Unit 4

Individual cities: Utopia

Main Lecturer: Casey Rehm

Unit Instructors: Dongyoon Kim + Jaewon Yi

Image credit: Zane Mechem and Chengyu Zhang at SCI-Arc's 2B studio with Casey Rehm

1. Brief

Covid-19 has not allowed us to do urban research from the site. Site researches such as interviews, field surveys, and engagement design are precluded although this method is effective to discover real city conditions. We ask how to meet the people and collect social structure in ‘un-tact’ society.

In this context, artificial intelligence technology could replace conventional urban research and then generate new methodology. The embracement of automation in aspects of the design such as working with different forms of machine intelligence and synthetic intelligence within the design process allow us to rethink how we would interpret the context and look for novel forms of organization or aesthetic that emerged out of the way non-human perception engages things.

Because conventional architectural design process is rarely working with ‘tabula rasa’ so machine which has the ability to respond to contextual inputs could show us a novel way to read the city. Individual cities: Utopia is a speculative narrative about how these transformations would occur, redesign, and renovate the entire city from non-human.


2. Tools


3. Aim and Scope


4. Expected Workshop Outcome