A Case of Leakage - Cyborg Architecture
[2019]︎︎︎ First year group - Design Project - Städelschule Architecture Class (SAC)
︎︎︎ Studio Tutors: Prof. Johan Bettum, Yara Feghali ( Teaching Assistant)
What would happen if one aesthetic realm leaks into the other, destabilizes it, merges and hybridizes, creating new syntactic possibilities and provoking new semantic potentialities? In this project, the organic forms leak into the physical built environment, and architecture, a machine for living as it is known, gets prosthetically extended with the assistance of organic human body parts. The form of the human body leaks into the space that it initially occupied, mutating it, producing new spatiality that problematises the conventional binaries, mainly targetting the ‘human vs machine’.
Human body parts were used as ‘style’ images over the ‘content’ images of the site, processed through Neural style transfer algorithm, the formal properties of the body were transferred upon the architecture, making it soft and ‘organic’.
Leaky stuff is an exploration into realism. It presupposes that architectural representation is rendered ambiguous through aesthetic leakages. A leak is defined as the slippage that happens when multiple realms of representation coexist in a single image or architectural space. Leakiness transgresses political and economic constructs by being inclusive. It embodies and delivers an aesthetic of fluidity and is specific to contemporary technology. Leakiness sees different regimes of aesthetics coexist and cancels out the previous binary opposition between different representational regimes that previously existed in sequential exclusiveness. The studio engaged with a varied spectrum of design mediums, from Neural Style Transfer to Photogrammetry, to generate lush yet detailed design outcomes, seeing existing and new aesthetic expressions co-mingle, mix, and transform into something new.
