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The public release of OpenAI’s artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot Chat-GPT has recently brought AI to the forefront of the public imagination. Alongside mass fascination with its capabilities and potential uses, its rollout has been accompanied by ardent discussions around the legibility, trustworthiness, accountability, and even agency of AI programmes. For specialists, these issues are far from new, and the design-inflected question of AI explainability has been a pressing concern for programmers and user-interface experts for some time [1].
These recent debates have seen a resurfacing of the language of ‘black boxes’ in a broad public forum. In this context, the phrase is often used critically to conceptualise an understanding gap between a system and its users. It refers to an unknowable space that emerges when a system cannot easily ‘show its working’ to either its users or designers. For many, an accusation of a platform either being or incorporating a black box relates to the impossibility of full control or oversight over it. This typically arises from a lack of comprehension of the inner workings of that system. Prompts go into a black box style algorithm, and information comes out, but the connection between the two cannot be fully understood, even by its programmers [2].
In other words, the computational metaphor of a black box is not associated with colour or form, but with the notion that a system’s output can not necessarily be deciphered by analysing its inputs. It operates as an unknowable function in the passage of information. The sense of it performing like a ‘box’ has little to do with storage, but rather relates to an intractable containment of hidden knowledge that creates ethically-significant problems of causality (cause and effect) and accountability. For similar, largely symbolic, reasons, the terminology of black boxes finds another well-known (mis)use in the field of aviation. Again, the persistent metaphor is associated with the containment of something, in this case, the rarefied information about events that transpired in the final minutes of an ill-fated aircraft. In both, a black box metaphor appears at a moment of uncertainty between causes and effects.
The design of theatre auditoriums can help to conceptualise some of the consequences of living with black boxes at a human scale and in a spatial sense. In his influential book Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle and Modern Culture, cultural theorist Jonathan Crary points to the adaptations that Richard Wagner made to the design of the Festspielhaus in Bayreuth as a turning point in the dramatist’s ability to dominate audience attention [3]. This purpose-built festival hall, opened in 1876, saw Wagner make now-famous infrastructural interventions that would, he hoped, encourage his audiences to engage with the fictional worlds presented onstage in a more absorbed, even hypnotic way. Removing the sideways facing booths from the seating, visually shielding his orchestra from the audience and dimming the lights in the auditorium are perhaps the best cited examples of the type of adaptations he demanded.
Crary, however, emphasises the significance of a less well-known innovation, an optical effect that would go on to be known as Wagner’s ‘mystic abyss’, in achieving a desired totalising engrossment of his audience in the presented scene [4]. This effect – the ‘mystic abyss’ – refers to the intentional insertion of unknowable distance between the stage space and auditorium achieved by separating the two with a series of receding, perspective-distorting proscenium arches. This intervention disrupted all continuous sight lines between stage space and the auditorium, thus perceptively and epistemologically severing the visual bonds between real space and fiction. In so doing, the mystic abyss demanded that audience members undergo a more fully-realised abandonment within the scene presented. They were encouraged to ‘pick a side’ between fiction and reality in a perceptive sense.
Contemporary black box theatres, arguably and ironically, represent a move away from these hallucinatory priorities. While on the one hand, some elements carry an inheritance from Wagner and early modern scenographers (their blank flexibility, typically low house-lighting and matt-black surfaces that visually privilege the fictional space on stage) on the other hand, their frequent ‘in the round’ layout means that their audiences tend to be more self-aware and often have the impression of sharing the event space with the performers. Again, the metaphorical name black box does not refer to their colour or shape, but rather to a more generalised aesthetic of containment of a space of fiction in a self-consistent interiority (box), supported by a humility of the playing space that bends to meet the various fictions that inhabit it (black). Unlike Wagner’s passive, hypnotised audiences, stripped of autonomy – if we are to follow Crary on this – these groups inhabit the same forum as the performers [5]. In this case, the ‘suspension of disbelief’ tends to be requested rather than insisted upon as the border of the theatrical universe is situated close to the entrance to the auditorium rather than between proscenium arches.
In a theatrical black box – unlike an AI-powered chatbot or a flight responder – the human element is ‘on the inside’, sharing a space and collaborating somewhat in the event that is live theatre. It might be hard to convey the full essence of what happens within a temporary theatrical universe to someone who never saw the show, but each event is always a joint venture.
The question of explainability in AI is not a settled issue in computer science, with some developers believing that too much potential is lost in the process of making an algorithm fully explainable to humans. In the context of these decisions being made away from the public forum, it is important for the rest of us to consider what costs must be paid in terms of accountability and autonomy in exchange for the enchantment and wonder earned across a mystic abyss.
