12_Architectural History of the Future

We folded the past and the present of Saudi architecture to produce the history of the future.

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Inspiration

How would one build on the future if we don’t embrace the richness of our history and heritage? This is where we started by embracing the concepts and ideas behind some of the prominent contemporary architectural structures in Saudi Arabia by marrying it with the obvious icons of the culture. We’re building on a rich legacy that we’re proud of. This is the architectural history of the future of Saudi Arabia.

What it does

Contemporary architecture of Saudi Arabia often employs concepts that are inspired by traditional architecture. These formal and stylistic references become part of the narrative through which we understand and identify the architecture. We currently contrast the contemporary with the traditional/vernacular in a binary opposition, in which one emphasizes the otherness of the other. What about the future of architecture? Where are we going with this and can this binary opposition continue? We imagine that in the future, the present and past will fold into each other. The visual qualities of historical images may transfer and formal features that originally inspired an abstraction, will actually become more literal.

The art pieces we produced are envisioned to be a momentum of a new art direction that artists can leveraged to produce new and compelling masterpieces, or used for projection mapping on the actual architectural artifacts. A few visitors to our work in progressed expressed the intent to buy printed versions of the produced art which opens the door for a new business model that we didn’t expect before the artathon.

How we built it

We used neural style transfer to combine images. We defined the content as the image of the main contemporary building and the style image as the influence from the past.

Work 1: Cultural Canvas The King Fahd International Stadium (KFIS) work combined two style images that work with the angles of the building, and have different scale and texture qualities. The work was produced as a series of 4 images that used different parameters (weight of content and style images; scale of style image). The 4 images were then combined in a movie (using iMovie). The transitions between them animate the building and provide a juxtaposition that emulates the transience of time.

Although only one artwork is required, we applied the same methodology to produce 2 more (each is presented as a short video on the youtube playlist provided).

Work 2: Cultural Alley - King Abdulaziz History Center as content and old traditional Najdi door as style. Work 3: Ignition of Knowledge - Ithra (King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture) as content and style combined stones and traditional door pattern.

Challenges we ran into

Finding the right AI application to support the concept of the work.

Style transfer was strongly affected by the level of detail, direction, texture and colors of the style source image. Finding the right combinations of images was crucial. We experimented with the effects and started to be able to identity potentially successful matches of content and style.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

From an artist perspective of the team, we’ve learned new information and skills over the past 48 hours that introduced us to a whole new dimension of knowledge that we can explore further and collaborate with on future projects. We see it as design by numbers.

From a developer perspective of the team, we’ve experienced working on art for the first time, which was inspiring and impact our future projects.

What we learned

Using neural style transfer and getting comfortable experimenting with the code. Understanding the subtle differences of changing the parameters. The AI Artathon is an entry point into the world of AI for the artist members of the team. We can see the huge potential of AI in the art and culture sector and feel that we have been welcomed into a world which as inaccessible to us before.

What's next for 12_Architectural History of the Future

The field of Saudi Architecture has a lot of potential in combination with AI. The documentation of traditional and contemporary architecture is lacking classification and transferability. As a part of the project, we started the foundation for a non-existing and essential part of archiving the Saudi architectural style, building a small catalog of architectural features (doors, windows, etc …) that differentiate the Saudi heritage buildings over others. This small catalog has been used to train a deep learning model (using Google Teachable machine 2.0) to automatically classify an image of an arbitrary building into the proper class (Old Jeddah, Najd or Abha architecture styles)

This effort is envisioned to continue as a foundation to include more Saudi styles and micro features, that can be used for endless applications that benefits architects and non-architect users.

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