Utopie KI | Winter Semester 2024/25
In the winter semester 2024/25 „Utopie KI" was offered as interdisciplinary elective course by IMIAD within the Faculty of Architecture and Design.
Artificial intelligence is the disruptive mega-tool of our time - it opens up completely new visions and dreams of what our future could look like. In architecture, utopias are the means of choice to spatially represent ideas for the future and make them tangible. Traditionally, future scenarios are created, visualized and tested on this fine line between fake and vision. In the “UTOPIE KI” seminar, utopias were designed that provide content for the ubiquitous buzzword AI in the context of architecture. The seminar poses the question: What could a society based on AI look like? What new opportunities and challenges will arise? What does the built environment look like for this? Our vision: A future in which AI transforms people's lives in a positive way.
In the first phase of the seminar, an AI-based social and architectural scenario was developed. In the second phase, we examined what AI tools are available to architects to create and visualize a utopia. We took a critical look at the influence of AI as a design tool: How can AI help us design spaces of the future, visualize them and get people excited about them? The individual steps of an architectural design process were recreated and enriched using AI tools. Care was always taken to ensure that every design decision was backed up by human control mechanisms.
The exhibition “UTOPIE KI: fake it till you make it” shows the results and genesis of the student projects and thus provides insights into the work and collaboration process with different AI applications for architectural practice.
Course Participants: Rosana Agel Al-Samaany, Betuel Atasever, Ben Berkmann, Fabian Bernad, Vanessa Denk, Florian Hörtig, Alparslan Karavas, Raphael Knie, Celina Leichtfuss, Max Liegl, Lauren Marcu, Simon Tellert, Ezgi Toprak, Katrin Wunder.
We would like to thank Simon Hirtz (A.I.gency & Unlocked Creatives Wien) for his input and for making his research results available, as well as Florian Hörtig and Katrin Wunder for the support with the exhibition.
The elective course was directed by the lecturers Samuel Weiss M.A. and Yannik Kaiser M.Arch.