Future Reference is supported by the Arts Council through the Architecture Project Award Round 2 2022.
Contains Spoilers.
The Brutalist was directed by Brady Corbet and written by Corbet and Mona Fastvold. Both were interested in the subject matter due to the parallels between film-making and architecting, in particular the challenges of aligning artists’ creative vision with the expectations of their patrons [1].
Beginning in 1947, the saga spans decades, telling the immigration experience of László Tóth (Adrien Brody), a Jewish Hungarian-born architect. A holocaust survivor who emigrates to America, Tóth eventually comes to the attention of a wealthy industrialist, Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce). Van Buren’s commission for Tóth to design a multi-purpose community building initially seems a salvation. Through Tóth’s obsession and Van Buren’s greed, patronage eventually descends to exploitation.
The making entailed nine years of dedication for Corbet and Fastvold (a gestation equal to many buildings). When initial budgets for €28 million made its realisation impossible in Hollywood, it was filmed in Hungary for an incredibly low budget of $10 million [2]. Production design was even hindered by material shortages from the Ukraine war. The entire 3-and-a-half-hour movie was filmed on a very tight schedule, a mere 33 days of shooting. It has been frequently compared to the film Oppenheimer, which had a budget of $100 million and was filmed in a brisk 57 days.
Throughout the film, a number of storylines explore concepts of intent and narrative. When his cousin’s wife accuses László of improper advances, it changes his fortunes irrevocably. We never see evidence of this advance, like many key interactions in this film it is left open to our speculation. However, years later a distraught László references it, saying the allegations were invented because “they do not want us here,” despairing at his incapability to define the narrative as a Jewish immigrant to America. On numerous other occasions in the film, individuals fabricate stories to reflect an imagined or preferred reality [3].
In the epilogue, we are presented with a similar question of authenticity. László’s niece Zsófia, who left America to become an Israeli citizen, presents a retrospective of his work at the first Venice Architecture Biennale in 1980. In her speech she reveals a significant insight: the architecture of the Van Buren Institute was a reinterpretation of the spaces her uncle experienced in the concentration camps. She claims he based certain spaces on rooms in Buchenwald, transforming them with soaring ceilings.
Tóth watches on, wheelchair-bound and mute, as his niece states “I speak for you now”. It is left ambiguous if Zsófia’s version actually was his design intent [4]. She could be retrospectively applying a narrative to suit her world-view, placing Toth’s Jewish identity and trauma at the forefront of his design philosophy and success [5].
We’re told her uncle allegedly outlined an apolitical architectural philosophy in his memoirs, his designs were: “machines with no superfluous parts… they indicate nothing. They tell nothing. They simply are”. This unsentimental outlook gives the second act of the film its name: The hard core of beauty, and the title and theory are lifted from a Peter Zumthor essay of the same name [6]. This is also consistent with one of Tóth’s monologues about architecture earlier in the film [7].
Zsófia ends with a statement that seems to dismiss the creative process and design philosophy we’ve seen in the previous three and a half hours: “no matter what the others try and sell you, it is the destination, not the journey.”
The application of new interpretations outside of a creator’s control, transpositions of meaning, are commonplace in architectural history [8]. As one example, Brutalism, with its muscular, fortress-like forms, is sometimes today associated with federal dominance, even authoritarianism, or the destructive bluntness of urban renewal [9]. At its origin it was often a hopeful, utopian style with ambition to rebuild and rehouse from the rubble of war. The term brutalism originates from raw concrete, béton brut, not brutality. Some film critics have pondered if the ‘brutalist’ in this story is in fact the sinister Harrison Lee Van Buren, applying another new meaning to a brutalist.
Despite receiving ten Oscar nominations, the film has prompted a negative reaction from some architects and architecture critics [10]. It takes many liberties with architectural history; the inaccuracies have been extensively described elsewhere [11]. Its portrayal of the architect as an uncompromising visionary, unwilling to work for others, is reminiscent of Ayn Rand’s problematic Howard Roarke in The Fountainhead. The film’s sombre, serious tone that has led some to incorrectly believe it is, at least partially, a true story [12]. Tied up with the complexities of artistic authorship is the expectation that a serious film like this has a responsibility to be accurate and realist, lest fiction be mistaken for fact.
