Théorie et critique du projet BA6 (Huang)

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.