Dezeen School Shows: a foldable mobile structure designed for Google's community outreach initiatives is included in Dezeen's latest school show by students at Florida Atlantic University.

Also included is a museum that pioneers new ways of displaying aircraft and a project that examines how AI can be used in architectural education.

Florida Atlantic University

Institution: Florida Atlantic University
School: School of Architecture
Course: Bachelor of Architecture
Tutors: Joseph Choma, Francis Lyn, Anthony Abbate, Daniel Bolojan, Diego Camargo, Jean Martin Caldieron, Philippe d'Anjou, Willa Granger, Jeffrey Huber, Heather Ligler, Tyler Rodgers, John Sandell, Emmanouil Vermisso, Dustin White and Shermeen Yousif

School statement:

"Schools of architecture are a balancing act. There are many polyvalent dimensions that make up architecture – in particular, our school focuses on three areas – technology, environment and community.

"How will technology transform the practice of architecture? How can we reduce the carbon footprint of how we build? How can we design for hydro-generated urbanism?

"What role can design play in social justice? How do we design public space and affordable housing? How do we reveal biases in how histories are told?

"These are some of the questions we explore to project possible futures for the discourse of architecture.

"Florida Atlantic University School of Architecture continues to contribute to the growing complexities associated with the cultural and technological trajectory of architecture.

"The school blends innovative research-based methods with professional practice conventions. We embrace pragmatic constraints as poetic design opportunities while tackling the most challenging problems of our time."

Space as Product by Advanced Architectural Design 2 students 

"This course embraced the pedagogical approach of teaching through research and research through teaching, where students collaborated with director Joseph Choma on an industry-sponsored applied research project.

"The project began with a series of client-driven questions and prompts. Currently, the client Google conducts all of its product testing and user experience research within carefully designed spaces inside its headquarters.

"However, it found that its research results were often skewed because it was not reaching a broad enough demographic beyond the geography of the headquarters, which are dominantly based in major metropolitan areas.

"As a result, it posed the questions, what does it mean to design space as product? How can we design and fabricate deployable structures for community engagement initiatives around the world? How do we take product research outside of corporate headquarters and engage the public directly within outdoor public spaces?

"A lightweight pop-up structure was created for Google's community engagement initiatives. The foldable fibreglass structure was designed by combining funicular geometric principles with controlled buckling from curved creases.

"The two-dimensional crease pattern with a diameter of 30 feet was folded into place within two hours. As catenary-based arcs are folded into a series of structural ribs, four cantilevering canopies pop into place.

"The full-scale prototype spans 22 feet, stands 10 feet tall and has a material thickness of 1/16 inch."

Student: Advanced Architectural Design 2 students
Course: Advanced Architectural Design 2
Tutor: Joseph Choma

Curves with Lines by Hannah Adamson

"Throughout the semester, Architectural Design 1 students created a series of objects and drawings as they transitioned through four pedagogical exercises.

"Curves with Lines is a pedagogical exercise where ruled surfaces were explored. Before the computer, ruled surfaces were a popular way to construct and calculate curved surfaces.

"Students began this exercise by making analogue hand-drafted drawings of ruled surfaces by connecting different spatial boundaries with a series of straight lines.

"Later, the students translated these two-dimensional representational abstractions into three-dimensional surfaces on the computer. From there, each student learned how to precisely record their digitally designed surface through physical analogue modelling using wooden dowels.

"Pictured above is Hannah Adamson's interpretation of this exercise.

"Throughout this exercise and others, students learned to fluently move back and forth between analogue and digital tooling within a rigorous rule-based framework."

Student: Hannah Adamson
Course: Architectural Design 1
Tutor: Joseph Choma

Intimate Institutions by Mickhyle Dangalan

"The project brief, Intimate Institutions, explored a small museum and community centre located on a site between two urban scales – a dense urban grid and a sprawling transition space.

"How do you design an institution that fits the scale of both the city and a neighbourhood while embracing the creative ambitions of an art centre?

"Mickhyle Dangalan's Miami Museum of Graffiti translates the ethos of graffiti into a fluid spatial experience, imagining pathways that are more free-flowing than those experienced around the rigid existing site.

"Through different intensities of speed and density of spaces, the museum brings people in for intimate spatial moments."

Student: Mickhyle Dangalan
Course: Architectural Design 4
Tutor: Tyler Rodgers

Xenomorph by Daniel Lasso, Jerry Velasquez and Matthew Smithmullally

"The advent of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) techniques into the field of architecture has the potential to revolutionise the design process by expanding the design space of possibilities.

"In Architectural Design 7, students delved into the use of deep learning (DL) tools in architecture, which can augment the design process by providing a wider range of options and possibilities for the designer to choose from.

"Through the use of these tools, designers can engage in a more dynamic selection process, utilising the capabilities of these tools to generate a more diverse range of possibilities.

"This has resulted in the creation of three-dimensional datasets, which are then used to train and interpolate three-dimensional deep learning models. Beyond designing a building, the students also designed their own AI workflow.

"Daniel Lasso, Jerry Velasquez, and Matthew Smithmullally embraced this approach to creative AI in their design of a hotel located adjacent to the High Line in New York City. Massing studies, circulation diagrams, and programmatic organisational strategies were fed into the DL tools.

"Additionally, a stigmergy algorithm was utilised to create over four thousand three-dimensional models as datasets that were interpolated with self-organising maps.

"Within this project, AI was more than just a tool, but a collaborator in the creative process.

