Circular Kyoto – Flows
During the Atelier Huang Fall Semester 2022 students focused on a particular shokunin (artisan) and their craft, which ranged from kaiseki (seasonal, traditional cuisine), wagashi (Japanese confections), sake (Japanese alcohol), paper products (Karakami), kyo-shikki (lacquerware),to tatami and architectural parts. The analysis of the different flows undermining the making of the product, from material sourcing to (…)
Circular Kyoto
Atelier Huang Fall 2022 Since its glory days as the capital of Japan (794 AD), Kyoto has managed to cultivate a flourishing tradition of artisanship (Shokunin) for over 1200 years. Yet with the recent economic downturn and changing habits of a new generation, artisanship in Kyoto is facing a noticeable decline. In this experimental studio, (…)
Circular Gangbuk
Atelier Huang Spring 2022 The projects and architectural interventions of this studio focused on Sewoon Makercity, a strangely suspended, brutalist megastructure in Gangbuk, Seoul. We examined the potential of Sewoon as a catalyst for Gangbuk’s transition to a future, net zero circular economy. Historically, Sewoon has been going through several stages of development. On a (…)
Gangnam Living Blocks
Atelier Huang Fall 2021 Gangnam District, the newest city center of Seoul, South Korea which has drawn attention internationally due to the worldwide K-Pop song “Gangnam Style” is the site and field of experimentation. With a grid network – superblocks with a division of smaller urban blocks of various scaled buildings – the urban organization (…)
Virtual Parliament
Atelier Huang Spring 2021 On December 11, 2020, the Swiss Parliament in Berne urgently accepted an initiative to allow congress members (Nationalrat/Conseil national) to vote remotely due to COVID-19, and a few days later, Sophie Michaud Gigon, the Green Party Representative from the Canton Vaud, became the first parliament member in Swiss history to cast (…)
Design Brain
Imagined as an ever-shifting spatial interface revealing the innermost dreams of an artificial machine pre-occupied by possible resilient futures of the Swiss refuge, “Design Brain” is a showcase of the outcome in the design research studio conducted at EPFL with master students in Spring 2020 called Refuge 2.0 – Artificial Swissness. In the studio, machine (…)
Zürich Prints
Models digitally printed by students as one of the final steps in the artificial design research process with GAN in Zürich. https://deepcityzurich.wordpress.com/ Keywords: GAN, Artificial Design, Zürichness, Housing, 3D Print Students: Bryan Parvex, Maylis Pillet, Ebrahim Rahmani, Marilyn Brühlmann, Andrea Calzoralo, Lara Giorla, Beatriz Menéndez Ontañón, Antoine Prat, Ricky Lee, Valérie Ovadia, Basile Sordet, Yonah (…)
Artificial Zürichness – Final Review
Throughout the semester we reflected on what characterizes Zürich, what is Zürichness and if arriving at this solution through machine learning (and Generative Adversarial Networks – GANs) makes the result artificial. Does artificial intelligence create artificial architecture? In the final review, the individual projects resulting from the study were reviewed by a jury composed of (…)
Giro – Deep Façade
This project was developed in the context of the “Artificial Zurichness” research. Deep Learning and Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) were deployed as a project tool to capture and maintain the essence (genius loci) of a specific site – Zürich – while modifying the type of architecture through additions or variants. From here, a GAN image (…)
To Meditate – Virtual Zen Garden
Meditation is a practice where an individual uses a technique – such as mindfulness or focusing the mind on a particular object, thought, or activity – to train attention and awareness, and achieve a mentally clear and emotionally calm and stable state. In a global pandemic, various things can cause mental stress, anxiety and the (…)
Sampling Zürich
In this research experiment, the GAN algorithm serves as a new mode of vision, bypassing the preconceptions of the human designer in order to reveal an unbiased pool of ideas. The algorithm zeroes in on details otherwise unnoticed to generate new interpretations. The curation of the input data set and the critical analysis of the (…)
Augmented Home
The recent outbreak of global pandemics has accelerated the virtualization of our everyday life and made humans realize how much they can do without leaving the confinements of their connected homes: participating in remote meetings, co-designing over distance, orchestrating a symphony over zoom, singing in a virtual choir, shopping for essentials and non-essentials, dancing and (…)