Advanced Workshop in Artificial Intelligence
and Architectonic Thinking
Borrowing the double meaning of 东西—dōngxi, simultaneously "East–West" and "things" or "stuff"—the workshop is structured around two axes: the encounter between Chinese and European architectural cultures, and the emergence of new forms of architectonic thinking through computational instruments.
To the question of what is architecture when computers can do what we think architecture is, the workshop aims to constitute a room—a computational forum—in which talking can transcend a particular alphabet. Rather than understanding AI in terms of efficiency, automation, or representation alone, METEORA 东西 NANJING approaches computation as a new material and conceptual condition for architecture: a novel kind of optics through which architectural ideas may be articulated, translated, and transformed across linguistic, symbolic, and cultural discontinuities.
Combining seminars, design experiments, collective discussions, and excursions, the workshop explores practices of "architectonic writing," a kind of writing whose text is literary as much as drawing, picture, music, or any formal articulation that can be coded through computational instruments. Hosted by the Faculty of Architecture at Southeast University—one of the leading schools of architecture in China—the workshop brings together 16 Chinese and 16 European students in a program composed of six one-day modules, each led by a different invited researcher and designer.
This module brings together Chinese and European students to use AI-based methods for identifying structural symmetries and invariants across classical architectural treatises, focusing on Vitruvius' De architectura, Alberti's De re aedificatoria and the Chinese Yingzao Fashi. Based on digitized corpora, large language models and embedding techniques are employed to extract and compare conceptual networks, argumentative patterns and normative structures, with the aim of formulating "translation rules" between distinct architectural worldviews in a way analogous to interlingual translation. In mixed teams, students use these formalized mappings to draft sections of a joint, contemporary "New Treatise on Architecture", reflecting both traditions while explicitly integrating AI as a hermeneutic instrument.
This module explores large language models as instruments for constructing architectonic correspondences across linguistic and cultural discontinuities. Drawing on the garden and the Tower of Babel as figures of translation, students select 2–5 culturally significant texts from their own context and exchange them cross-culturally. Rather than treating LLMs as instruments of transparent translation, participants sound these foreign collections through a series of prompts along two conceptual axes, progressively assembling a shared garden: not a unified system, but a cultivated arrangement in which disparate images, commentaries, and textual figures coexist through maintained tension. Fragments are organised into a new composite text.
Architecture's stuff is the accumulated plenty of all that architecture has made: ideas, figures, spaces, forms, and the many manners in which they may be recognised, carried, and composed again. Each pair of students—one Chinese and one European—receives one Western and one Chinese building plan. The first movement consists in recognising the architectonic figure at work in each plan: not as a visual motif, but as an architectonic schema through which form, experience, and knowledge are brought into proportion. The second movement: re-cognising this figure into a new plan—not figurative imitation, but a mechanics of copiousness through which the same figure persists while its architectural manner varies.
This module treats the plethora of digital material we have access to as a terrain that is always entered from somewhere. Bias is approached as one of computation's potential design materials: a way of making the public field of films, books, images and texts speak with local, specific intent. Students curate 6–7 collections of videos, texts, and images by keyword; these collections become encoding dimensions through which an agent navigates their biases, demonstrating how text-to-image translation varies by cultural perspective. Chinese and European students pair up for cross-cultural comparison.
A second module on architectural treatises, focused on close comparison of Alberti's De re aedificatoria with classical Chinese treatises on architecture and urbanism. Using large language models and embedding techniques, students identify invariances and translation strategies across traditions—asking what remains stable across radically different architectural worldviews, and what resists translation entirely.
Students use the accumulated data from the prior days to attempt spatial configurations using LLMs—a house, or something like one. Different sub-groups explore different techniques: working with the existing curated database, geometric approaches, and image generation. A house begins as a sentence, then a question, then a fragment of code. It moves between languages—English, Chinese, Python, Wolfram, JSON—and between formats: paragraph, image, app, table.
| Thu 20 Aug | Arrival | Arrival of participants in Nanjing, check-in, informal evening gathering | |
| Fri 21 Aug | Opening | Opening ceremony — Courtyard Auditorium, Former Engineering Building, Sipailou Campus, 08:30–09:00 | |
| Module 01 | Ludger Hovestadt | Morning lecture seminar (2–3h) + afternoon exercises/workshop | |
| Sat 22 Aug | Module 02 | Riccardo M. Villa | Morning lecture seminar (2–3h) + afternoon exercises/workshop |
| Sun 23 Aug | Module 03 | Ludger Hovestadt | Morning lecture seminar (2–3h) + afternoon exercises/workshop |
| Mon 24 Aug | Excursion | Visit to the Nanjing Municipal Museum — calligraphy collection | |
| Tue 25 Aug | Module 04 | Lorenzo Vicari | Morning lecture seminar (2–3h) + afternoon exercises/workshop |
| Wed 26 Aug | Module 05 | Julian Besems | Morning lecture seminar (2–3h) + afternoon exercises/workshop |
| Thu 27 Aug | Module 06 | Miro Roman | Morning lecture seminar (2–3h) + afternoon exercises/workshop |
| Fri 28 Aug | Excursion | Excursion to Suzhou (optional) | |
| Sat 29 Aug | Excursion | Excursion to Suzhou (optional) | |
| Sun 30 Aug | Production | Assembly of booklet/publication, collective reviews, editing sessions | |
| Mon 31 Aug | Production | Assembly of booklet/publication, collective reviews, editing sessions | |
| Tue 1 Sep | Presentation | Final presentations | |
| Wed 2 Sep | Excursion | Guide through Nanjing's architectural landmarks | |
| Thu 3 Sep | Departure | Participant departures |
| Software | Participants should bring a laptop and have an active account with at least one large language model (ChatGPT, Claude, DeepSeek, or similar) before arrival. For Module 05, Anaconda is also required — available at anaconda.com/download. | ||
| Travel | Participants are expected to arrange their own travel to and from Nanjing. | ||
| Accommodation | Accommodation and local hospitality throughout the workshop are covered by Southeast University. The excursion to Suzhou (28–29 Aug) is optional and not included. | ||
