2024.0630

Microsoft Designer: a single-family home in a parametric and art deco style

Adobe Firefly

DALL-E

Overall some weird looking creations requiring the bare minimum of input (and bare minimum of thought, even with iterations!), definitely not something I could've sketched out myself in the same span of time (a few seconds), but very cool for tools that were widely non-existent just about two years ago. It may be the lack of entourage in the renders, but there's something eerily uncanny about the images themselves that I can't put my finger on, and there's a kind of plastic-y quality to the renders that seems pretty common among many of the free generators, a certain quality that's difficult to describe, but once you've seen enough, you know it's AI generated.

2024.0629

I think there may have been a time in my distant past where I imagined I'd be able to say something and a computer would produce it with some level of coherence and accuracy. The ideal machine might be something like the protein re-sequencer featured in Star Trek: Enterprise which accepts a voice command and materializes a food or drink of choice along with the requisite dishes, glasses and/or silverware. There is no hint as to the inputs required other than spoken thoughts; things then simply appear. I think that same magic is replicated with today's prompt-based AI generators. Here are two results of my ongoing trials of prompt-based AI-generated architectural renders, the first generated by Microsoft Designer and the second by DALL-E. While I don't know the real differences between how these two services generate such images, they're nonetheless powerful tools for design brainstorming and rapid ideation of a very unrefined ideas, and they will only get better. I like to think of them as the digital equivalent of a napkin sketch. A few more weird ones are forthcoming.

I don't recall the exact prompt for this, but I have a thing for elevating the artificial in the natural - imagining either ancient or futuristic architecture in the context of what's essentially a natural void. It could be partially related to the romanticization of ruins in 18th/19th century painting that I'm drawn to for the suggestion of perseverance, possibility or opportunity in adversity, but this type of imagery, gargantuan built structures (though seemingly unpopulated), in an undeveloped setting is blatantly filled not with possibility but actual accomplishment and achievement. Where the romanticization of ruins is, as I've come to understand now, spiritually negative - inspiring feelings of melancholy and longing for some idealized past and maybe even a sense of nihilism or pointlessness with regard to progress and life (which, maybe not surprisingly, I sometimes think about whenever I see some Postmodern and Deconstructivist work). These generated images (I like to think) project the present, presence, the start of something, a new beginning, growth. These are intended to be spiritually positive. The positive in the imagery is the thing in the center, the built, the artificial, the man-made, the aspirational, the idealized and planned future, the arduous upward movement despite struggle and not because of struggle. Here, the natural is the void, the zero, the world being left behind, the ruin still standing and in a state of decay, a past not forgotten, but built up on. That is the spirit of the kind of architecture, the kind of design, I'd rather pursue.

A midwestern landscape painted by Caspar David Friedrich with a monolithic architectural enigma in the middle of it.