Paper short abstract

Architectural anthropology presupposes the space of the artificial as a human-machine creative symbiosis. This complex coupling between embodied living in and disembodied designing of buildings is explored via the uncanny 3D-printed housing forms as imagined by 3D generative adversarial networks.

Paper long abstract

“Displaced from artifice into the artificial, architecture became a technological extension of the body that is neither natural nor cultural. Modern architecture is the space of the artificial” [Wigley 1991]. From architecture as the built extension of the anthropological body, to architecture as the unbuilt virtual world extending the mind into a reality that is neither less real nor less meaningful than physical buildings [Chalmers 2022], the human-machine creative symbiosis is very much also a human-architecture creative symbiosis. This symbiotic coupling between Anthropology and Architecture [Oliver 1979], once even alluded by Winston Churchill when he said that "we shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us", has led to a new subfield -- Architectural Anthropology [Stender 2017]. The paper takes such an interdisciplinary attitude to explore the anthropological (or archaeological) reconstruction of lived spaces and the architectural construction (or deconstruction) of to-be-lived spaces as staged at the current exhibition “Eye Rise: Urbanscapes Between Human and Machine” [The Arts House 2022]. Unlike traditional artistic tools, the series of 3D-printed high-rise architectural forms sampled from the latent space of the 3D-GAN-Housing project illustrates an uncanny disembodied human-machine symbiosis. Indeed, “the house is a machine for living in” [Corbusier 1923], but more so -- “The house is a living machine for learning with”.

(Link to 3D-GAN latent walk video at shorturl.at/cqBO1)

(Link to 3D-printed models at shorturl.at/juTW9)

(Link to main exhibition at shorturl.at/imoAM)