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Project highlights and notes:

A velocity attribute is designated to each point of LIDAR data on the site by simulating its pyroclastic flow formation, which involves a fast-moving flow of volcanic ash. These velocity attributes are then extruded along their vectors of motion depending on their speed and are physicalised by the machine.

According to the initial velocity attributes, the machine carves out slows paces like balconies and courtyards, and water monitoring wells that mediate the aridness of the Gran Canarian landscape. The machine then hallucinates the infinite possible variables of the site according to the simulation - this resort is just one of them, frozen in time. The velocity attributes are then used to carve out programmatic zones, where programme is understood as spatial events characterised by their volatility, duration and intensity.

The morphologies of the buildings are designed such that their surface area is increased through their outward extrusion, creating more interfaces for the virtually curated environment to operate.

Using the centralistic logic of the human body grafted with the performativity of the circuit board, the machine then allocates a system of high-speed circulation around the site, and slower, more experiential routes that heighten the visitor’s awareness of both their physical body and their present surroundings.

Generated through a series of colliding algorithms, the machine designates 3 building species that are algorithmically varied based on their programme. The more industrial programmes graft their genetic code from the circuit board to create a spatially and temporally rationalised architecture.

The bodily species incorporates both the circuit board and the organic body’s intrinsic logic, creating a hybrid, posthuman architectural language that is split between the totally organic and the rational.

The natural species prioritises data from the landscape to form expansive and partially accessible green roofs, encouraging visitors to slow down and engage with their body as is typical when exploring the landscape in Gran Canaria.

The buildings allocate materiality to the skin through a system of intelligent voxels, colour coded based on variables like opacity, directionality and curvature. Like the body, each building cell responds to stimuli - here, following the passage of the sun to optimise solar voxel placements.

Each building on the site has two binary conditions - its colour coded, voxelised existence in the virtual domain, and its material reality that negotiates stone, marble, glass and vegetation. In an architecture generated instantaneously, however, the buildings lack history or accumulated meaning. Through machine learning, the building voxels draw associations between their own architecture and existing records - describing its architecture as if it were an organism, or as a posthuman revision of ‘Michelangelean’ media.

A final nolli plan of the scheme details the spatial distribution and accessible routes around the site. The machine articulates the plan based upon the security level of each programme - for example, the public leisure arena is spatially detailed, whereas stamped imprints are left over the high-security research laboratories by the machine in order to classify the underlying spatial information.

Ultimately, as architects we have control over both real and virtual domains, and so we have the capacity to use digital tools to generate a post-human architecture that is to be consumed across gradients of experience; from the embodied to the remote, the muscular to the ocular, in the co-presence of the multiple vectors of time that constitute our present reality.

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Click to explore video stills below: