Visual Communication III

Visual Communication III is the foundation course in digital architectural visualization that I have taught at the School of Architecture of The University of Texas at Austin since 2023, with 50 to 70 bachelor students per semester. It equips students with advanced skills in AI-supported representation, working with tools such as Midjourney and ChatGPT alongside Photoshop, and it brings the history of art into the picture: students explore architectural styles inspired by art movements and create AI-driven visuals that span the urban, the architectural and the interior scale.

The course runs as a sequence of three assignments, each building on the last. The first explores artistic references: every student chooses a position from the history of art and studies what its rules of composition, colour and material do when they are asked to become space. The second develops spatial compositions from those references. The third culminates in layered visual narratives that integrate the generated images with digital tools such as Photoshop. The matrix shown here reads one column per student, the reference at the top, the studies below it and the final spatial image at the bottom, so that the translations of a whole cohort can be compared at one glance; the boards are the final narratives.

Each assignment fosters technical proficiency, historical insight and innovative storytelling. By the end of the semester every student has a portfolio that blends architectural concepts with contemporary digital tools and prepares them for the evolving landscape of architectural practice. Because the course meets every student rather than a selected studio group, it is where I test how AI methods can be taught responsibly at cohort scale. The material shown here is from Fall 2024; the names of the students are withheld.