Research
Architecture X Architecture:
A Dialectic
Architecture X Architecture: A Dialectic reimagines the visual and conceptual frameworks of architectural design and visualization, positioning machine vision and generative AI not merely as tools but as transformative agents within the intricate ecosystems of architectural practice.
Metropolitan Architectural Practice (MAP) has engaged with digital technologies that have not only reconfigured imaging processes but have fundamentally altered how architects may conceive, iterate, and materialize spatial form.
Research House Resilience Study
Coming soon.
Threshold of the Frontier, v1.0- 2023-24
interrogates the infrastructural gigantism of data centers proliferating across the American West. MAP juxtaposes these speculative, sci-fi-inflected computational bunkers within mytho-historicized landscapes. Here, the aestheticized representations of these landscapes intertwine with the inescapable material realities of mass-scale computation: the staggering extract energy consumption required for data generation, storage, cooling, and maintenance, and its consequential impoverishments.
In this sense, the very infrastructures that sustain our digital existence become covert agents of depletion, accelerating the conditions of desertification and climate crisis.
tOpography of chance
“Topography of Chance” offers a composite visualization representing the explosion of accessible, generative AI platforms, 2022.
This project astutely depicts a discrete, perhaps fleeting moment, in architectural practice - a rare instance of experimental modality.
It proposes a position that is neither fixed nor predetermined, rather one that emerges via chance and contingency.”
“AI art is a bit like a first trip to a casino...”
@ Sugar Subversive, April, 2023
No Place Like Utopia
Gregory Ain is the focus of a long standing project, including the documentary “No Place Like Utopia”, directed and produced by MAP Studio.
This film is based on MAP’s extensive and rigorous research that maintained that Ain's 1950 MoMA Exhibition House, "Our View of the Future", had never been destroyed as had been alleged by architectural historians.
This Future Has a Past
This Future has a Past… is a cross-disciplinary installation first exhibited at the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale and then at the Center for Architecture, NYC in 2017.
It reflects upon the elusive histories of Los Angeles and architect Gregory Ain during an extraordinary, tenuous moment in the United States.
The underpinnings of Ain’s practice were sited in a progressive, hybrid approach to urban planning in its co-mingling of “community modernist” and housing development. Ain’s ideals were met with stark scrutiny during the fiercely contested narrowcasting of the polarized politics endemic of the McCarthy era.
This Future has a Past… traces this vital and all-but-forgotten milieu - revealing an intimate liaison of architecture and (sub)urban development - one caught within the rupturing social and political topographies of the mid-20th century United States.
I-5_PASSING
MAP’s “I-5_Passing (52 Food Marts)” is a journey...a journey of aesthetic inquiry across disciplines, across cultural discourses, across personal narratives, across regional perspectives and across the mythos of California itself.