| The Institute of Artificial Intelligence Education | Barcelona, Spain | Unit 21 | 2024 austin.mcgrath.22@ucl.ac.uk |
The Institute is an avant-garde approach to participatory design processes. Conceived as a hyper-contextual latent space, the project harnesses the voices of the very visitors that flock to Gaudí’s renowned Sagrada Familia basilica and its adjacent park – a verdant oasis that offers respite from the Barcelona sun pre- and post-visit.
Audaciously sited at the periphery of this iconic precinct, much like the onsite workers’ school, the building emerges from a novel methodology. By scraping the web for tourists’ whispers, a corpus of vernacular experiences is synthesised into an architectural form via machine learning. Through backpropagation, an iterative dialogue is enacted between algorithm, visitor, and architect – a tripartite collaborative model where each agent is regarded as an equal partner. The culminating artifact is a 512 x 512 pixel visualisation that immerses the viewer in an experiential experience. Within this simulated latent space, one witnesses the designer’s authorship, the tourists’ spoken word, and the machinic processes that choreographed their integration. This body of speculative work charts new frontiers for AI-augmented, crowdsourced placemaking.
Latent Samples of the Institute
The video unveils the institute’s hyper-contextual latent space, where whispers of past tourists linger, shaping the proposed building. Visitors’ transient presence sculpts the urban fabric, their words breathing life into the architecture.
Model of Spoken Word
The model depicts tourist site usage via structure heights indicating word volume spoken per area. YouTube vlog transcripts captured visitors’ experiences, informing the architectural intervention.
Latent Samples
This video explores how sampling a latent space can be used as a design tool to refine a design as opposed to a traditional design tool.
Hyper-Contextual Latent Space
The model depicts a Hyper-Contextual Latent Space shaped by tourists’ whispered comments on-site. Their whispers were gathered by transcribing location-tagged YouTube vlogs, capturing transient experiences that informed the architectural intervention.
Orthographic Drawing
To turn an image into a 3D space, orthographic drawings make up the traditional tool for an architect. How can we design with orthographic drawings while using a latent workflow?