The Tacheles Pleasure Platz | Berlin, Germany | Unit 21 | 2025

This project develops a methodology that utilises self-organising maps (SOMs), an unsupervised machine learning technique, to uncover data patterns that resist binary categorisation. Rather than isolating these peripheral clusters, the methodology brings them into active relation with normative data, rearticulating the entangled field of information into new spatial and architectural expressions. Embracing AI’s non-deterministic nature, it produces emergent outcomes that entangle — rather than reject — convention, recontextualising normativity to amplify the non-normative. In doing so, it inverts the structure of data itself, repurposing it to generate architectures that resist determinism and embrace ambiguity. Situated in Mitte, on the contested site of the former Kunsthaus Tacheles, the project proposes an alternative to privatised urban development. Berlin has long been a city of alternative culture and politcs — a space of friction between counterculture and capital. Developed through the FANDEMQAC framework (fully automated neo-decadent ecophilic metamodern queer anarcho-communism) the methodology is rooted in queerness and non-linearity.

The Nook An interstitial outcome of determined disorder. This space emerges from subverted and translated data, forming a peripheral island.

The SOM-ified Plan The cyclical and iterative SOM methodology follows a sequence of multi-modal data translations. Data is first translated from drawing to model. Information is then extracted through drawing, which is subsequently SOM-ified.

The Smoke House At the confluence of three programmatic prompts: intimacy, kitchen, and play, the Smoke House emerges. Primarily a space for food preservation, it also becomes a setting in which to lose oneself in the haze or indulge in illicit affairs.

The Corrupt Section The project remains in constant conflict between architectural practice and a subverted methodology. The drawing becomes an amalgam of interferential data translations, incompatible with sterilisation in traditional architectural production..

The Lantern The most queer space in relation to the subversion of architectural data, the Lantern is a translation of each phase in the design process, with each iteration referencing the translations that preceded it.