Leon Carranza

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Coney Island Pavilion

This is work I have done for the second assignment for Professor Ryan Whitby's Spring 2024 Dreamlands Studio. From the syllabus:

This studio course explores the integration of AI and text-based image generators within architectural design. Its main aim is to combine traditional architectural methods with the capabilities of AI, creating an environment where students can experiment with and conceptualize designs that push beyond standard practices. The course emphasizes hands-on experience, teaching students to merge digital AI-generated designs with physical construction techniques, focusing on materiality and structural soundness.

Group Members:

Leon Carranza

Akiel Allen

Arseny Pekurovsky


Process:

Recognizing common themes of erasure within our respective ethnic and cultural backgrounds in our assignment 1 projects, we sought to design a pavilion that was a hybrid between a monument and a speculative architecture.

Working backwards from concepts generated through Midjourney, our pavilion takes the form of a tensile fabric spiral, situated on the sand next to Coney Island’s boardwalk.

The experience can be broken down into three key moments:

1. Screens facing the boardwalk and obstructing the pavilion itself digitally edit out its visitors, leading to a completely barren environment. Unbeknownst to the visitor, they are stored as a unique seed of data to be processed in a later moment in the pavilion.
2. Intrigued visitors are led from the boardwalk to the sand, where they are able to enter the pavilion’s interior. The enclosure is created by suspending tiles in the fabric. The fabric-tile system’s porosity is modulated through their spacing and gradually becomes tighter and more enclosed as the visitor progrersses further.
3. At the spiral’s center, the visitor can find themselves reconstituted onto a tile, where their data-seed is transformed into a generated pattern that is then projected onto an available tile.

The patterns found on the physical tiles follow the logic of a two-axis “semantic space,” such as those studied in natural language processing. These polarities are, on one end, patterns and aesthetics found in Filipino tile making and African-American textiles, and on the other, aesthetics of history and an imaginary future projected for these two practices. Each tile is generated and physically fabricated to be unique and adherent to these gradients.

Folding Semantic Space

A short animation made in Unity to demonstrate the conceptual distribution of tile patterns throughout the pavilion. Illustrates conceptually how this flat grid pattern would be turned into an enclosure.


Digital Fabrication and Generative AI

Depth Maps could be extracted from tiles made from Stable Diffusion and made into relief molds. In our project, I 3D printed these tiles, then performed a silicone cast to make several unique plaster-cement tiles.