#17: More Songs about Buildings and Food
This week: Two visions of the digital future of architecture // Disney's digital floor // Reading Nick Cave's emails // Plus, a last chance to go to Remix Summit London.
It’s Sunday morning, so here we are again with issue 17.
This week we look at how AI is changing architecture, a new kind of digital surface from Disney, and at what Nick Cave’s incredible emails tell us about the digital medium.
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Houses in Motion // The digital future of architecture
Over the last week we’ve seen two different and competing visions for what the digital world means for architecture.
On one path, we have the way AI is helping redefine the architect’s creative imagination.
In parallel, we have the sober reality - that the digital world’s real architectural innovation is data centres, and the announcement of a huge one to come in Hertfordshire.
On the creative side, this overview of architecture and AI in the FT is great reading.
It looks at creators like Hassan Ragrab, whose surreal visions, made in MidJourney, may never be made, but are carving out a new realm of imaginary whose influence may be felt far in the future. That influence is counted in social shares, where Ragrab has 375000 followers on Instagram - more than major practices like Studio Libeskind.
Impossible architectures are important. Both Umberto Eco and Italo Calvino, have written about the power of imagined places, and how they shape our imaginations.
Ragrab’s work will likely influence Hollywood and games designers first, but it may also do more to shape the style of tomorrow’s architects than we can know now.
What’s most noticeable to me looking at the diffusion of AI into architecture is how quickly it’s been adopted at a skills and training level. Look across the internet, and the immediate range and quality of training courses on the possibilities of Generative AI is obvious.
This starts at the very top, where you can study for an MSC or MRes at UCL’s Bartlett School of Architecture, the best school in the world, in Architectural Computation.
And it goes down to online providers, where innovators have stepped into the mix with introductory courses. Chinese studio XKool - ex-Zaha Hadid and building a design platform for end-to-end integration of AI into design practise - offer this excellent looking course on Digital Futures. Parametric Architecture, a Turkish website on the future of design i’ve got a lot of time for has a whole huge programme dedicated to this area.
Our ability to leverage the benefits of AI at scale will be utterly determined by how quickly we can train tomorrow’s talent to exploit its potential. I feel hopeful that Architecture will get to those benefits fast - the discipline is imagining its future, and rapidly enabling practitioners to adapt to it.
But for all this hopefulness, let’s remember the real world trade offs it takes to unlock the hallucinatory creative power of AI.
The growth of data centres is something we’ve talked about before, and AI is one of their key drivers of demand.
So it’s a big deal economically that Google are going to build a $1bn new data centre just outside London.
But whilst this helps keep London at the centre of the next wave of technology, the side effect is an increasing plainness in the built environment.
I spend a lot of time driving around the Hertfordshire belt where this data centre will be - one of my son’s school is in Hertford and weekend sports games spread around the same zone.
It is becoming a dull eruption of anonymous boxes - logistics and distribution centres, innovation parks and places that don’t really have names.
I think Google and others are missing an opportunity here to create a new architectural legacy. Rather than cold grey boxes, why not unlock the power of their own technology to make something beautiful and new - why not let them be visually a fora for innovation?
Then we might feel the excitement of AI in the real world that someone like Hassan Ragrab’s work shows it can unlock in the creative imagination.
This Must Be the Place // Remix Summits London
Remix Summit London is on Tuesday and Wednesday and tickets are very nearly sold out - so barely any time left to get your exclusive discount on tickets..
This year’s theme is ‘Ideas for the Revolution’ on Monday and Tuesday J at the Royal Academy of Arts & Here East and “Creative R&D” Readers are being given a very special 25% discount on tickets. Just enter CREATRD when you check out at www.remixsummits.com/ldn-2024/.
I’ll be in conversation with gaming legend Miles Jacobson OBE, Studio Director of Sports Interactive (creators of the global sensation Football Manager) on the future of the sector
Look forward to seeing lots of you there!
Road to Nowhere // HOLO at ya!
I can’t quite decide if this is a joke or not.
I don’t think it is, but there’s no question there’s an element of the absurd in Disney’s HoloTile Floor.
Watch the video then let’s talk.
So you get it.
It’s a responsive floor for immersive and virtual experiences, an omnidirectional treadmill that will allow movement without movement. It is, quite literally, the Road to Nowhere.
It’s really smart, and brilliantly silly, and whether it ever makes it out of research and into production, we’ll see.
But it’s another step on the route to two things: to the digitisation of the physical world, where buildings become screens and everything else becomes a kind of human-computer interface; and to the emergence of a genuinely hybrid kind of creativity, at the intersection point between virtual and real.
Wild, Wild Life // The beauty of Nick Cave’s emails
I have a deep abiding love for Nick Cave, one of the great strange musical figures who came through the 1980s.
The story about the tragic deaths of his sons is now well known.
But I want to think about the way it’s unlocked a vein of great writing on his website, The Red Hand Files, and its monthly response to reader’s letters. It’s both a glory, more powerful in some ways than his music. But it’s also something quite specific to the digital medium he writes in.
I opened this week’s edition on the train last Wednesday morning, and was reduced to tears moments later. Cave’s response to a letter from a father whose son had committed suicide has elemental grace.
He writes:
But I want to say something, and even though it will doubtless mean little to you at this moment, I hope in time you will look back and know I spoke a kind of truth. Some years have now passed since the loss of my own sons, and though gone from this world, I have come to understand that they still travel with me – they are with me now – but more than that, they have become the active participants in a slow but certain awakening of the spirit. It saddens me deeply that they never lived their own full lives, but though I would give anything to have them back, these departed souls ultimately served as a kind of saving force that revealed the world to Susie and me as a thing of outrageous beauty. I have found my relationship to the world enriched in a way that I never dreamed possible. I know this to be true, but I also know it is a truth beyond understanding in your time of fresh grief, and so I say these things with extreme caution and pray it doesn’t come across as a kind of glibness uttered into your despair.
It’s beautiful, and I urge you to read the whole thing.
But trying to make Cave a conventional literary figure is misplaced. The power of this writing is enhanced by, and dependant on its digital context.
The internet is a place of such raw emotions - of instant anger, joy and hate.
Opening this email, which starts with the plea for help of a father deep in loss, throws us deep, head first into the internet’s bottomless pool of pain.
Cave’s words, which in their deep faith are closer to the Tolstoy of The Death of Ivan Ilyich, or Master and Man than anything of the secular 20th or 21st centuries, have the redemptive effect of pulling us out of that world of hurt. They let us rise above it and give it a place in our lives.
They show fundamentally, I think, that the internet as a medium can be a force for moral good.
What a strange place for Cave to end up - the poet-savage of Stagger Lee, Release the Bats and The Mercy Seat become a prophet of salvation for a digital world.
Still here? 🙏❤️
This week’s titles should have been Nick Cave, but it ended up Talking Heads.
The title’s an early album. Then we’ve got classics from Remain in Light and True Stories. If you want to experience them at their best, Stop Making Sense remains a brilliant concert film, as fresh today as it was 40 years ago in 83.
And the big suit is still cool.
ALSO: Keep your eyes peeled on Monday.
Something BIG is coming.
😎😎
Really enjoyed your architecture thoughts Chris.