Computer game, online co-design session with 4 players, 14:31 min

Common'hood is a community simulation game offering a platform for collaboration and the collective reflection of the equitable growth of neighborhoods. The game confronts players with the challenges of precarity, inequality, and models of economic production in today’s cities.

Players are operating from the first-person perspective of a young girl who has lost her family and encounters a community of squatters occupying an abandoned factory. In the non-linear storyline, gamers need to figure out how to balance the needs of various stakeholders and use the post-apocalyptic scraps found in the factory to build a thriving new urban community.

The game is inspired by political and social dynamics that have seen a resurgence since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, such as mutual aid and solidarity. The hope is that some of the community management strategies deployed by the creative gamer community will seep back into reality, where the pre-pandemic status quo seems to have reinstated itself.

Jose Sanchez is an architect, game designer, and theorist living in Detroit, Michigan, where he teaches at Taubman College. Sanchez’s design studio Plethora Project has not only developed a successful and widely played game but is also a research project investigating the notion of the commons within architectural discourse. Sanchez has been part of a wave of architects coming of age in a time of parametric design, but he has developed his own approach, which he sets out in his book Architecture for the Commons: Participatory Systems in the Age of Platforms.

Computer game

Block'hood is a strategic city simulation game developed from an ecological perspective. The game challenges the notion of „waste“ by considering every element of a city as a potential resource. Through the design of games, complex real-life ecological dependencies can be tested and simulated and offer an opportunity to explore potential solutions.

Within the game, there are over 150 “blocks,” each with its own unique inputs (consumed resources) and outputs (produced resources). Players must manage a complex ecosystem and maintain an ecological balance. The game signifies a new approach towards discrete design and complexity, which is not governed by abstract algorithms but by the wisdom of the community of players, thus becoming a tool of participatory urbanism.

Based on a post-2008 scarcity mindset, rather than the exuberance of the digital architectural production of the 1990s, the game uses rectangular and blocky architectural elements. It is played from an axonometric view, where the player can zoom in to work on individual voxel-like elements or zoom out to have an overview of the complexity of the three-dimensional cityscape. 

Jose Sanchez is an architect, game designer, and theorist living in Detroit, Michigan, where he teaches at Taubman College. Sanchez’s design studio Plethora Project has not only developed a successful and widely played game but is also a research project investigating the notion of the commons within architectural discourse. Sanchez has been part of a wave of architects coming of age in a time of parametric design, but he has developed his own approach, which he sets out in his book Architecture for the Com­mons: Participatory Systems in the Age of Platforms.

Web-based application, NFT

The playable web-based game _Spaces transports visitors to a virtual cityscape that can be experienced both from an axonometric view (three-dimensional but without perspective) and from the first-person view as is common for games. Players navigate the colorful and animated cityscape that takes advantage of its natively digital format—featuring buildings and other elements that float and rotate in mid-air.

The project was also implemented on the blockchain as an NFT (non-fungible token), where decentralized distribution allows experimentation with ownership of digital architecture through "smart contracts."

iheartblob (Aleksandra Belitskaya, Ben James, and Shaun McCallum) is a mixed reality design studio and research collective with a strong focus on the architectural object and the role of new technologies in architecture.

Installation, Augmented Reality Experience

2MVD are presenting a site-specific augmented reality commission—created for three areas within the museum—that expands the exhibition space beyond the confines of the physical space of the hall.

The installation within the exhibition space itself creates a rupture in the floor and walls, where visitors can enter a virtual landscape. Another interactive piece featuring a swarm of soft shapes that float or can be pushed around is located just outside the exhibition entrance. The third installation is in the MAK Columned Main Hall and comprises a large-scale digital sculpture that mimics heavy stone, yet hovers weightlessly in the historical space. The project pushes the limits of augmented reality by placing entire landscapes and natural forms into interior spaces, challenging our notions of clear boundaries between the real and the virtual, and merging in- and outside. The organic shapes stand in clear contrast to the museum's geometric architectural features. Instead of referring to a particular landscape or being, they create their own computer-generated language of the natural.

