Studio MA2 (Huang)

AR-402(k) / 12 credits

Teacher: Huang Jeffrey

Language: French/English

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Résumé

The studio examines the effects of artificial intelligence on architecture and cities. Generative tools are approached as cultural and political instruments, shaping design through data grounded in territory, economy, identity, imagery, and ecology.

Contenu

The studio investigates how architecture can become a key element in the evolution of the sentient city: an urban environment where computational systems and generative AI are no longer accessed through discrete devices, but diffused across the urban fabric, embedded in intersections, facades, transit networks, and domestic spaces.

Building on the Fall semester's investigations into generative design workflows, vibecoding, and LLM-assisted spatial modeling and conceptualization, students will explore how cities think and feel, and use this as a basis for developing context-specific, responsive spatial forms.

The cities studied in the first semester will serve as living laboratories, offering both real and speculative contexts in which to imagine new Peripheral Typologies. These will operate as nodes in a broader cognitive urban system. If the first studio focused on designing the "urban brain," this studio will address the organs, nervous systems, and distributed sensors that contribute to the city's underlying pulse, its patterns, rhythms, and emergent behaviors.

At the core of the studio lies a question: how can future architectures begin to sense and respond not only for human users, but with and through machines? Beginning with architectural elements, traditional components such as balconies, corridors, doors, pathways, ceilings, and patios, studentsl develop grounded, contextual interventions that allow intelligence to act publicly and legibly. They will consider questions such as: What are the aesthetics of data? How can cognition be spatialized? How might flows of sensing, computation, and action take on physical and cultural meaning in the city? What if a city begins to dream? What would those dreams be, and what roles would citizens play in them?

The goals of the studio are threefold: (1) to critically deploy LLMs and computational tools to design architectural elements and interventions that participate in emergent urban intelligence systems; (2) to develop new types of distributed civic, peripheral typologies that can react and respond within a sentient urban fabric; and (3) to articulate an architectural language for urban sentience, forms that embody the city's perceptual and cognitive capacities.

This intensive studio will make use of advanced digital tools. Experimental and remote LLMs and MCP agents for spatial modeling will be used in exploratory ways. A range of software, scripts, and plugins for mapping and open geodata analysis (including Rhino & Grasshopper, QGIS) will support successive phases of the design process.

No prior programming or software knowledge is required, but curiosity and strong motivation to learn are essential.

 

Mots-clés

  • Architectural elements
  • New Typologies
  • Data-driven design
  • Artificial intelligence
  • Vibecoding
  • Urban Design

Acquis de formation

A la fin de ce cours l'étudiant doit être capable de:

Compétences transversales

  • Réaliser et présenter un poster.
  • Recueillir des données.
  • Faire une présentation orale.
  • Faire preuve d'esprit critique
  • Faire preuve d'inventivité

Méthode d'évaluation

Projects will be reviewed and assessed based on:

(1) their conceptual strength and innovation,

(2) the coherence and resolution of their architectural translation,

(3) their representative clarity and expressive power, and

(4) the persuasiveness of their communication, both orally, and through the physical and digital artifacts.

 

Encadrement

Office hours Oui
Assistants Oui
Forum électronique Non

Ressources

Bibliographie

  1. Huang, Jeffrey, Mikhael Johanes, Frederick Chando Kim, Christina Doumpioti, and Georg-Christoph Holz. On GANs, NLP and Architecture: Combining Human and Machine Intelligences for the Generation and Evaluation of Meaningful Designs. Technology | Architecture + Design 5, no. 2 (2021): 207-224. https://doi.org/10.1080/24751448.2021.1967060.
  2. Huang, Jeffrey, Dieter Dietz, Laura Trazic, and Korinna Zinovia Weber, eds. Transcalar Prospects in Climate Crisis: Architectural Research in re/Action. Zurich: Lars Müller Publishers, 2024.
  3. Bender, Emily M., Timnit Gebru, Angelina McMillan-Major, and Margaret Mitchell. On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? In Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT '21),  610-623. New York: ACM, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1145/3442188.3445922.
  4. Carpo, Mario. Beyond Digital: Design and Automation at the End of Modernity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2023.
  5. Crawford, Kate. Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021.
  6. Del Campo, Matias, Stefan Manninger, and Andre Carlson. Archiitectural Hallucinations: Diffusion Models and New Aesthetics. International Journal of Architectural Computing 20, no. 4 (2022): 493-509. https://doi.org/10.1177/14780771221135036.
  7. Goodfellow, Ian, Jean Pouget-Abadie, Mehdi Mirza, et al. Generative Adversarial Nets. In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 27 (NeurIPS 2014). https://papers.nips.cc/paper/2014/hash/5ca3e9b122f61f8f06494c97b1afccf3-Abstract.html.
  8. Mattern, Shannon. A City Is Not a Computer: Other Urban Intelligences. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021.
  9. Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. New York: PublicAffairs, 2019.

Ressources en bibliothèque

Sites web

In the programs

  • Semester: Spring
  • Exam form: During the semester (summer session)
  • Subject examined: Studio MA2 (Huang)
  • Courses: 2 Hour(s) per week x 14 weeks
  • Project: 4 Hour(s) per week x 14 weeks
  • Type: mandatory
  • Semester: Spring
  • Exam form: During the semester (summer session)
  • Subject examined: Studio MA2 (Huang)
  • Courses: 2 Hour(s) per week x 14 weeks
  • Project: 4 Hour(s) per week x 14 weeks
  • Type: mandatory
  • Semester: Spring
  • Exam form: During the semester (summer session)
  • Subject examined: Studio MA2 (Huang)
  • Courses: 2 Hour(s) per week x 14 weeks
  • Project: 4 Hour(s) per week x 14 weeks
  • Type: optional

Reference week

Monday, 8h - 10h: Lecture

Monday, 10h - 12h: Project, labs, other

Monday, 13h - 18h: Project, labs, other

Tuesday, 8h - 12h: Project, labs, other

Tuesday, 15h - 18h: Project, labs, other

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