The Promiscuous Project: Artifacts of Cultural Transgressions

3 units

Diverse cultures throughout history have developed creative architectural practices that often became inseparably entwined with their cultural ethos. The homogenization of global architectural values, under the guise of modernity, has undermined the cultural legacies that protected local and traditional building practices to the extent that many such practices are at risk of being lost forever. The Promiscuous Project utilizes generative AI's ability to disassociate from the imposed socio-political hierarchy of history to mine underexplored architectural qualities tied to cultural practices and hybridize them, drawing unexpected threads across time and space. In an increasingly mobile world, cultures are often practiced far from where they originate and are constantly evolving in response to their surroundings. This course seeks to parallel this cultural transgression in architectural production. This iteration of the seminar will focus on the cultural, architectural, and religious significance of domes in well-known Gothic churches like Notre Dame in France and lesser-known Persian and Ottoman mosques like the Shah Mosque in Iran. We will closely study their formal and ornamental qualities and speculate on how the hybrid domes are derivative of their origins while also deviating from them. We will explore virtual 3D scanning tools such as Trnio and RealityScan, AI processing tools like Google Colab, Automatic1111, and Adobe Firefly, and 3D modeling software like Rhinoceros, Blender, and ZBrush. The final deliverables will be a series of estranged physical objects that make productive the inevitable clash between diverse cultures and their spatial affinities.