2019 Best of Design Award for Research: Delirious Facade

Designer: LAMAS

Delirious Facade is a design research project by LAMAS that uses image-processing artificial intelligence as a generator for architectural form and ornament. The project manipulates existing Toronto facades and uses their visual signatures as the material for hybrid facades created with Google’s open-source Deep Dream algorithm. In short, the project “face swaps” by asking the computer to hallucinate one building in the image of another. The resulting facades are contextual, but they relate to historical precedent in ways that are not tied down to dominant formal narratives: They are equally at odds with modernism and postmodernism. If anything, they are “altermodern,” forged in heterochrony, in medias res, and embody the present moment in all its delirium.

Honorable Mentions

Project Name: The Water Alert and Testing Resource (WALTER)
Designer: Ennead Architects

Project Name: USModernist Masters and Library Databases
Designer: USModernist

Editor’s Picks

Project Name: Buoyant Ecologies Float Lab
Designer: Architectural Ecologies Lab

Project Name: Sound Pavilion
Designer: UNC Charlotte