With his new project, Symbiotic Architecture, architect and computational designer Manas Bhatia imagines a strange architectural future by using the potential of the artificial intelligence (AI) tool Midjourney. In this idea, an Indian designer, who was inspired by the Hyperion tree, imagines a future where people live in apartment towers that grow and breathe together and look like giant hollow redwood trees.
The architect asks, “Can the envelope we live in breathe like other things do, or do we have to live in concrete and glass boxes with air conditioning?” Manas Bhatia’s conceptual research explores the relationship between living things, nature, and architecture.
He shows his ideas as a series of AI-generated images and drawings of surreal “living” apartments that are completely at one with nature. Scroll down and check out some of his amazing works in the gallery below.
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Image credits: manasbatia
With Symbiotic Architecture, Manas Bhatia’s work goes beyond designing buildings physically. Now that he is interested in artificial intelligence and strange architectural ideas and designs, he wonders how patterns appear in nature, how networks form in the homes of tiny creatures, and how plants respond to natural stimuli and other theories.
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The Indian architects and designers also think about how people are deeply connected to nature and how our experiences with nature have shaped us to create a vision of a “utopian future.” In this imagined version of the future, buildings are not concrete or steel machines. Instead, they are living places that can grow to meet the ever-growing housing needs.
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Manas Bhatia uses the AI program Midjourney to create this symbiotic architecture. This helps his conceptual research ideas come to life. The architect gave the program a series of text-based cues, such as the words “giant,” “hollow,” “tree,” “stairs,” “facade,” and “plants,” to make it create a variety of images.
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Image credits: manasbatia
Then, as part of an ongoing process, the prompts were changed over and over to get the results that were wanted. A result is a strange group of apartment buildings that look like they belong in nature.
The insides of hollowed-out Hyperion trees are turned into a living, breathing architecture, with apartments facing inwards and natural light flooding in to make a bright, magical natural space.
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Manas Bhatia says in his new Symbiotic Architecture series that designers can make better designs by learning from natural systems that are already in place. “I have always been interested in how insects and other small animals make their homes in nature.”
Ants, for example, build their homes by making complex networks in the ground. What a cool world it would be to live in if people could build buildings that grow and breathe like plants.
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With the help of technology, this new approach, which uses knowledge of natural systems, can be used to make designs that are more biologically integrated and have a lot of different uses. With the help of new tools and technology, architects and designers will be able to turn their ideas directly into drawings, renderings, and 3D models, which will make the industry faster and more efficient.
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Image credits: manasbatia
As with the AI tool Midjourney, the most important thing is the choice of words that creates the images you want. Sometimes, you may not get the result you want, but the output can lead to a different idea that the user may not have thought of at first.
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Image credits: manasbatia
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Image credits: manasbatia