Central London Montage

Though montage has served as an important strategy of composition and interpretation in most artistic mediums since the enlightenment, it wasn’t codified until 1923 by film maker and theorist Sergei Eisenstein. His theory of montage was inspired by an architect, Giovanni Battista Piranesi who, in his print “Ichnographia” — from Il Campo Marzio dell’antica Roma (1762), simultaneously valorized and betrayed architectural history by seamlessly representing a discordant assemblage of buildings, some of which were allegedly based on archeological sources while others were very evidently conjectural. Campo Marzio exemplifies a decompositional, temporally fragmented sensibility that has inspired architects from Nicholas Hawksmoor and John Soane in the 18th and 19th centuries to Louis Kahn, Rem Koolhaas and Lacaton & Vassal in the 20th and 21st.

The projects of this studio will deploy AI based analytical and synthetic techniques to transform an existing urban collage, a block in central London, into an architectural montage. Students will combine strategies of renovation, addition and new construction to support a hybridic program of mixed use, educational, cultural and housing components.

Occupied by the former campus of Central Saint Martins College, the entire site is presently slated for redevelopment. It features two non-descript one story warehouses (to be replaced by far greater density), a Victorian hotel (likely to be retained and surmounted with new construction), 1920s Edwardian and 1960s/1970s modern perimeter blocks (to be significantly altered and added to), a theatre/lecture hall (likely to be divided, expanded or replaced), and a truck yard in the center (which may be converted into green space and/or covered).

Students will be introduced and encouraged to use Machine Learning techniques that treat the urban context and architectural scaled spaces as signals to be analyzed and reconstructed. In this case the machine is not a generative substitute for the designer but rather an alternative gaze: a perceptual system that tends to transform categorical distinctions and binaries into continuous spectra. This is a view of the world that is fuzzy/probabilistic yet precise and may offer a new way to approach montage as a spatial editing, exploration and hybridization methodology.

Students will be given the digital tools specifically developed for this class to help make the relevant technologies accessible without any need for prior scripting experience or mathematical knowledge. The studio will work on two parallel tracks that periodically co-mingle. Working in collaboration with the MRE Development Project course, student teams will develop a multitude of programmatic scenarios upon which subsequent individual design proposals will be based. While the teams are sampling and diagramming general plans, students will experiment individually to develop formal and spatial montage techniques derived from several architectural as well as filmic concepts. AI will be used to identify and transformatively combine multiple abstract spatial configurations as well as types and styles of facades, roofs, interior spaces and other features derived from central London’s morphology and architecture.

The studio and GSD Master of Real Estate students and faculty will visit London, tour numerous buildings related to our project including John Soane’s Museum collection of Piranesi prints, and meet with several architects as well as stakeholders who are involved in the current planning for the site.