DigitalFUTURES Project Award 2021
Early results of Latent Space Exploration. Our AI network learns the semantic representation and the underlying compositional rules of the physical models and CHBL projects domains, and then conducts coherent domain translations between the two.
Deep Himmelb(l)au
We are proud to announce that in recognition of our significant contribution to the architectural discipline through applications of digital technology Coop Himmelb(l)au received the Digital FUTURES Award 2021.
DigitalFUTURES Beijing/Shanghai 26.6.2021
Opening Ceremony — Lecture Wolf D. Prix and Project Award for Deep Himmelb(l)au
Who fails to fight for the meaning of terms leaves it to others and eventually speaks a bureaucratic artificial language. We architects are in a predicament. We have forgotten that it is our job to design our built environment in three dimensions.
This escape into the ivory tower of theory leaves the wide field of design to investors who, under the title of optimization and efficiency, erect the most banal and ugly buildings, buildings that lack any claim to the term “architecture”.
Thus, minor subjects in architecture schools become majors, and if students no longer want to build — that is, turn buildings or cities into architecture because they shun the travails of the capitalist system or are only more interested in digital processes without converting them into buildings — they have chosen the wrong kind of study.
For without acquiring competence in these areas, through intensive study, they remain dilettante architects. And our built environment is left to the profiteers who have no interest in our future. The French philosopher Derrida, who studied the unconscious in the creative process, the “blind spot”, was only partly right when he stated — as he told me — that often the smallest drawing has more influence than thousands of cubic meters of built space. He forgets that theory in architecture must be translated into reality to have meaning, otherwise architectural theory remains only theory.