In their work, 2MVD seek to illuminate the effects of digitalization on the perception of spaces and objects. To allow their installations to be viewed, 2MVD has developed the AR app afx-isi.

2MVD is the artistic collaboration between architects Valerie Messini and Damjan Minovski. Their work focuses on immersive technologies that bridge the physical and the digital.

Film, Installation, lava rocks, screen, 8:11 min

The short film Earth Mother, Sky Father is set in 2030 in an abandoned mine in Congo. Today, workers toil away in mines like these under inhumane conditions to extract raw materials that are exported to the West and processed for use in technological devices such as smartphones. In Kordae Jatafa Henry’s vision of the future, the mine and the area’s valuable resources belong to the people living there. The filmmaker presents a scenario where local culture is reintroduced to the industrial area and new meanings are created through traditional cultural elements, such as dance, performance, and ritual. The work is shown in an installation designed especially for the exhibition that uses a pile of earth as the base for the screening. This al-lows the film’s basic themes, i.e., people’s relationship to the Earth and the urge to shape and exploit its resources, to be made materially tangible in the exhibition space.

Kordae Jatafa Henry is an architect and filmmaker who explores the complex themes of mysticism and ritual, pop culture, new technologies, gender, and identity through music videos and short films.

VR experience, CNC milled terrain model, map projection, video, 2:55 min

For Abyssinian Cyber Vernaculus, Miriam Hillawi Abraham uses the medium of virtual reality to tell a version of the story of the Ethiopian city of Lalibela and its historic stone churches while challenging various patriarchal narratives.

Virtual reality allows visitors to experience different perspectives represented by avatars, and the designer uses this to show three different critical approaches to this historic UNESCO-protected architecture: The Western academic or white savior (represented by an Indiana Jones parody), the conservative Orthodox Christian Ethiopian, and the Hotep (pro-black but non-progressive cis man). In her research, Miriam Hillawi Abraham found powerful and influential women who have been forgotten by history. In the VR experience, a female character appears who is an amalgam of these historical figures and goddesses, creating an antithesis and alternative narrative to the patriarchal-hegemonic history. In a broader sense, Miriam Hillawi's work can be understood as a struggle against the active exclusion of African cultural history and artifacts from the architectural canon by opening up new stories and perspectives on historical heritage.

Miriam Hillawi Abraham is a multidisciplinary designer based in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. With a background in architecture, she works with digital media and spatial design to interrogate themes of equitable futurism, experimental conservation, and intersectionality.

3D printed resin, memory cards, and electronic components

In 2015, a series of highly publicized videos documented how the terroristic regime ISIS (now Islamic State) destroyed statues, buildings, and culturally significant sites in Iraq, including the Roman-period city of Hatra and Assyrian artifacts from Nineveh. For the series Material Speculation: ISIS, Morehshin Allahyari reconstructed twelve of these objects using 3D modeling and 3D printing. Enclosed in each of the 3D printed sculptures is a USB flash drive containing research such as images, maps, PDF files, and videos gathered on the artifacts and sites that have been destroyed.

In her lecture and performance Physical Tactics for Digital Colonialism (shown here in a video), the artist talks about how significant the artifacts became to her and how she developed a sense of needing to protect them. She articulates how different kinds of violence are being perpetrated. On the one hand, there is the direct brutal violence that has led to the objects' destruction. On the other, a more subtle, hidden violence carried out by Western technology companies that digitally appropriate and profit from historical object data without considering who that data should belong to and how it should be distributed. With the term digital colonialism, Allahyari thus criticizes Western companies' widespread practice of acting territorially and accumulatively in digital spaces.

Morehshin Allahyari is a New York-based Iranian-Kurdish artist who explores myths and historical themes using multimedia technologies such as 3D simulations, sculpture, and digital fabrication as tools to reinterpret them. In her work, she creates complex counter-narratives to the ongoing influence of Western technological colonialism.

