Thesis Studio  - 3rd Year M. Arch - Thesis Advisor: Clark Thenhaus

Architects, like filmmakers, draw inspiration from a romanticized past, refabricating and recontextualizing it into the future to give form to the present moment. Filmmakers attempt to capture moments, often going to great lengths to construct a moment with specific props, lights, scenic elements, actors, and crew, all in the service of a certain type of nostalgia. As soon as it is on film, the moment becomes part of film’s canon of techniques. Architects also constantly consume their own historical references to evoke a specific, visual, spatial, and material response that captures an essential quality of the present moment. With this in mind, and an awareness of our own subjectivity, and the influence that objects and images play in shaping our understanding of the world, architects can use the detail to rethink the role of typology and give new expression to things that are strangely familiar. 

The goal of this project is to develop a methodology for analyzing and interpreting the results of generative AI in the context of reimagining the scenography for a popular fictional film. In this methodology, I place a strong emphasis on translation; being obliged to iteratively select and clarify the details present in the generated images. With how fast you can generate AI images, it is vital for part of that translation to occur in real physical space, using physical materials, such that the objects of production return to the realm of ideas, rather than furthering a misconception of the image as a transparent medium of representation. I plan to build a large-scale model of a miniature movie set and will attempt to render the model as ‘realistically’ as possible, to allow the observer to begin to call into question which is representational, the object or the image.