by Artificial intelligence is taking over Instagram, marrying art, design and technology to create dreamlike buildings, landscapes and even entire cities that leave social media users speechless and create buzz.
What would Imerovigli and Oia in Santorini look like if the white Caldera cave houses and luxurious resorts had been built by Gaudí? Carved sculptures with feminine curves, circular windows, impressive arches and round bell towers.
Complexes that seem to have been made by a sculptor, with pits instead of courtyards and hills, next to the typical stairways of the villages of Santorini, which are built on the front of the cliff. This is how the famous Greek photographer and architect Kostas Spathis, known on Instagram from the account @spathumpa, imagined Oia and Imerovigli.
Santorini as Gaudí’s city-sculpture
Born in 1984, Kostas Spathis belongs to a new generation of creators who have taken advantage of the opportunity offered by social networks to present their talent and their work to a wider audience. After studying architecture at the University of Thessaly, he embarked on photography, but keeping the influences of architecture and design that give identity to his works.
Costas Spathi’s photos go viral every time because they have a balance, an architectural approach, whether it’s landscapes or people interacting with space as if they are harmoniously part of an organic whole that seems to have been designed by a genius designer. Symmetry, poetry, linearity, surrealist approach, humor, geometries and mathematical sequences, repetitive patterns, architectural perspective, visual games of shadows and volumes, movement, dance, fashion, travel and design coexist in his photographs which are the result of creative marriage analog and digital worlds.
New technologies, drones, digital image processing programs and now artificial intelligence software, are put to use by Kostas Spathis to create snapshots that seem not to have come out of Hollywood studios shooting science fiction films using effects harsh, but poetic images. of a dreamlike world reminiscent of the works of art of the avant-gardes of the 20th century.
In this project with Santorini, Kostas Spathis, playing with #AI (artificial intelligence) software combined “the geomorphology of the island with the art of Gaudi to create interesting shapes”. The result is a dreamlike volcanic landscape in the Caldera that impresses.
How Artificial Intelligence Is Changing Architecture Forever
In recent years, artificial intelligence, through computer software, has enabled designers, photographers, and even architects to do things the analog world hadn’t even dreamed of. With shocking verisimilitude, we see photographic snapshots, such as the viral fake photos of the pope in a fashionable Balenciaga puffer jacket, buildings and entire cities not as photorealistic mock-ups, but as photos that confuse social l media user and make them believe that they are true, creating confusion and incredible virality which, in some cases, can be dangerous.
Beyond the ethical part – especially when artificial intelligence (AI) fake photos show famous faces, international personalities and real people with altered styling or in places they weren’t in reality, doing actions they did not do, creating social confusion – the Artificial Intelligence software has undoubtedly brought about a veritable revolution of enormous proportions in architecture and design, forever altering the data in the design of buildings, cities, objects and landscapes.
Young architects and designers, using advanced artificial intelligence programs, create digital images of a futuristic world, which however does not lack emotion, color, art and a surreal perspective of reality. On Instagram, where these photos are posted, they are scanned and discussed more than actual works of architecture, since they present an unreal aesthetic of the future drawn not from the cold effects of cinematic sci-fi films, but from a full world of artistic imagination. which awakens desires and feelings.
Investing in innovation and technology, combining it with traditional architecture, young creators are researching dissemination models based on linguistics and genetic design techniques to create a new digital world in the metaverse. The most famous text-image AI software they use are Midjourney, Dall-E2, DreamStudioAI, Stable Diffusion, etc.
A great example is Turkala Ebrar Eke, a young architect, designer and design researcher based in Vienna. With a distinguished master’s degree in architecture from the Greg Lynn Studio at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, Eke focuses on exploring the ways in which artificial intelligence tools can be integrated into architectural design.
How Artificial Intelligence Software Works
When it comes to architecture, AI software solves designers’ problems by providing endless possibilities for realistic and highly creative design, even visualizing designs based on text descriptions at the very beginning of the design process.
By essentially communicating the architect with the “machine”, as Ebrar Eke explains in the architecture magazine Perametric Architecture, it gives the software the information it will use through artificial intelligence to create a realistic but same dreamlike time that combines both reality data as well as art and fantasy products. According to Ebrar Eke, a few sentences are enough to “Can artificial intelligence change materiality, spatial properties, compositions or lighting conditions with simple words. These tools offer designers great flexibility and open up endless possibilities. ».
Using neural networks, AI software transforms users’ text inputs into digitally generated images using artificial intelligence. Essentially, these advanced robots take advantage of the commands given by their operator, in this case the designer or the architect, and through a huge amount of data and information, create images of a detail and a incredible plausibility that impress.
Similar, but more dreamlike, are the designs of Hassan Ragab, a renowned Egyptian interdisciplinary designer with a background in architecture who lives in Southern California. A furniture and textile designer, Ragab, relying on artificial intelligence tools like Midjourney (which creates images from natural language descriptions, helps users design spaces or create works of art using commands from the Discord bot), stood out so much that it created the “school” in the field of AI design and architecture.
As Bill Cusick, the creative director of high-tech company Stability AI, which created Ai Stable Diffusion and DreamStudio software, said in a related report by international electronic design and architecture magazine Dezeen, the intelligence artificial will fundamentally change the way people see architecture, thinking that this software will be a real revolution, “the basis of the future of creativity”.
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However, the debate is very long and has only just begun. Critical ethical and aesthetic questions remain unanswered, but what is certain is that we are on the threshold of a huge transformation in modern architecture and design.
