Melbourne Design Week Showcase: The Architect’s Dream, The Sleep Of Reason
- Martha Liew
- 5 days ago
- 1 min read
The Architect’s Dream, The Sleep of Reason looks at the opportunities that AI tools provide to architects and designers to imagine and design worlds through the hallucinogenic lens of generative AI imagery. Questions surrounding the authorship and legitimacy of AI art miss the point that engaging with the ‘picture worlds’ of AI is only the start of the journey. If we reverse engineer our aesthetic encounters with AI, we can find hidden narratives that speak of other ontologies.
The exhibition by students and staff at RMIT University and the University of South Australia brings together a collection of artefacts, drawings, AI-generated images, and digital environments, each responding to theoretical prompts drawn from architectural texts. These works explore how AI can mediate between abstract design thinking and concrete architectural expression, revealing unexpected, provocative, and sometimes even ‘buildable’ possibilities. The opening event features a presentation and discussion that reflects on AI as both a tool for pragmatic design solutions and a medium for visionary creativity, and whether AI-generated visions represent a future we want, need, or deserve.
This project is supported by the AASA Learning and Teaching Research Grant (2023) and is part of Melbourne Design Week's program.
Information about the exhibition can be found here:
