Ruy Klein is an

experimental design

practice. We do projects

at the confluence of

architecture, nature, and

technology. We design

buildings, landscapes,

and machines.


↓

Tongues in Trees, 2021

a+u #646

July, 2024

Post-Digitality in Architecture

Guest edited by Toshiki Hirano and Toshikatsu Kiuchi


This issue of Architecture and Urbanism (a+u), features a survey of

SCI-Arc's EDGE programs, an interview with David Ruy about the future

of architectural education, and Ruy Klein's Apophenia project.

Other Places, 2022

Ruy Klein is directed by David Ruy and Karel Klein. Since 2000, Ruy

Klein has been focused on the changing nature of architecture relative

to three important historical events: the movement towards the

digitization and virtualization of everything possible, culminating now

with the AI revolution; the emergence of international finance and the

unanticipated effects of the giant pool of capital that flows through the

world; a global awareness of ecological peril and the growing

obsolescence of a modernist concept of nature. In short, our intuition

from the beginning has been that somewhere between the computer,

the bank, and the forest might be a new architecture. During these

years, we have seen the complete digitalization of how the architect

works. We have seen the erosion of established service-oriented

business models, but also (the still unappreciated) emergence of

strange new ways of financializing architecture. Though we have seen

some important research in the development of sustainable materials

and energy, nature oddly remains, for most, nothing more than that

thing we stare at through the windows of our buildings. Our projects,

essays, and design research have targeted disciplinary problems at

the confluence of these considerations and asks what it means to be

an architect in the twenty-first century.


We are currently investigating the possibilities (and dangers) of

generative AI and synthetic concepts of ecological design.

Bioprinter, 2013

David Ruy's work develops out of a single observation: what we take to be

reality is largely built out of representations—buildings, images, interfaces,

narratives. This insight has driven thirty years of design practice and

theoretical research, work sustained by an ongoing engagement with

computational design and, more recently, artificial intelligence. He has

founded and chaired graduate programs and lectured throughout Asia,

Europe, and the Americas. He is a recipient of the Architectural League's

Emerging Voices award, and his work is held in the collections of MoMA

and the FRAC Centre, among others. Currently, he writes and lectures on

the implications of artificial intelligence and climate change for creative

practice, and advises organizations about design innovation and cultural

strategy. He is on the faculty at SCI-Arc in Los Angeles, having previously

held appointments at Columbia, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania,

and Pratt Institute.

 

david@ruyklein.com



Karel Klein is an architect and educator who has worked with artificial

intelligence since 2016. Her research employs estranged training
methodologies — models hybridizing non-architectural imagery with
canonical architectural precedents. Over the past decade, her work has

progressed from atypically trained GANs to LoRA-driven material migrations.

Karel is interested in the capacity of generative AI for contemporary

myth-making. Following the Surrealists' use of metaphor as an instrument for

new mythologies, she treats AI imagery as matter for the cyborg imagination.

She is pursuing a re-enchantment of the architectural body —

one that both summons and succumbs to sensual perception, discovering

unexpected relations beyond the rational. This investigation has taken shape

across exhibitions at the Venice Biennale (2021), FRAC Centre in Orléans, and

Des Lee Gallery in St. Louis; in essays including "Machines À Rechercher"
(Log 55, Summer 2022) and "To Think a New Thing: AI, Metaphor and the
Fantasies of Knowing" (The Plan Journal 8.2, 2023); and in the book she is
currently writing, Reading What Was Never Written: Nonsensuous Similarities
in Artificial Intelligence and Divinatory Practice. She teaches at SCI-Arc and
Washington University in St. Louis.


karel@ruyklein.com