Geological Types

Geological Types is a contribution to the exhibition Transductions: Artificial Intelligence in Architectural Experimentation, an exhibition of work by more than thirty architects and designers at the Rubelle and Norman Schafler Gallery of Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, from 7 February to 15 March 2025, curated by Jason Vigneri-Beane, Stephen Slaughter, Olivia Vien and Hart Marlow and organized by the Pratt School of Architecture with the Pratt Department of Exhibitions.

The project, developed and shown as a turntable film, speculates on building types that were grown on and from their site. Each sequence begins with a mass of rock, soil and vegetation and lets a generative model cycle it into a house: terraces cut into the strata, rooms hollowed out of the block, gardens on every ledge, trees on the roof. In this way image generation becomes a form of simulation: not by the physical rules and constraints of a game engine, but by the latent features of soil and architecture that the models have learned and generalized. The samples were generated with Stable Diffusion 3 Medium in a ComfyUI workflow and animated with Midjourney. The title makes a claim: a building type can be read as a geological formation, a deposit of uses that settles, hardens and erodes. Grown, cycled, printed, piled and chunked: samples of building types generated from soil, and of the models that imagine it.