Archinect - News

This architect crafts detailed illustrations of the hotel rooms she stays in

2022-04-01T17:22:00-04:00

Architect Kei Endo has a fascinating hobby: While traveling, she measures and sketches her hotel rooms, including the furniture and objects within them, in great detail……draws them up with a Rapidograph……and renders them in watercolor.

Endo, a graduate out of the Tokyo University of the Arts with experience as a practicing architect, currently works at an environmental color planning office. Her work as an illustrator has gained acclaim, though, as she’s produced an array of incredibly detailed drawings of the hotel rooms she visits.

Endo’s work can be viewed on her Twitter and Instagram. She also uploads videos of her illustrating process on her YouTube channel “Draw with KEI”.

Video via Draw with KEI on YouTube

This AI converts simple sketches into photorealistic landscapes—and architecture will be next

2019-03-20T15:10:00-04:00

Today at Nvidia GTC 2019, the company unveiled a stunning image creator. Using generative adversarial networks, users of the software are with just a few clicks able to sketch images that are nearly photorealistic. The software will instantly turn a couple of lines into a gorgeous mountaintop sunset. This is MS Paint for the AI age.

The GauGAN image creation system Nvidia presented this week is an impressive foreshadowing of AI's rapid advancement into creative fields, like art and architecture—and a frightening example of the increasing ease of producing (nearly) photorealistic inauthentic imagery.

Screenshot of the GauGAN app. Image: Nvidia.

The possibilities of this crude demo tool for future, more sophisticated architectural application are hauntingly plentiful, and the company already hints at exactly that in its announcement: "GauGAN could offer a powerful tool for creating virtual worlds to everyone from architects and urban planners to landscape designers and game developers. With an AI that understands how the real world looks, these professionals could better prototype ideas and make rapid changes to a synthetic scene."

Demonstration of Nvidia's GauGAN system. Video via Nvidia on YouTube.

Since neural networks generate creations based on the set of images they have been trained on, will the creative r...

How do humans perceive the built environment in outer space?

2014-07-10T14:43:00-04:00

I put out a call via twitter and facebook for quick drawings of the ISS from memory. Asking my social media friends for sketches wasn't some kind of contest about accuracy or skill, it was more an investigation into what sorts of visual responses come up when people think about the space station. The (totally unscientific) results reveal much about how we see and understand the built environment in outer space.

Renzo Piano: my inspiration for the Shard

2012-12-31T12:18:00-05:00

Piano apparently sketched his idea on a restaurant napkin while meeting property developer Irvine Sellar in March 2000. According to Piano's architectural firm, RPBW, Sellar keeps the famous napkin in his offices. "He saw the beauty of the river and the railways and the way their energy blended and began to sketch in green felt pen on a napkin what he saw as a giant sail or an iceberg," Sellar recalled in a recent interview.