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 12 Chinese and 12 European students in a program composed of six one-day modules, each led by a different invited researcher and designer.
Further detailed information on required installations and software will be communicated to participants at least two weeks in advance. All local expenses, including accommodation and hospitality, will be covered by Southeast University. Participants are expected to arrange their own travel to and from Nanjing.
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. Close readings are only introduced where AI-generated correspondences require critical verification or theoretical refinement. In mixed teams, students use these formalized mappings to draft sections of a joint, contemporary "New Treatise on Architecture", which reflects both traditions while explicitly integrating AI as a hermeneutic instrument.
This module treats the plethora of digital stuff we have access to as a terrain that is always entered from somewhere. Rather than a flaw of an unbalanced tool, 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 work with multimodal corpora to construct small, deliberately authored collections of their own, placing personal curation against the abundance of available material and asking what correspondences emerge between image and subtitle, poem and object, Chinese precedent and European image. These curated biases become the basis for interactions where the responses carry the specific character of what each participant has chosen to include and exclude, so that the dialect of one's curation becomes audible in conversation. Within the 东西 setting of the workshop, the question is how such personal dialects travel and encounter each other across the distances the room holds.
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. In the 东西 spirit of the workshop, each pair of students—one Chinese and one European—receives two architectural plans, one from a Chinese context and one from a European one. The first movement consists in recognising the architectonic figure at work in each plan: not as a visual motif, but as an architectonic schema—spatial and experiential—through which form, experience, and knowledge are brought into proportion. The second movement consists in re-cognising the extrapolated figure into a new plan, drawing a beautiful copy: not figurative imitation, but a mechanics of copiousness, through which the same figure may persist while its architectural manner varies. While AI serves as an instrument for association and variation, the movement remains architectonic and dialogic: from two given plans, through the recognition of an invariant figure, toward a new plan in which that figure is ideated anew and formalised again and again.
This module explores large language models as instruments for constructing architectonic correspondences across linguistic and cultural discontinuities. If stereoscopy produces depth through the disparity between two eyes, the module asks whether new architectonic images may emerge precisely through conditions of mutual blindness. Each participant assembles a small curated collection of texts drawn from their own cultural context. The collections are then exchanged, so that each student receives a corpus situated within a linguistic and symbolic world to which they have only partial access. Rather than treating large language models as instruments of transparent translation, participants are invited to "sound" these foreign collections through a series of prompts, framings, and recursive reformulations that probe the texts in relation to their own personal inclinations, references, and architectonic intuitions. These multiple framings are progressively assembled into a shared garden: not a unified system, but a cultivated arrangement in which disparate images, commentaries, references, and textual figures coexist through maintained tension and negotiated proximity. Writing here becomes a stereoscopic operation, producing depth not through synthesis, but through the sustained crossing of non-coincident views.
We prompt images. We prompt texts. We prompt apps. Can we prompt a house? This module is the experiment. It explores all the ways a house can be written—texted, coded, prompted, queried, sung—without ever being drawn or modeled. A house begins as a sentence. Then a question. Then a list, a fragment of code, a prompt thrown at a chatbot, a query passed to a biased library. From there it grows. It is described, contradicted, translated, indexed, summarized, recomposed. It moves between languages—English, Chinese, Python, Wolfram, JSON—and between formats: paragraph, image, app, song, table.
Architecture is populated not only by buildings, images, and texts, but also by characters: architects, patrons, critics, inhabitants, institutions, myths, and machines. This module approaches artificial intelligence not as a neutral instrument of image production but as a theatre of possible actors, each endowed with particular biases, temperaments, and ways of seeing the world. Rather than asking what images AI can generate, the question becomes: what kinds of characters can it perform? Working in pairs, students assemble small casts of human and non-human actors drawn from architectural history, literature, cinema, mythology, and contemporary culture. Through large language models, image models, and multimodal AI systems, these characters are staged into conversations, conflicts, alliances, and negotiations around architectural questions—AI serving not as an oracle providing solutions, but as an instrument for animating a plurality of perspectives and allowing unexpected positions to emerge. Particular attention is given to the relationship between character and image: architectural images are approached not as representations of finished objects, but as scenes in which different intelligences—human and artificial alike—become visible through their interactions.
| Thu 20 Aug | Arrival | Arrival in Nanjing, check-in, informal evening gathering | |
| Fri 21 Aug | Opening | Opening session at Southeast University, participant introductions, collective dinner | |
| Sat 22 Aug | Excursion | Guided visit and urban excursion in Nanjing | |
| Sun 23 Aug | Module 01 | Hovestadt | Morning lecture seminar + afternoon workshop + evening discussion |
| Mon 24 Aug | Module 02 | Besems | Morning lecture seminar + afternoon workshop + evening discussion |
| Tue 25 Aug | Excursion | Collective visit — possible bookstore-bunker, Nanjing | |
| Wed 26 Aug | Module 03 | Vicari | Morning lecture seminar + afternoon workshop + evening discussion |
| Thu 27 Aug | Module 04 | Villa | Morning lecture seminar + afternoon workshop + evening discussion |
| Fri 28 Aug | Work session | Independent and group work, editorial discussions, optional excursion | |
| Sat 29 Aug | Module 05 | Roman | Morning lecture seminar + afternoon workshop + evening discussion |
| Sun 30 Aug | Module 06 | Bokhari | Morning lecture seminar + afternoon workshop + evening discussion |
| Mon 31 Aug | Production | Assembly of booklet and publication, collective reviews, editing | |
| Tue 1 Sep | Production | Finalization of publication and presentations | |
| Wed 2 Sep | Presentation | Final presentations, closing discussion, farewell dinner | |
| Thu 3 Sep | Departure | Participant departures |