One Minute Architecture

One Minute Architecture is an architecture machine that runs at the pace of the planet’s construction. UN-Habitat estimates that two billion homes will be needed within the next thirty years; two billion breaks down to 127 homes per minute. The installation takes that rate literally: an assembly bot, trained on the listings of a real-estate platform, composes a new stack of daily amenities every minute, each within one minute’s walking distance, and in doing so exposes what the United States currently consumes in space per home. In the process the bot varies its compositions from one minute of space to one minute of walking time.

The question behind it is one of quantity: how much computation is enough, and when will we have reached the capacity to compute and build everything? The project builds on my doctoral research on part-to-part design thinking and looks into the compression of space through the rearrangement of the city’s architecture alone. By shuffling through the combinatorial solution space it accumulates a data set on possible modes of integrated living. The whole simulation of planetary construction runs on a single laptop; apparently, architecture cannot be rocket science. The point is not the speed but the question it forces: if computation can reproduce the pace of building, why not use it to build better, to make affordable, rich and sustainable environments for everyone?

The frames shown here are the bot’s output: sand-colored aggregates on a green ground, a cube, a tower, a field and a stack cut open, each assembled minute by minute from the same amenities. The video installation was first shown in CITYX Venice, the Italian Virtual Pavilion of the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale, How will we live together?, curated by Hashim Sarkis and Tom Kovac, from 22 May to 21 November 2021. Within the pavilion’s program I took part in two panel discussions with Daniel Bolojan, Matias del Campo, Immanuel Koh, Sandra Manninger and Kyle Steinfeld, AI Architects on 28 May and AI and Architecture on 18 August 2021.

In Innsbruck the work joined Potenziale 3 at aut. architektur und tirol in the winter of 2021 to 2022. In 2022 it returned as One Hour Architecture, a video installation in the exhibition Strange at The Funktion, Fort Worth, from 16 to 23 July.