From Piranesi to Midjourney: AI-Aided avant-garde architectural conception From Piranesi to Midjourney: AI-Aided avant-garde architectural conception
Utopian, unbuilt, and avant-garde architectural depictions have contributed to pushing architectural thinking forward and raising questions about the future of the built environment. Throughout history, imaginary works such as those of Piranesi, Boullée, Escher, Soleri, and Archigram have acted as catalysts for deepening thought about the built environment and its depictions.
Currently, AI tools such as DALL-E and Midjourney expedite the process of creating abstract environments. These tools can:
- Be used as a starting point for reflecting upon the philosophical nature of the material world.
- Serve as inspiration for upcoming projects.
The work of Piranesi has been analyzed and critiqued by different researchers and architects since it was first published in the 18th century (Korte, 1933, p.16). After producing a series of works portraying Roman ruins and scenes with antique architecture, Piranesi went on to create a series of 16 etchings depicting imaginary scenes from a gloomy yet captivating universe.
Through labyrinth-like structural sequences, the work entitled Carceri d’Invenzione portrays fictional prison interiors, drawing inspiration from different elements of Roman and Antique architecture observed in his earlier series. Piranesi combines elements from different eras and sites, creating architectural fantasies that seem:
- Inescapable
- Incoherent
- Non-corresponding to the physics of reality (Mastrigli et Toti, 2014, p.238).
Drawing parallels between Piranesi’s methodology and the way Midjourney’s Neural Language Model (NLM) was trained on image-text pairs, this research aims to experimentally approach how interpreting architectural composition and vocabulary into written text can influence the resulting images. Ultimately, the goal is to draw conclusions on how AI tools interpret abstract spatial concepts and qualities.
Key aspects of this research include:
- Illustrating how linguistic elements of descriptions affect the produced image.
- Investigating whether the use of emotional, historical, or social connotations further define the results.
The multiple reviews, analysis, and critiques of Piranesi’s Carceri provide a rich source of descriptive language to develop. Notably, Tafuri (Tafuri, 1990, p. 25-54) and Eisenman’s approaches to Piranesi’s work can serve as a point of departure for descriptions used in Midjourney.
Moreover, as Sergei Eisenstein suggests regarding the framing or composition of Piranesi’s images, it is an “intellectual montage” (Tafuri, 1990, p. 56), deploying a distorted sense of perspective and creating images using fragments from different angles. These recurrent themes and notions, underlined by the aforementioned works, are utilized in the prompts to be interpreted by Deep Neural Networks (DNNs).
Lastly, this experiment assesses Midjourney’s model’s ability to process and illustrate complex mental concepts and meanings.