Synthetic Types Atlas, Vol. I

Every technological epoch has induced its building types: the elevator its tower, the car its mall. The Synthetic Types Atlas asks which types a new material induces, and it asks it for materials that did not exist a few years ago. Each of its thirty-six case studies begins with a compound predicted by AI, follows it through a synthesis route that an ordinary workshop can run, derives the tectonic disposition the material affords, and ends with the building type that disposition makes possible: a hall under an amber vault, a stepped arcade, a block whose facade is a grid of glowing bays.

A case study is a research paper with a fixed anatomy. It traces the material’s genealogy, the compounds and crafts it descends from; its agency, what it does that its analog cannot; its lifecycle, from the sourcing of precursors to reuse; its construction, the joints and spans it permits; its transpositions into other scales and trades; its readings across domains, cultural and computational; and, last, the induced type, drawn as a section model and inhabited in synthetic photographs. The drawings are generated, and the atlas says so on every plate: they are the hypothesis a material makes about a building, not a building.

The two volumes were researched, written, and fact-checked by a multi-agent pipeline I designed for this purpose: an orchestrator, retrieval and critique agents, and an adversarial verifier that checks every claim against forty to sixty sources per case and, on occasion, catches the atlas’s own errors. I regard the pipeline as equal parts research method and publication instrument, and the atlas as its first public test. What survives the verifier goes to the kiln: the materials the atlas rates highest are the ones students at the Academy of Fine Arts Stuttgart set out to make in 2026.

Synthetic Types Atlas, Vol. I: Research Papers. Generated Materials, Induced into a Type has 489 pages (ISBN 979-8-1844-3884-9) and was published in 2026. Its companion, Vol. II: The Recipe Atlas, gives the recipes for 245 makeable compositions; the underlying database, Generative Matter V3, is open. The building types of Vol. I are the Synthetic Types program’s next entries: design studies, one type per material, to be added to this site as they are drawn and built.