Installation, Virtual-Reality-Experience

The Portal Galleries by Space Popular is a site-specific VR installation that showcases their research on the magic and mechanics of portals found in fiction. It is composed of over 1,000 portals and 23 archetypes—such as a door, a mirror, a crack in the floor, or a cave—taken from books, films, graphic novels, and games from the past 250 years.

While the internet is becoming more spatial, virtual worlds remain self-contained, offering no way to transfer avatars, assets, or content between different platforms. With this extensive project, the duo aims to compile an archive of previously unmapped virtual portals, thresholds, and transitions from popular media that can serve as a resource for designers and builders of a connected metaverse. To that end, they are presenting a manifesto for the future of portals and virtual travel titled The Fabric of Civic Teleportation, which outlines the key qualities needed to create a meaningful, fair, and civic infrastructure for the Immersive Internet.

Space Popular (Lara Lesmes and Fredrik Hellberg) is a research-driven art, design, and media studio that explores the future of spatial experience.

Installation, 3D prints

The View is a new project by Genevieve Goffman developed specifically for this exhibition. The sculptural installation addresses the turn of the century in Vienna and the rise of modernism. Inspired by the writings of—and controversy surrounding—Adolf Loos, the work explores the idea of "The Architect" as a figure fighting to ideologically define both the present and the future through modern architecture. The narration draws on the influence that Loos had on Red Vienna as well as the contrast between the architect's interior and exterior spaces, suggesting a vast difference between the private and the public.

In The View, two miniature façades with balconies are juxtaposed on a large pedestal. One balcony is occupied—in reference to Loos—by a male figure gazing into the distance at a world yet to be designed. The interior exudes authority with the use of hardwood, marble, and ornate furniture. The other balcony—quoting the residential buildings of Red Vienna—is occupied by a female figure looking into an uncertain future with a sense of optimism and excitement. As architect and theoretician Beatriz Colomina writes in Sexuality and Space (1992): "Architecture is not simply a platform that accommodates the viewing subject. It is a viewing mechanism that produces the subject. It precedes and frames its occupant."

Goffman works with detailed digital 3D models, which she then presents in miniature 3D prints, often combined with other materials and unexpected elements. For this display, she created a custom base for the two balconies, which becomes part of the work itself. A row of windows are mounted on the pedestal, making it look like a palace or a baroque state building and symbolically creating the basis for the questions of modernity that "sit" on it.

Genevieve Goffman is a New York City-based artist whose work focuses on the history of architecture, internet aesthetics, fantasy, lore, and narrative worldbuilding. She often uses architecture as an allegory and a means to address deeper political issues.

Digital renderings, CGI

With Neo-Chemosphere (2021), Charlotte Taylor and Anthony Authié (ZYVA Studio) have designed a fictitious home that pays homage to John Lautner's Chemosphere House (Los Angeles, 1960).

In response to the Covid-19 crisis and climate change, the two designers envisioned a post-anthropocentric world where their house is staged on a pink fictional coast somewhere along Marseille's Calanques, delivering a contemporary commentary on housing as an escape from society and a way to reconnect with nature. Inspired by the original „Neo-Chemosphere" the design is an octagonal structure 14 meters in diameter placed on a concrete pillar stuck between rocks. The interior is entirely covered with white resin creating a strong contrast to the pink environment. Balancing between modernist and sci-fi, the architectural fiction is also a tribute to the cinematographic visual effects that emerged in the mid-1970s as the first forms of an exaggerated future.

Founded by Anthony Authié and based in Paris and Marseille, ZYVA Studio is interested in the inconsistencies of the design discipline. Using saturated colors, trans-design, and hybrid architecture, Authié's designs embrace stylistic fractures, often filtered through the prism of subcultures.

Studio Charlotte Taylor creates interiors and spaces that blend the sculptural with the practical, the futuristic with comfort. Exploring the boundaries between digital and the physical, the studio utilizes ultra-realistic visual renders to reimagine real-world interiors.

