Architecture x Architecture: A Conversation on the Implications of Machine Learning on Architecture

Join us for a conversation considering the implications of machine vision and generative AI on architectural modeling and design methods. Presented in celebration of the release of Architecture X Architecture: A Dialectic, a new book from Metropolitan Architectural Practice (MAP), the conversation is grounded in MAP’s approach to architecture as not only a constructed object but as a field shaped by environmental forces, cultural legacies, and emerging modes of perception and representation.

Their research lab, MAP Studio, has spent years exploring what happens when hand drawing, digital fabrication, and AI image generation are used not as separate tools but as part of a single, integrated way of seeing. This research is presented in the book through compelling imagery and probing essays. The book’s most striking provocation is that AI-generated images including the unexpected, sometimes uncanny forms that algorithms produce, are not just visualizations of architecture, they are a new mode of thinking about it.

The panel brings together four of the book’s contributors: architect and professor Katherine Lambert, director and mediamaker Christiane Robbins, interdisciplinary artist and researcher Bill Seaman, and computational design scholar Kyle Steinfeld. Book contributor Amanda Wasielewski, an artist and academic interested in histories of art, technology, media, and architecture, will reflect on her contributions to the book in a pre-recorded introduction. Each brings a distinct perspective informed by experience across fields and rooted in an understanding of the long evolution of imaging technologies and architectural practice.

About the Panelists

Katherine Lambert, AIA, is an architect, author, and professor, and co-founder of Metropolitan Architectural Practice (MAP) and MAP Studio. Her work spans built practice and speculative research, integrating material precision and ecological intelligence with emerging methodologies in synthetic vision, environmental data, and spatial media. Through MAP Studio, she investigates evolving models of authorship and human–machine collaboration in architecture. Lambert has also contributed to architectural pedagogy through her leadership at California College of the Arts (CCA), advancing interdisciplinary and future-oriented design approaches. Her work is held in the collections of the Cooper-Hewitt Museum and the Dia Foundation.

Christiane Robbins is a director, media artist, scholar, and co-founder and research director of MAP Studio, where she leads cross-disciplinary investigations into architecture as a media ecology, integrating design research, expository visualization, and experimental media. Her practice engages with emerging technologies — including synthetic vision and algorithmic imaging — to examine how they reshape contemporary spatial and visual culture. She has served as professor at the University of Southern California and director of the Matrix Inter-Arts Program for Digital Media, advancing innovative research at the intersection of media, technology, and the arts. Robbins’s work has been exhibited internationally at MoMA, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Venice Biennale, the São Paulo Biennial, and the Gwangju Biennale, and her films and media artworks are held in major museum collections including MoMA, the Getty Museum, SFMOMA, and the Stedelijk Museum.

Bill Seaman’s work often explores an expanded media-oriented poetics through various technological means. In a process he calls Recombinant Poetics, the works often explore the combination and recombination of media elements and processes in interactive and generative works of art. Seaman enfolds image/music/text relations in these works, often creating all of the media elements and articulating the operative media-processes involved. He is self-taught as a musician/composer. He is a professor in the department of Art, Art History, and Visual Studies and in the Computational Media, Arts, and Cultures program at Duke University where he co-directs the Emergence Lab.

Kyle Steinfeld makes, writes, and teaches about computational design as a cultural practice. As an Associate Professor of Architecture at UC Berkeley, he aims to reveal the overlooked capacities of architectural computation through creative work, through writing, and through speculative tool-making. Applying techniques drawn from artificial intelligence to architectural design, his work has been exhibited at the Italian Pavilion of the Venice Architecture Biennale, at the NeurIPS workshop on Machine Learning for Creativity and Design, and at the Pavillon De l’Arsenal. His leadership roles at UC Berkeley include serving as the Associate Dean for Undergraduate Studies, and as the Faculty Director of the Master of Design program.

Amanda Wasielewski is an artist and academic whose work spans the histories of art, technology, media, and architecture. They serve as Associate Senior Lecturer of Digital Humanities and Associate Professor of Art History at Uppsala University’s Department of Archives, Libraries, and Museums. Previous teaching appointments include institutions in Stockholm, Amsterdam, and New York. The author of four monographs, their most recent book, Computational Formalism: Art History and Machine Learning (MIT Press, 2023), examines the intersection of art history and machine learning. Their artwork has been exhibited internationally.