The paradigm of drawing has undergone radical change and no longer provides a stable reference for the discipline of architecture. What one may think are drawings are in fact pictures of drawings or simulations of lines on a digital interface. The manipulability of these images also suggests that the act of drawing or simulation of drawing no longer constitutes an original act of creation. Combining contemporary digital image appropriation with visual neural networks contests the hegemony of traditional drawing tectonics associated with orthography.

Clicks & Mortar reprocesses the living room at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater through artificial intelligence and 3D texture mapping technologies. Various spatial and material qualities are maintained, while others are scrambled and interpreted by the machine learning process. Digital residues or deposits begin to drip, cascade, and flood into the interior that modify the spatial profile of the living room.

The combination of subtle and aggressive intrusions into Fallingwater’s interior challenges image-based realism—a liminal condition that corrupts yet maintains recognizable qualities of the original reference. Clicks and Mortar accounts for the ways in which the physical environment is continually mediated by its virtual existence.

2021
Honorable Mention
with Jean Jaminet

Published in RE-DRAW.03: Fallingwater, THEME 2: H2O