Text in the Making
How the spatialisation of text forms a new application for architecture
Text in the Making
How the spatialisation of text forms a new application for architecture
This project critically examines the potential of text to architectural mimesis, imagining a situation in the current text-driven AI world where a door is a page, a building is a book and a city is a library. Where architectural and literary dexterity run in parallel. In a move to reinvent the potential of text and the book within a global media landscape, as a tool for spatial exploration. This is particularly poignant as text-to-image software is becoming increasingly implemented in creative endeavours. We are entering a period where the image is becoming arbitrary, given the endless possibility for almost instant iteration from a single ‘prompt’. Whereas the information, the text, has even greater relevance.
The project is designed with the intention that the architect creates the first edition of a book, rather than a drawing pack, suggesting that communication through story and narrative, offers a horizontal approach to discussing and navigating architecture, for those not fluent in architectural vocabulary or drawing convention.
The project calibrates to data driven architecture through the lens of text. What if the building or the city were to start to speak as well? These themes are explored through a dialogue with a ‘transmedial machine’, a phygital device that uses machine vision, text recognition and custom-built applications to create a text-to-space platform where multiple users, both digital and physical can contribute to textual stories that trigger novel architectural assemblages. Where you can write a building and draw a story.