Many architects and architectural critics find Laszlo’s buildings as depicted unconvincing, particularly so the Van Buren Institute [13]. It is hard to judge the institute, as filmmakers had to be thrifty in how they shot it. Most scenes, for example, had to decide whether to focus solely on floor or ceiling. Only segments of the building were constructed as large-scale models, the rest replicated by computer generated imagery and implied off-camera [14]. A certain number of real sites were used around Budapest to complete the impression. The architecture of the institute is therefore not one thing, a holistic vision, but several fractured things. This portrayal through fleeting glimpses creates a suspense and mystique worthy of a marauding horror-movie monster. Similarly the more we see, the less captivating it becomes [15].
The lukewarm reception of the film’s architecture is all the more fascinating following revelations about its use of Artificial Intelligence. After controversy around the use of AI in post-production to enhance Brody and Jones’ Hungarian accents, an interview with production designer Judy Becker was unearthed. Becker stated that the film’s architecture consultant, Griffen Frazen, used the AI engine Midjourney to quickly create three Brutalist buildings for the film, at an early stage of development. A sample image provided in the article imitates hand-rendering in graphite or charcoal. Becker went on to explain “Now I will have these digital prints redrawn by an illustrator to create mythical buildings” [16]. Corbet has defended the collaboration and creativity of his team, stating that all renderings ultimately used were hand-drawn by artists. A24, however, released a statement that two digital renderings in the end sequence video were generated by AI [17].
With the fleeting glimpses we see of Tóth’s other buildings, it would hardly be a surprise if generative AI was used, even as just a tool in their creation. The buildings appear clunky and varied, mostly resembling incomplete appropriations of brutalism and international-style buildings. These results would be typical of the nascent abilities of AI image generation during the film’s creation (it has already greatly advanced since). Their uncanny quality is reminiscent of what Neil Leach describes as “machine hallucinations” [18]. Familiar yet unfamiliar, they resemble both everything and nothing.
The Brutalist has generated a very rich debate and numerous interpretations (see articles referenced, the list grows daily). Ultimately the architecture in the film is a vehicle, almost incidental to the telling of the characters’ stories. Corbet was less interested in an exercise of faithfully recreating accurate historical architecture, his main intent with the buildings and spaces shown was to externalise the mind of his sullen protagonist [19]. Considering the time and budget constraints on the production, the selective use of AI could be argued as pragmatic.
In terms of who defines the narrative around this film, it's unlikely that the architecture world’s unease with aspects of the film will have much impact. Its enormous success has allegedly generated a new appreciation for Brutalism outside architectural circles, at a time when its buildings are facing widespread erasure from public and private entities [20].
If the film prompts audiences to visit and value the authentic work of architects in post-war America: Breuer, Gropius, Le Corbusier, Rudolph, Kahn, Saarinen, Goldberg, Pei, Yamasaki, Weese; even if one is sceptical of the journey, the destination will be worth it.
The Brutalist tells the story of, in its words, ‘a principled artist’. The film has thus faced criticism after revelations that Artificial Intelligence was used in its making. The plot, production and critical response raise interesting questions about authenticity in design. Who determines artistic value: creators, patrons, critics, or future generations?
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Dublin’s North Georgian Core is one of the city’s most important built assets, comprising a pioneering network of 18th and early 19th-century streets and squares developed by successive generations of the Gardiner family and by other pocket-sized family estates. Although vast tracts were demolished during the 20th century, including fine terraces on Summerhill and Grenville Street, Gloucester Diamond, Rutland Street and beyond, much survives in the area extending from the North Circular Road in the east to Dominick Street and Parnell Square in the west. And unlike the South Georgian Core, it is still densely lived in, populated by thousands of residents in a bricked landscape that is topographically more stimulating and culturally more diverse than its southside cousin.
Despite these qualities, Dublin’s greatest ‘known unknown’, our best kept public secret, is that the North Georgian Core is floundering in a deleterious cycle of substandard uses and ever-accelerating unauthorised development in a property investment model – to call it for what it is – that is fundamentally at odds with the protection, custodianship and even the future survival of the area’s architectural heritage. Worse still, it is consolidating social injustice and chronic poverty in an area that has the least capacity to address it. Under this pernicious regime, the type of high-quality urban homes in historic buildings promoted by multiple central and local government ‘adaptive reuse’ strategies, plus RIAI best practice models, have not the slightest prospect of being delivered.
This is because there has been a massive shift in investment patterns in the area, not just in the face of the current housing crisis, but also in the aftermath of the last economic recession. Where previously own-door, old-school, budget bedsits populated some Georgian houses in so-called ‘pre-‘63’ formats, now, as a result of the ‘bedsit ban’ introduced under new legislation in 2009, many are set out as under-the-radar ‘units’ packed with beds and bunkbeds in a housing standards limbo-land that constitutes neither apartment nor hostel accommodation, but mere rooms into which a kitchen and bathroom have been squeezed, with accompanying top-dollar rents. In other cases, such as houses on Gardiner Street and Gardiner Place, where families, students and children until recently lived in reasonable quality 1990s-type Georgian house conversions, the properties have been sold over their heads to investors specialising in providing homeless and emergency accommodation to the State through enormously lucrative contracts [1].