Project in collaboration with ZYVA Studio
Images by ZYVA Studio

More works in the show:

Riccardo Fornoni × Charlotte Taylor, Villa Saraceni, 2020
Nicholas Préaud × Charlotte Taylor, Casa Atibaia, 2020
Sarah Castay × Charlotte Taylor, Ryokan House, 2023
Alba de la Fuente × Charlotte Taylor, The Residency, 2020
Evoquelab × Charlotte Taylor, Iceland House, 2021
Charlotte Taylor, Charlotte's House, 2022

Digital renderings, CGI

Imagined and designed during lockdown, this series of escapist landscapes features abandoned tennis courts overgrown with lush blooms and explores the intersection of impossibility and reality, fusing nature and the digital world.

Berlin-based since 2012 and operating worldwide, Studio Mary Lennox specializes in floral styling, botanical design, and botanical consulting, working on a variety of projects across a range of disciplines. Founded by Ruby Barber, Studio Mary Lennox is named after the protagonist in Frances Hodgson Burnett's novel The Secret Garden.

Digital renderings, CGI

No Use For A Name is an ongoing series of personal artworks exploring the new directions of set design, different lighting, and material studies.

More works in the show:

formundrausch, No Use For A Name - Hidden Hallway, 2020
formundrausch, Greyscaled 1, 2022
formundrausch, Greyscaled 2, 2022

Photographs, renderings

Salzburg-based Studio Precht (Chris and Fei Tang Precht) is known for its thoughtful and experimental projects that are modular in design and created using timber. Their viral Instagram visualizations of buildings in untouched nature have a fantastical quality reminiscent of dreamscapes. One of the designs that the practicing architects have rea- lized is the Bert treehouse.

Consisting of prefabricated parts that can be assembled on site, Bert is a modular system that allows for customization to meet clients' specific needs. The design was inspired by the forest. The building resembles a tree trunk connected to the ground on a minimal footprint, and the interior is kept dark to create a cozy atmosphere, with large windows providing views of the surrounding nature. Leaf-like timber shingles on the façade help the structure to blend in with its natural surroundings.

Bert was conceptualized as a tiny home but can also be arranged in larger configurations to create summerhouses, apartment buildings, hotels, or urban developments. It is—at least, in theory—a flexible, modular building system that can grow taller and wider throughout its lifespan through the addition of new modules.

Renderings, Videos

For The Farmhouse, Studio Precht developed a modular building system that redefines the relationship between people and their food, and creates a building that innovatively connects urban architecture with agriculture. The project proposes a solution to long food supply chains and reduces the footprint of planted areas by condensing agriculture into a vertical farm within a residential building.

"The Farmhouse is designed to run on an organic lifecycle that uses byproducts from within the structure. Buildings already generate a large amount of heat, which can be reused to grow nutritious plants such as potatoes and beans. A water-treatment system filters rain- and gray water, enriches it with nutrients, and cycles it back to the greenhouses. Food waste can be collected locally in the building's basement, turned into compost, and reused as fertilizer.

The concept for the building envisions a fully modular system that can be prefabricated on site and delivered flat-packed, reducing construction time and impact on the immediate neighborhood. The structure is based on a traditional A-frame system and is connected to a diagrid that transfers loads through the building. Each wall of the frame consists of three layers: an inside layer with finishes, electricity, and pipes; a middle layer comprising the structure and insulation; and an outside layer with gardening elements and a water supply.

The Farmhouse is designed to reconnect people with the process of growing their own food. The inspiration for this project comes from Chris and Fei Tang Precht's first-hand experience of living and working in the Austrian mountains.

Animation, NFT, 15:11 min

Quantum Express by Alexis Christodoulou combines different scenarios and fictional landscapes to tell a visual story that viewers experience as if on a train ride. The scenes showcase varying interior settings—a formal dinner wagon, a spa, or bedroom compartment—with views of the passing landscapes from Tuscan fields to calm lakes and mountainous panoramas, evoking a sense of quantum time travel with ease.