Students: Daniel Lasso, Jerry Velasquez and Matthew Smithmullally
Course: Architectural Design 7
Tutor: Daniel Bolojan

Deep Ecologies by Yagmur Akyuz, Luisa Giffoni and Matt Craven

"This research project develops a novel design workflow that leverages multiple interconnected deep learning (DL) models to enable varying degrees of design agency.

"By adopting this iterative collaborative approach, the design process becomes enriched, encouraging creative design thinking and augmenting the prospects of innovative outcomes.

"In this way, the designer becomes the choreographer of how multiple DL models interact with each other and human agents, thus determining the levels of autonomy in the design framework.

"In the test-case application of the prototyped design workflow, the brief was to design a speculative bio-centric architecture that can leverage a new symbiotic relationship with natural ecosystems.

"Yagmur Akyuz, Luisa Giffoni and Matt Craven explored mycelium as a building material and an algorithm to provide three-dimensional datasets to the DL models.

"Their project grounds this experimental approach in the socio-economic realm of a city on the verge of climate crisis."

Students: Yagmur Akyuz, Luisa Giffoni and Matt Craven
Course: Advanced Architectural Design 2
Tutor: Shermeen Yousif

Creative Nexus by Arie Chocron and Alyssa Scherger

"Located in Little River in Miami, an innovative artistic enclave, the concept of the Creative Nexus project revolves around the artist.

"The desired user group includes a wide variety of artists, from painters and sculptors to digital and artificial intelligence creators.

"The design approach is to provide specific commercial, office and residential spaces curated to the needs of artists and art consumers.

"Throughout the building, creative hubs are arranged with social areas between them called design blocks.

"These collective spaces encourage serendipitous encounters by providing opportunities for different creative disciplines to informally share ideas.

"By analysing how different artists work, a series of precisely calibrated spaces were designed to support those needs."

Students: Arie Chocron and Alyssa Scherger
Course: Advanced Architectural Design 1
Tutor: Hadi Alhaffar

Make-Shift Architectures of Necessity by Shambil Khan, Ian Fennimore and Nicole Grueser

"This research project explored the application of pre-trained text-to-image AI models (neural language models) for architectural ideation.

"The project considered restructuring the Bangladeshi ship-breaking culture to reimagine new communities from decommissioned marine vessels.

"Shifting from the semantics of disassembly to re-assembly enabled the unveiling of a latent visual language from the logistics of ship construction.

"The site is stationed in the Bay of Bengal, the world's scrapyard for marine vessels.

"This project envisages a future in the past, in which a cataclysmic event isolated a number of ships in a small quadrant of the coast, leading to their destruction and rebuilding into an utterly fantastic series of social spaces that celebrate the raw power of people with mythological levels of creativity.

"Guided by generative semantic AI tools, feedback loops and processes were chained together to develop a catalogue of potential spatial scenarios, carved and welded by the shanty-dwelling ship-breakers."

Students: Shambil Khan, Ian Fennimore and Nicole Grueser
Course: Advanced Architectural Design 2
Tutor: Emmanouil Vermisso

Encoding Intelligence by Arie Chocron, Alyssa Scherger and Thomas Tucker

"The project explores how features from various design-based professions, such as fashion, furniture, sculpture and car design, can be integrated into an architectural project.

"The project proposes an innovative approach that uses artificial intelligence networks and tools to extract, transfer, generate, blend and analyse features from different domains through an interconnected workflow to encode them back into architecture.

"To achieve this goal, the project entails a comprehensive process of extracting, analysing and encoding features from nine design domains.

"The trained diffusion model encodes features from the nine domains onto images of the project site location, utilising a combination of semantics from all nine domains to blend the features cohesively onto a set of images representing the project site.

"The three-dimensional site is represented through sectional images that sequentially cut through the site, providing a two-dimensional dataset that can be utilised throughout the artificial intelligence networks and converted back into three-dimensional space.

"The project's end result is a catalogue of 28 three-dimensional variations, each with unique architectural features from the combinations of all the encoded information that can be further explored and implemented into future design phases."

Students: Arie Chocron, Alyssa Scherger and Thomas Tucker
Course: Advanced Architectural Design 2
Tutor: Daniel Bolojan

Salty Urbanism by Advanced Architectural Design 2 students

"Adapting to the changing coastal landscape is key in the face of sea level rise and climate change.

"Led by professor Jeff Huber in collaboration with architecture students and interdisciplinary experts, Salty Urbanism is a research project that offers an innovative solution to this pressing issue, combining the best practices in ecological and urban design to create a more resilient and sustainable future for our coastal communities.

"From managing flooding to new development patterns, Salty Urbanism is leading the way to rethinking our relationship with water."

Student: Advanced Architectural Design 2 students
Course: Advanced Architectural Design 2
Tutor: Jeff Huber

Residual Fields by Matt Deveau and Ian Fennimore

"The Boca Air and Space Museum challenges how we define spatial boundaries and perceive scale.

"Stemming from a graphical exercise in extracting latent contextual data, the field conditions are refigured as an architectural arbiter.

"The literal and metaphorical fields act as geometric input driving a performative response focused on delaminating constituent programmatic elements.

"By lifting the building, the ground plane is liberated, allowing aircraft to move freely through the project.

"The museum reorients people relative to aircraft, creating new spatial configurations within this programme."

Students: Matt Deveau and Ian Fennimore
Course: Advanced Architectural Design 1
Tutor: Andrew Hayes

Partnership content

This school show is a partnership between Dezeen and Florida Atlantic University. Find out more about Dezeen partnership content here.