In countless other instances, where Georgian houses were in redundant commercial use: solicitors offices, local newspapers, community group facilities, tourist hostels, religious buildings – all providing multiple opportunities for high-quality, sensitively divided apartment homes as espoused by the Dublin City Development Plan – they have instead transitioned to unauthorised high-density accommodation of the poorest quality without so much as a planning notice being erected, often identifiable by blinds kept firmly closed apparently under landlord decree. One case in point is a house on Gardiner Place, where a fine late-Georgian property was used for many years as offices for Community Action Network (CAN). Following its recent sale, the house is now filled over four storeys with no less than 34 advertised bed berths, without any planning permission for change of use, or the resulting fire and disabled access requirements [2].
The areas affected may surprise readers: they’re not backwater side streets. They include flagship Georgian squares, such as Parnell Square, where unauthorised mutilation of its mid-18th century houses continues to spread; principal city arteries like North Frederick Street, set out by the Wide Streets Commissioners; and architecturally significant streetscapes like Belvedere Place and Gardiner Street. Even rare early-Georgian houses next to the Department of Education on Marlborough Street have recently been subdivided and, in one shocking case, entirely gutted from top to toe. There is a rulebook for the majority, but in the North Georgian Core there is one rule only: don’t ask and keep the head down. Even certain estate agents are in on the act, typically advertising Georgian houses in commercial use as a series of ‘rooms’, and posting only exterior photographs in their listings to limit the evidential record from prior to their inevitable unauthorised conversion.
To be clear, the time referenced is not the 1970s. Instead, this has been the steady pattern of the most recent decade, happening in our own time, in an era of laws, regulations and policy guidance relating to housing standards and protected structures, and it is presently accelerating at an alarming rate. The phenomenon is not a function of the relaxation of planning laws in relation to emergency refugee accommodation, of which the North Georgian Core also hosts a significant concentration, but rather an out-of-control development model in which the State itself is a prime actor at central and local government levels [3]. This is exercised through funding for homeless and emergency accommodation services, approved housing bodies, private sector companies, housing assistance payments and related strands. All providing vital supports in an era of massive pressure in Ireland’s housing sector, but manifestly unaccompanied by regulatory checks and balances.
So complex is this network, particularly its hazy intersection with private-sector providers, that no one public agency has a picture of the scale of what is happening on Dublin’s northside. And as housing is such a hot political issue, Dublin City Council’s planning enforcement section is both reluctant and inherently compromised to deal with matters housing-related, even in cases where protected structures are suffering material damaged, as the council itself is a statutory housing and de facto homeless authority. Not a single conservation enforcement officer, never mind a team, is employed by that section for a city with over 9,000 protected structures.
The impacts on the North Georgian Core are manifold: the most obvious being a consolidation of inequality in an area which is already one of the most marginalised and densely populated in the State. Secondly, the illegal damage being undertaken to protected structures, including the gutting and subdivision of historic interiors, the insertion of PVC windows and doors, marring facades and streetscapes, and a total lack of proper conservation-led investment in facades, roofs, and exterior envelopes. This represents an assault on Ireland’s finite cultural heritage which in many cases, incredibly, the State itself is indirectly facilitating.
But most impactful is the displacement of any quality investment in the area, either in historic buildings or in new developments, where the tens if not hundreds of millions of euro flowing into the district annually should actually be targeted. Instead, bargain-basement accommodation – it cannot reasonably be called housing – has now become the governing market for the district. There is absolutely no prospect of change unless the State itself intervenes in this deleterious cycle.
It is vital that the new government gets to grips with this issue. This must include the establishment of a dedicated conservation planning enforcement unit in Dublin City Council staffed by accredited building conservation personnel. The spatial framework for the Strategic Development Regeneration Area (SDRA) for Dublin 1, being prepared under the Dublin City Development Plan, must prioritise investment in existing historic private properties as a policy action, and not just default solely to regeneration of social housing and lands in public ownership [4]. This should include street-by-street design strategies informed by architectural conservation and public realm expertise.
In a Dublin solution to a Dublin problem, 80% grant funding should be offered for large-scale conservation works to Georgian exteriors to draw long-term reluctant property interests in from the cold. And central government must better coordinate the regional and national distribution of emergency housing for our most vulnerable citizens so that Dublin, which currently hosts 80% of the State’s homeless accommodation, a staggering 82% of which is hosted in the city centre, is placed on a more sustainable footing [5].
