AI Dreams in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch

curated by Giuseppe Ridolfi

A critical investigation on Artificial Intelligence & Post-Environmental Design in Architecture

The exhibition proposes a new idea of architectural design where as a product, it is redefined as an experiential artifact capable of raising questions rather than solutions and, as a process, it follows new sequences that reverse traditional methods.

The project site is  is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a paradigmatic example of contemporary ecological disaster and an ideal context for projects that recognize the need to operate in the presence of a complex multi-agency system to which we belong without privilege or distinction. 

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a mutable entity that defies definitive and objective understanding. It excludes equally muscular solutions, and forces us to think beyond rationalist nature/culture dualism and anthropocentric supremacism, a place that teaches how operational tools themselves must be fuzzy, non-definitive and reconfigurable; capable of establishing relationships, even illegal ones.

The exhibition combines graphic works and video animations selected from students’ works developed in the Environmental Design Laboratory held at the International Master of Architecture Degree Course at the University of Florence. Students were asked to test the feasibility of this new vision of architectural design through the use of Artificial Intelligence in two distinct and consistent research paths: 

• a first path of aesthetic-conceptual critique of the climate emergency developed through the technique of Speculative Fabulation in which Artificial Intelligence was used to generate stories and then radical and provocative environments capable of raising questions about the ongoing environmental drift; 

• a second path, more closely related to design practice, in which the traditional ideational sequence from concept to detailed development was overturned. Instead, in this approach, properly termed Reverse Designing, we start from high-fidelity visualizations, developed in the conceptual phase through the use of artificial intelligence, and then proceed backward to the canonical development of technical drawings. 

These approaches allowed participants to experiment with new forms of imagination, redefining the relationship between creativity and technique, between idea and form until leading to a profound rethinking of the concept of style itself, which from superfluous superficiality now becomes ‘data’ necessary to the generative algorithmic process.

Environmental Design Lab AA 2023-24 

International Master on Architectural Design 

School of Architecture, Università degli Studi di Firenze

Teachers: proff. Laura Andreini, Lorenzo Giorgi, Giuseppe Ridolfi

• Exhibition venue: MAD-Murate Art District. Piazza delle Murate Firenze
• Inauguration: 4 October 17:00 – 19:30.
• website: www.mailab.biz/thegreatvortex