Informed by the post-pandemic era, when we no longer move so freely in our material world, the project aims to explore a new sense of movement within ourselves. It considers the same question we have been pondering for thousands of years: Do we move through space and time or do they move through us?

The series with ontological titles such as Energy, Distance, Space, Time, and Probability is also available as an NFT collection.

Alexis Christodoulou is a self-taught 3D artist from Cape Town (South Africa), who is currently based in Amsterdam. A pioneer of the render movement, he simulates images without any claim to reality, often using geometric shapes and minimal surrealism. With a background in advertising and copywriting, he worked in an agency for several years before he began exploring 3D rendering.

Digital artwork, video, 1:06 min

In July 2018, Reisinger first posted a digital 3D rendering of the fictional Hortensia Chair—inspired by soft falling hydrangea petals—on Instagram, where it quickly became a viral sensation and part of the first wave of NFT designs. After multiple requests, Reisinger searched for months for a cooperation partner who could help turn his digital design into a physical object. It was considered impossible to produce the chair in physical reality. Together with textile designer Júlia Esqué and the manufacturer Moooi, Reisinger found a way to transform the "impossible" design into a real-life product, first released as a limited edition, now adapted for serial production.

With his hyper-real pastel renderings—and, more recently, AI-based "takeovers" of various major European cities—Andrés Reisinger has rapidly gained international recognition. Originally from Buenos Aires and now based in Barcelona, the designer has always been fascinated by the idea of the digital realm as an extension of reality. His works are known for their elaborate approach that blends real and fictional worlds.

Júlia Esqué is a product designer from Barcelona. She spent her early career working between Barcelona and New York before establishing herself as an independent designer in 2019. Her projects are based on the experience of research and hands-on making.

Wood, fabric, sculpted foam, limited edition of 15 pieces

The Hortensia Chair is a sculptural functional seat designed to evoke the feeling of sitting in a blooming flower. The structure is crafted from wood, covered in medium density sculpted foam, upholstered with colored polyester fabric, and topped with a specifically designed Petal System. It is made up of 20,000 pink fabric petals that have been clustered together into distinct modules and are inspired by the hydrangea flower that the chair is named after.

Design: Andrés Reisinger
Textile Design: Júlia Esqué
Realization: Moooi

Midjourney images, magazines, video 9:00 min

Symbiotic House is a project catalyzed by Lee Pivnik in 2022 to research and develop adaptive architectural solutions to Miami's environmental precarity, and to conceptualize and design a "multi-use space for multi-species survival."

The community-oriented project is a platform for research aiming to reimagine a collectively designed building as a potential site for climate care. Using Midjourney AI software that generates images from text, Pivnik visualizes the textural prompts of participants to create fantastical images that are ultimately meant to catalyze a movement towards regenerative design.

Symbiotic House creates a blueprint for a self-initiated project, building on crowdsourced knowledge, expertise, and imagination rather than waiting for administrative or governmental structures to solve urgent issues.

The project's intended outcome is to design and build a physical structure that functions as a community center and artist residency, while using experimental, sustainable building methods to create an active hub for offsetting carbon emissions, rewilding landscape, and supporting biodiversity.

Lee Pivnik is an artist and founder of the Institute of Queer Ecology (IQECO), an ever-evolving collaborative community that seeks to bring peripheral solutions to environmental degradation to the forefront of public consciousness.

Installation, Midjourney images, oil paintings

For My Mid Journey Trash Pile (2022), Leah Wulfman used the AI software Midjourney to generate images of buildings made from various types of trash. The designer entered prompts such as “water towers,” “paper mills,” and “grain elevators” combined with natural elements (rivers, waterfalls, and clouds), resulting in an aesthetic that falls somewhere between the industrial and the artisanal.

The building materials—waste plastic and scrap metal as well as dirt—seem an unusual choice: Piles of trash are usually removed from view, rejects of consumerism that are buried or thrown into the sea. In this project, the trash piles are given new meaning as valuable building materials, thus questioning the status of what we deem “trash” and encouraging the recycling and reuse of materials.

Wulfman commissioned an oil painting factory in a village in China—known for producing replicas of master painters—to bring five of the images to life with the Impressionist-style painter Ou Wen, who is trained on the work of Monet. The five paintings are displayed on a large, curved wallpaper showing the thousands of various trash piles created by the Midjourney algorithm. The project becomes a meditation on contemporary architectural production’s materiality, delivery chains, and waste. By using trash to put into question ideas of waste and value, Wulfman generates a trans aesthetics and politics, where buildings are freed from associations of master canons and singular authorship.

Leah Wulfman is a Carrier Bag architect, educator, game designer, digital puppeteer, and occasional writer. A trained architect, Wulfman has been assembling hybrid virtual and physical spaces in order to prototype new relationships to technology and nature, as well as challenge normative ideologies so often reinforced by technology and architecture.

Model, Midjourney images, AIBO7 robots

The Doghouse installation is a large scale physical model created out of 2D images generated using Midjourney. The resulting structure becomes a visual representation of the mathematical processes underlying its creation. The Sony AIBO7 robots that inhabit the 3D Doghouse model add a playful and interactive element to the installation. They move and interact both with each other and their environment, resulting in a constantly changing scenography. The robots’ perspective—their machine vision—is transmitted via a livestream, taking the installation’s virtual space beyond the confines of the museum.

The large-scale print—Mosaik—that accompanies the 3D model looks like a gradient from a distance, but a closer look reveals that it comprises thousands of images generated by SPAN using various image generators. Through the use of 3D modeling, robotics, and artificial intelligence imaging, the installation becomes a visual representation of the various processes and technologies that underlie contemporary computer-based architectural production.

SPAN (Matias del Campo and Sandra Manninger) is a team of architects from Vienna, Austria, who have been working with new technologies and artificial intelligence since the 1990s. Both teach architecture at the Taubman College, University of Michigan.

Film, 4:30 min

Alisa Andrasek's film Ecocity imagines the future of cities driven by advanced technologies such as AI-powered combinatorics and computational physics simulations. Andrasek is interested in questions of complexity, and her work deals with how novel design visions can propel cultural and social imagination as well as support the evolution of cities. Thinking beyond the anthropocentric, her vision of the future operates on a planetary scale, with a micro-to-macro approach for the health and support of human and non-human forms of life.

Alisa Andrasek is working on the convergence of design, computer science, and exponential technologies. She is the founder of Biothing and AIARCH, a design synthesis platform at the intersection of the physical and the digital, for integrative solutions in the built environment as an ecology of complex systems.

HD-Video, 3D-Animation, 4 Channel Surround Sound, 12:45 min

Domestic robotic appliances, such as vacuum cleaners, depend on an AI-trained computer vision system to navigate their environment. In order to recognize and understand the spaces, objects, and beings that it encounters, the robot needs to learn about its future environment. The systems are trained on large datasets of 3D files that are virtually assembled into standardized model homes.

Yet what is banal to the human mind is still challenging for autonomous systems, which rely on the available datasets for input. Domestic environments tend to be filled with personal and idiosyncratic objects while the algorithms learn from idealized model homes. Simone C. Niquille explores this contradiction and the humorous mislabeling of objects, revealing the cultural bias in the training data that is usually sealed within technological objects.

Aesthetically, the video explores computer vision and ren- dering techniques. It uses various filters and render layers, such as z-depth, a render channel usually used to calcu- late the depth of an image. Parts of the video are filtered through AI algorithms, which help to make a quick ren- der less grainy and more readable to the human eye, while leaving strange artifacts such as blurs and smears.

Simone C. Niquille (CH, NL) is an Amsterdam-based designer and scientist. Her agency /technoflesh investigates the representation of identity & the digitisation of biomass in the networked space of appearance.