Dublin’s North Georgian Core is witness to both a shameful degradation of unique architectural heritage, and a consolidation of inequality in an area which is already one of the most marginalised and densely populated in the State. This article is a sounding of the alarm, and a call for urgent action.
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Statistics and climate action have a difficult relationship. Sometimes the statistics presented are not easily relatable, appearing abstract and therefore impersonal. Other times they can be presented at such a large scale, they seem to overwhelm our ability to act on the climate emergency. On this occasion, statistics were a starting point for Demolition Take Down, a research project initiated by two architects.
Let’s begin with the headline number of nine million tonnes of construction and demolition (C&D) waste produced in Ireland in 2021 as calculated by the Environmental Protection Agency [1]. This amounts to a staggering 48% of all waste produced in Ireland that same year [2]. In 2022, the Central Statistics Office estimated that the construction industry accounted for roughly 6% of the employed population in Ireland [3]. These three statistics are not absolutes, they fluctuate year on year [4]. It is the disproportionate relationship between the size of the waste production relative to the size of the producer that is the principal concern. This sparked a year-long project to understand why a small percentage of people had helped to produce such a large percentage of our nation’s waste. The gains from a potential change in attitudes and behaviour within this 6% club seemed a hopeful outcome to aim for.
This project was conducted in three parts. Part one gathered information primarily from a series of in-depth interviews with professionals operating in the construction industry on the back of an industry sentiment survey. Part two focused on an inter-disciplinary learning environment between students of architecture and of property economics. Part three was about dissemination and raising public awareness about the issue through a large-scale installation and supporting events, hosted by IMMA during September 2024.
In the beginning, care was taken to remain neutral in order to act as a go-between for various stakeholders in the industry. We appreciated a nuanced approach was required. The project departed from solely analysing statistical facts towards collating anecdotal evidence. It therefore painted a clearer picture of tensions between the economic mindsets of vested interests and the aspirational gumption of activists and academics.
One area that this writer was focused on was the decision-making prior to buildings being demolished. The temptation to point towards the circular economy as the solution to C&D waste was resisted. While it is acknowledged that circularity is to be encouraged, it tends to make the unsustainable sustainable if relied upon. A lack of resources, imagination, skills, and knowledge is affecting top-down and bottom-up decisions, leading to the total removal of buildings from the built environment they each helped to shape. An engineer in a local authority put it rather gloomily “The only way C&D waste will reduce in this country is if there is another economic recession! It is unlikely that C&D waste will be reduced for the right reasons” [5]. This is not a future to wish for.
The theme for this series of articles, "Future Reference", is apt because, in some instances, the total removal of a building or neighbourhood can make our future points of reference more uncertain. If you keep taking pieces of neighbourhood away incrementally, there is a chance that some people will later grieve for what is gone. They might walk through their neighbourhood where a building was demolished, replaced, or left as an empty site primed for future investment. Even if they can’t pinpoint what used to be there, they might feel a sense of loss. Some argue a reliance on demolition as the political tool of regeneration is leading us towards a nowhere place. In solving present problems, and searching for a better future, do we really need to erase the past?
Public attitudes are the life and death of a building. Let us pause for a moment to consider problematic human behaviours like pursuing the path of least resistance through urban sprawl or the deliberate decline of parts of our cities and towns. Perhaps this momentary pause might take us from a top-down view – that in order to regenerate we must obliterate the past – towards a bottom-up approach: that sometimes the answer may be selective demolition, or even none at all. Whether empowering citizens to have more agency over their local development plans through delegated power would result in less waste is debatable; it would require an Irish construction industry that has the skill set and knowledge required to adapt existing buildings for new uses in a viable manner.
Ultimately it will be our shared cultural and social values that will allow us to reduce carbon emissions and retain embodied carbon within our existing buildings. The challenge will be how to unlock the power of culture to get things moving in the direction of adaptive reuse. It is this writer’s hope that the Demolition Take Down project can build upon our research to date and find like-minded practitioners within the 6% club who are interested in rethinking the value system currently associated with our existing buildings.
To encourage positive change, we intend to keep questioning and pushing back against current methods of practice and policy in Ireland. By working together, stitching new within old, we will ultimately make no "newer or greater contravention" [6] to the quality of our built environment.
Architects are part of a problematic industry that produced nine million tonnes of construction and demolition waste in 2021 alone. This figure is projected to grow each year unless action is taken. Should the construction industry continue its current economic model, which encourages and facilitates the needless creation of waste?
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