN dataset.
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A Taxonomy of Gestures – 3D DCGAN Training
Interpolations of the original gesture-based surfaces are generated and organised based on the established categories and dimensions using SOMs.
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Rhythms of Gestures – Fragment Structures
The fragments that are later going to be filtered and carefully chosen for each of the buildings are now generated using Python and GH scripts based on the rhythms and timelines of the gestures.

From Fragments to Buildings – A Co-authored Process
Depending on the demographics and the rhythms of the activities on each site the filtered fragments are organised and a feedback mechanism where the architect and the community participate all together in the final stage is orchestrated in VR.


Towards a ‘Non-Universal’ Architecture – Community spaces