lab-eds
§ work · No. 048 · 2025
menu
§ work · No. 048

Complicit Code

2025 · exhibition

Buildings designed through consent rather than prohibition

year
2025
type
exhibition
status
Mashburn Gallery, Houston, 27 January to 21 February 2025; Richardson Memorial Hall, Tulane University, New Orleans, 17 March to 19 April 2025
credit
Daniel Koehler. Drawing, shown in Drawing Codes: Experimental Protocols of Architectural Representation, curated by Adam Marcus and Andrew Kudless.
program
Large City Architecture
no.
048
The drawing installed in the Drawing Codes exhibition
Installation view, Drawing Codes, 2025

Drawing Codes is a series of exhibitions on the effects of computation on architectural representation and on how architects have integrated procedural thinking into their drawing. Complicit Code reimagines architectural boundaries: instead of beginning with prohibitions such as setbacks and height limits, the buildings in the drawing are designed through consent and complicity, governed by blockchain algorithms that record who agrees to what.

plates

Gallery

1 plates · click to enlarge
  • Rendered view of buildings assembled by consent algorithms
    Study view · rendered, 2022
1 / 1 · Study view · rendered, 2022
adjoining sheets

Related

3 entries
§ work

More work

34 entries
The Latent Earth wall: 160,000 generated images arranged as one continuous mosaic whose colour fields emerge from the sort
2026 · research · Frankfurt
Latent Earth
200,000 images of 40,000 places on Earth, each rendered by one image model from nothing but the place's name and sorted by the model's own internal representations. Not a picture of the world but a probe of the model.
D. Koehler
A grid of windowless building types across US cities, sorted by type
2025 · research · Austin
Dark Spots
About one per cent of US residential buildings have rooms without adequate daylight; because those buildings are large apartment complexes, roughly one household in ten lives with one. Maps and plans made with the University Tenants Union, Austin, 2025.
D. Koehler
A generated building type grown from rock, soil and vegetation, with rooms cut into the strata
2025 · exhibition · Brooklyn
Geological Types
A four-minute film of building types grown rather than drawn: terraces cut into strata, rooms hollowed from the block, gardens on every ledge. Generated with Stable Diffusion 3 Medium and animated with Midjourney; shown in Transductions at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, 2025.
D. Koehler
A pale sun-cured brick of the calcium silicate standing upright on a white surface
2023–2025 · research · The University of Texas at Austin · Academy of Fine Arts Stuttgart
Generative Matter
DeepMind's GNoME predicted 380,000 stable compounds. This pipeline filtered them to 13,638 building-material candidates with machine-readable synthesis protocols, released them openly, and made several of them physically, with students, in ordinary workshops.
D. Koehler
The projector display of Architecture After AI in the Mebane Gallery
2023–2024 · exhibition
Architecture After AI
The first overview of generative AI in architecture: more than 2,000 works by 80 architects and artists, shown at the Mebane Gallery in Austin in 2023 and twice in Boulder in 2024 and 2025. Curated with Kory Bieg and Clay Odom.
D. Koehler
A generated view of a vast atrium in which a living tree trunk rises through tiers of curved timber galleries under a skylight
2023–2024 · research
Foresting Architecture
Can cities be built with living trees? An advanced design studio at UT Austin and an image series that explore an architecture literally forested with trees; the series won the Metaverse Architecture and Design Award 2023.
D. Koehler
A grid of small mixed-media architectural models with exposed frames and geological bases
2022–2024 · research
Research by Models
Physical models built in mixed media and left deliberately incomplete become the ground on which diffusion models are asked to complete a building. The augmentation stays answerable to the object on the table: the frame constrains the roof, the base constrains the section.
D. Koehler
A generated photograph of cows grazing between planters on the deck of a concrete parking garage
2023 · exhibition · Berlin
Carbon Hinterlands
What about Cows: the future of parking and other carbon hinterlands. An image series on the parking garages that autonomous vehicles will leave behind, returned to farms, gardens and pasture, shown in Solarpunk Futures at P61, Berlin, 2023.
D. Koehler
A generated building in the manner of Jakarta, made of hundreds of diverse parts, with tiled roofs and open balconies
2022–2023 · research · Austin
Designing Cities with Cities
Generated image series from 2022–23, made from and about the imagery of cities: compressed city types, remixed neighborhoods, treehouses, urban material studies, and Rasa Navasaityte's interiors. The pilot studies that led to the LCA-GCS dataset.
D. Koehler

All work entries →