eskew dumez ripple wraps louisiana music & heritage experience museum in AI-inspired shell

envisioning the Louisiana Music and Heritage Experience Museum

Architecture firm Eskew Dumez Ripple unveils its proposal for the Louisiana Music and Heritage Experience Museum in Downtown New Orleans. Boasting instrument-like features inspired by AI-generated images, specifically via Midjourney, this 11,148 sqm contemporary art space is intended to showcase and highlight the city’s contributions to the music industry as a whole. The building sits across the street from the New Orleans Ernest N. Morial Convention Center and offers visitors a state-of-the-art exhibit space, a performance theater or soundstage, a research/archival area, a facility sales space, an expansive lobby, a museum store, and classroom/education areas. Completing the program, the architects envisioned a music club and restaurant for museum visitors to enjoy the sounds and tastes of New Orleans culture.

all renders courtesy Eskew Dumez Ripple

Eskew Dumez Ripple uses AI to turn instruments into structures

The design team at Eskew Dumez Ripple sought inspiration from music and instruments, particularly how the latter were created to generate specific sounds. One example is the outer shell of the Louisiana Music and Heritage Experience Museum, evoking the hollowed-out body of a guitar. Seen in the design of the rooftop terrace and full exterior facade, this mimicking of shape turns the relationship between exhibit and architecture quite ‘symphonic’, as the architects describe it. To conceptualize such a form, the studio employed the popular text-to-image software Midjourney, sparking wider inspiration with surprising results. With access to a vast archive of instrument images, these algorithms helped Eskew Dumez Ripple discern the nuances of form, texture, and proportion that define various musical instruments. Images of guitars, violins, saxophones, and cymbals were input, accompanied by descriptions like ‘Zumthor architecture,’ ‘dramatic lighting,’ and ‘cinematic’ to add dimensional instructions for creative outputs.

using AI to generate architectural forms inspired by musical instruments

This AI-powered research ultimately generated a vast spectrum of architectural forms and styles in the form of massing studies, mainly drawing inspiration, again, from instruments — resulting in the guitar-like design taking over the Museunm’s outer shell. ‘Form and function pair together in both cases: to produce sound from a guitar and to provide a multifunctional outdoor terrace feature for the celebration of Louisiana’s contribution to the music industry,’ notes the team. As visitors walk through each corner and room, they can intrinsically sense design notes taken from violins, guitars, and various brass instruments throughout the outer building details, with sinuous and flowing lines reflected gently and poetically throughout the Louisiana Music and Heritage Experience Museum.

vertical gallery perspective