A City Created By Keywords
Artificial Intelligence is such a glorious, glorious thing. Head architect at Ant Studio in India, Manas Bhatia, has found a way to utilise artificial intelligence in his work. His series, called Manas Bhatia’s AI x Future Cities, is a selection of images completely created by the open beta website, Midjourney. He just entered prompts to make this sprawling city. The power of machine intelligence, am I right?
The recipe plugged into Midjourney to create these images was a mashup of keywords you’d normally throw into Google: “symbiotic, biomimetic, and fluidic apartments made of algae and bioluminescent material that act as air purification towers in a futuristic city HD HQ hyperreal photoreal.”
Bhatia really wanted to showcase the importance of urban increase in a rapidly growing future. The images show a sprawl of futuristic towering biophilic air-purifying residential buildings with green exteriors. Sustainability is at the forefront of this design, with the biomimetic structures reducing carbon emissions by using vertical gardens and other cool additions.
The use of AI is becoming somewhat trendy these days, with tools like Midjourney and DALL⬝E and Stable Diffusion becoming the go-to to think up sprawling landscapes for the future.
As is the case for most of this artwork, it feels derivative of green city projects we have covered in the past. Sweeping white boulevards going absolutely nowhere contrast with the lush rainforest these cities are seemingly built on top of. Finally narrow towers poke out of the foliage with wide breathing spaces between each, portraying a future where we are both space and nature rich.
While AI can quickly scamp out sketches of the future, a human touch will still be required to make sense of this Doctor Seuss madness for a few years yet.
By 2050, 70% of the world’s populations are going to be living in urban areas. Green spaces have a significant impact on people’s wellbeing as well as air pollution and smog, which left unchecked can reduce lifespans per person by at least two years. This is before we even get into heat mitigation and C02 trapping.
AI images like this may be flights of fancy to a certain degree, but having green urban landscapes is an imperative.
