This post is brought to you by Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc).

New technologies come and go at a rate never seen before. Their capacity for substantially affecting a field and a discipline like architecture, long thought to be excessively slow and even conservative at keeping up with technological advances and innovations pioneered by other industries, has always seemed problematic to say the least. We can all watch with exhilaration the incredible landing of a, now reusable, Space X rocket onto a mobile robotic platform floating in the middle the ocean. It’s a game changer. But there isn’t anything like it in architecture. That’s just not what architecture does. And it’s okay! Architecture has a complicated relationship with innovation. As theorist Robert Somol has put it, Architecture is always trapped somewhere between past and future.

In the final studio of the SCI-Arc Architectural Technologies program, a year-long, three-term postgraduate program, a group of talented students led by instructors Marcelo Spina and Casey Rehm aimed at Distortions and Alterations of the Real, as the polemical title of their course description literally read.

Using five robots, a drone, a LIDAR scanner, and AI software to read urban fabric through color and pigmentation, students were asked to imagine ways to bring problems we face today into a building of the past so as to generate an architecture of a near future. In fact, at its core, the Architectural Technologies program aims at connecting issues long relevant to the discipline with the most advanced technological developments reshaping society and culture at large. Aiming at producing architectural objects and urban structures of cultural significance, the Distortions studio speculated on the effects of robotic automation and the role that artificial intelligence plays in reshaping the built environment. Program Coordinator Marcelo Spina described the studio as operating as a form of thesis, wherein each student is able to position a clear idea of what automation, a form of artificial intelligence, can mean for architectural objects and contexts.

As a starting point for many aesthetic approaches, students used the notion of glitch, or data bending, allowing for the deformation of images and the transformation of their visual content. In parallel, students interrogated the agency of robotic tools, utilizing multiple processes to produce hybrid translations and assemblies that combined scanning and photography to move seamlessly between physical and digital.

The studio chose the site of the former Lincoln Heights Jail in East Los Angeles, located at the crossroads of various infrastructural, communication and geographic systems and not too far from SCI-Arc and the LA Arts District. The presence of a historic landmark building and its adjacency to the LA River along with its potential for a pedestrian public park afforded students with fresh opportunities to reconsider and speculate on new notions of adaptive reuse, as well as to subvert traditional ideas of conservation and restoration.

Projects applied the overall brief towards a wide range of agendas. One project by Arsenios Zachariadis and Hsiao Chiao Peng focused on automated robotic design and material processes. Their project used autonomous robotically-controlled platforms in combination with machine vision to interpret scans of existing structures into new architectural forms. This was achieved through intelligent agent driven sculpting in plaster and 3D robotic painting. Daniel Horowitz and Jose Reyes, on the other hand, focused on how bottom-up organizational algorithms and block chain models could integrate data centers and energy production programs into a multi-unit housing typology to offset spiraling residential costs in Los Angeles. In what was literally the wildest project of the group, Sunhita Vartak and Burcin Nalinci proposed “Biophilia”, a growing self-controlled, park-like, three-dimensional jungle that promoted human and non-human interaction and a return to urban wilderness.

It seems clear that the studio used technology to foster a new kind of architectural infrastructure. Rather than situating itself comfortably in the all-too-often iconic sites within archetypal urban environments, the studio took on a complex and stranger site: one wherein a challenging natural terrain, a derelict building infrastructure, and neglected utilities make traditional architectural content not yet relevant.

Bringing together technological, aesthetic, and design dexterity, the first group of graduating students from the Architectural Technologies program was able to generate proposals very much grounded on actual problems of today. Rather than being deceived by reality or merely escaping into utopia, these young experts managed to create inventive propositions for a near future: visionary yet plausible, real but not realistic.

Architectural Technologies is one of four postgraduate programs offered through SCI-Arc EDGE. The priority deadline to apply for fall 2018 entry is January 15, 2018.