EETOV reimagines an alternate utopian new york

 

Mexican photographer and architect Eetov explores an alternate architectural reality in New York, interweaving photographs of iconic structures with AI interventions. Titled ‘AI Buildings’ the series explores the application of artificial intelligence design tool DALL·E 2 through hybridization with images of streetscapes and architecture across the city.

 

Through resulting compositions of familiar urban icons reimagined in new expressions, the project investigates how bustling metropolises like New York could have been adopted if, for one reason or another, they had not been designed as we know them today.

AI buildings designboom
Flatiron Building after AI intervention | all images by Eetov

 

 

‘ai buildings’ fuses dall·e 2 and traditional photography

 

‘AI Buildings’ ponders the constant human fascination for the speculation of the imagined and its encompassing fantasy. As a result, the series reveals photographs of reality becoming intervened through propositions whose main premise is the variations of specific elements of the image — in this case, the building itself.

 

Cities as vast as New York are ideal for this exercise, notes Eetov, due to the diversity of aesthetic and morphological parameters to consider, in the interpretation to generate the variants. Over the years and through constant mutations, these cities have elegantly blurred elements of the past and exalted those buildings that continue to shape desires, under the curiosity of a discoverer.

 

Similar to the writings of Ítalo Calvino in the novel ‘Invisible Cities’, the ‘AI Buildings’ photographic series presents utopian elements of a city that will never exist. Though contrary to Calvino’s work, here they are not the product of human imagination. Instead, the photographer and architect adds to the dilemma of whether artificial intelligence can develop creativity or not — a quality that is reserved for the human species and that is widely applied in design and architecture.

AI buildings designboom
One World Trade Center after AI intervention

 

 

Eetov correlates exercises like this with historic precedents, such as when artist Jean-Marc Côté along with other French artists imagined futuristic scenarios for the year 2000 and presented them through postcards for the 1900 Paris World Fair. Years later, the Futurama exhibition at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, designed by Norman Bel Geddes, presented models that imagined North American cities 20 years in the future, where, according to the ideology of the time, the car represented a guiding axis to develop cities.

AI buildings designboom
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum after AI intervention

AI buildings designboom
Little Island after AI intervention

AI buildings designboom
The Vessel after AI intervention

AI buildings designboom
The Oculus after AI intervention

 

 

1/6
1
 
1
 
1
 
1
 
1
 
1
 

project info:

 

name: AI Buildings: New York
designer: Eetov

 

designboom has received this project from our DIY submissions feature, where we welcome our readers to submit their own work for publication. see more project submissions from our readers here.

 

edited by: ravail khan | designboom