Thelivingnewyork.com Website Review

Commissioned by Princeton University, this project is simple in form but sophisticated in function. It involves an “open source building” to host research on the future of construction and computation. Just as biologists use an electron microscope to study organisms, architects will use this structure to study buildings. The building includes new sustainability and low-carbon features, and the facade involves the use of custom algorithms trained to detect knots in wood—bringing the power of machine learning to the physical This new 300-person Autodesk office and research space involved pushing the limits of generative design for architecture by bringing qualitative metrics into the traditionally quantitative task of space planning. The project began with high-level goals and constraints and then used the power of computation to generate, evaluate, and evolve thousands of design options. The result is a high-performing and novel work environment that responds to complex and high-resolution preferences from a large number of stake-holders. Twin Mirror exposes the hidden biases in machine learning technologies that will allow the smart buildings and cities of the future to sense and gather data about their inhabitants and urban contexts. A live video feed of the exhibit’s visitors is processed by two different face-recognition models trained on two different sets of data to reveal the “digital twin” – an imperfect interpretation of the visitor’s image produced by the technology. A third large LED screen projects this data back into the urban context in real-time. Twin Mirror was exhibited at the 2017 Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism. Hy-Fi offers a captivating physical environment and a new paradigm for sustainable architecture. In 2014, we tested and refined a new low-energy biological building material, manufactured 10,000 compostable bricks, constructed a 13-meter-tall tower, hosted public cultural events for three months, disas*embled the structure, composted the bricks, and returned the resulting soil to local