Abstract
Role-playing, long used in theatre to test and exchange ideas, thrives on the interplay of distinct voices. In traditions like the classical comedy, archetypal characters improvise conflicts of value and worldview, using humor to explore difficult subjects obliquely. Exaggeration and collision make contradictions visible, destabilize assumptions, and open new ways of thinking.
Dialogues on Habitat applies this dramaturgical logic to an interactive prototype that stages live, polyphonic AI-driven conversations around archival images of Dutch modernist planning. Here, digitized holdings from the Dutch architecture collection and curated bibliographies inform fictional AI personas, each invested in the Dutch landscape from a distinct epistemic position. This multiplicity resists AI’s homogenizing tendencies, sustaining friction and divergence.
In the proposed prototype, an unfolding AI conversation foregrounds frictions within the collection, and human users may join in, add impressions, critiques, and memories to a growing meta-archive of subjective reception. The AI draws lateral links across the archive, improvising speculative “tours” that recontextualize planning history and ecological thinking in Modernism.
Situated at the intersection of critical architectural historiography, HCI, and environmental history, the project employs an artistic research method to blur fact and fiction, thereby complicating the historiography of the Dutch polders - new fabricated land for new architectural form. Here, artistic research in architecture is understood as a mode of inquiry in which design and performance are not just vehicles for presentation but integral means of producing knowledge, where the act of staging and enacting ideas generates insights that cannot be reached through conventional historiography alone. Through staged dialogue, the research seeks not consensus but multiplicity, foregrounding the frictions in architectural representation that shape our understanding of landscape, planning, and the modernist imagination.
Dialogues on Habitat applies this dramaturgical logic to an interactive prototype that stages live, polyphonic AI-driven conversations around archival images of Dutch modernist planning. Here, digitized holdings from the Dutch architecture collection and curated bibliographies inform fictional AI personas, each invested in the Dutch landscape from a distinct epistemic position. This multiplicity resists AI’s homogenizing tendencies, sustaining friction and divergence.
In the proposed prototype, an unfolding AI conversation foregrounds frictions within the collection, and human users may join in, add impressions, critiques, and memories to a growing meta-archive of subjective reception. The AI draws lateral links across the archive, improvising speculative “tours” that recontextualize planning history and ecological thinking in Modernism.
Situated at the intersection of critical architectural historiography, HCI, and environmental history, the project employs an artistic research method to blur fact and fiction, thereby complicating the historiography of the Dutch polders - new fabricated land for new architectural form. Here, artistic research in architecture is understood as a mode of inquiry in which design and performance are not just vehicles for presentation but integral means of producing knowledge, where the act of staging and enacting ideas generates insights that cannot be reached through conventional historiography alone. Through staged dialogue, the research seeks not consensus but multiplicity, foregrounding the frictions in architectural representation that shape our understanding of landscape, planning, and the modernist imagination.
| Original language | English |
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| Publication status | Published - 2025 |
Publication series
| Name | UNFRAMING KNOWLEDGE: Artistic Research Beyond Theory and Practice |
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