I asked AI to Design a New Urbanist Seaside Town

I wanted to know if mid-journey AI could help me design a new urbanist town like Seaside Florida from the 1980s and the results from this experiment were mind-blowing so here's where Seaside is located it's in the panhandle of Florida this is the original new urbanist town and we're going to jump into mid-journey AI to see what it does now these results are interesting but quite great and also questionable at the same time and we take a look at these buildings the mix of uses it's kind of wonky the way that it connects the streets but it's certainly referencing real life scenarios particularly this massive stadium-sized parking situation over here looking over at this plan the amount of detail that it puts into these things is incredible the public space in the center the buildings that envelop it this one I found to be really amazing this is like the epitome of suburban contemporary modernism Garden city-esque sort of things but the delineation the buildings is really nice but I wasn't entirely happy with the results so we ran the model again to see what happened and this is what it gave us this time look at the separation of uses the residential is clearly separate from the commercial there's sort of a mall little parking lot situation going on over here but there's this weird interesting kind of fun Pool Central Town thing this one has a similar pool pond Center thing going on but what I'm not seeing is anything addressing the water directly until we get to this model but this parking situation up here in the north is massive look at the teeth on this one it's really exciting the possibilities of what this technology can generate but we have to be more specific so we ran the model again this time being really particular about what we want and how we want the configuration of buildings and spaces to be and this is what it gave us this time we have a centered square with sort of a walkable Central District but much larger buildings it's not really clear what these are used for and also the coastline went away this situation is a little bit closer to the real life Seaside look at the the difference in the roof colors might dictate what the use of the building is but it doesn't have a clear Town Center sort of thing but there is this maybe interesting Boardwalk sort of area looking at this version we're getting a little bit closer there's definitely a central area there's sort of a pedestrian walk in the Middle look how it hides the parking right so there's you come you can park in the town center and then there's parking in this interior block of the Promenade and then this one is totally interesting you drive through the place and there's the Central Parking along the boulevard I don't know what the purple ring is but there is some sort of pedestrian walk over on the east side and then on the West Side there's this Gathering area but it's not clear exactly what it is but I have to say that these are not too far off from some of the preliminary sketches we might do during a charette so we ran the model again this time asking for variations of number three just to see what it would give us so this is based on one of the previous outputs and it starts to rearrange the elements you'll notice different colors or roofs different configurations of buildings but sort of in the same scheme this one has sort of a central water park-esque kind of swimming pool area with maybe little Lounge buildings or Clubhouse buildings for gathering this is quite interesting this one has a very odd parking situation and I'm not really sure what to make of the public spaces everything seems kind of separated it doesn't have a new urbanist vibe that I will be looking at except for this one little area here moving along to this one this is quite cool the way that it has these sort of white teeth along the beach and then this little square Bandshell Gathering area is really interesting and this one has this really neat little Pond that pulls you up through the beach and it seems like the buildings are following the the pattern of Coastline and I can imagine the little spaces in between them so this is starting to get a little bit better in some ways but it's not quite there yet I think the machine needs a little push so we're going to give it the actual plan of Seaside this was the plan that was drawn before the actual construction I believe I may be wrong but this is this is one of the original drawings so we're going to give it to Mid journey and see what it does this is exciting oh my goodness oh wow okay so now the town plan has a more rectilinear patternation I just made up that word look at this look at the way that you can walk through to the beach look at the organization of these buildings most of these it seems are these sort of residential lock sorts of things there's a repetitive squares there's a little tennis court thing in the corner this is almost like the real thing this is amazing this one this is more like the Suburban Country Golf Club thing that my family grew up in so we're not going to address that this one this is cool this has sort of a double access or double yeah double access pedestrian sort of thing one going north south from the water and then another one going east west through the center of the plan and wow and look at the the Promenade has this sort of it could be like little commercial stalls and up here look at these Texas donuts oh wow so it's got these little teeth in the South it's got these little Texas Donuts up on the North side so this is really Fantastical let's create a version based on version four and see what it does this is getting really good and let's pop this open so version one look at this park situation that points out to the Waterfront and the entire center of town is this park it might be too much public space for the amount of residential here but it's uh it's interesting interesting idea I love the the tightness that the urban feeling of the way that it could figure the buildings on this one this seems like a Corporate Park uh with not really a much not really much habitable space and this seems to be a balance of everything look at that this kept both of The Pedestrian axes it has the residential in the South this is this is amazing so do I think this technology is ready to unleash for a final product not yet but what it can be really good for is to generate lots and lots of ideas at the beginning phase of a project and then to be using those as inspiration for further developments or to create a variety of Concepts overnight to show a client to say hey this is kind of what it could look like and the amazing thing is we can use work that we've all done in the past to inspire the machine to create things that are more reasonable more realistic that are more true to our intentions versus generating something that doesn't make sense but they might actually take us backwards what's not clear to me yet is whether the AI can recognize the difference between different uses and buildings between for example residential and commercial or if it can understand public Space versus streets or if it can understand ground versus ocean so I'm interested to see if I can take this and generate things like figure grounds or land use maps and things like that to see if it really understands these Concepts and then to feed it that information and see how it applies it to site plans in the future this is the first of many episodes of the seaside AI design and we're going to generate things like Street sections and aerial renderings and all of the different kinds of drawings that would essentially be needed to build a new town using the principles of new urbanism and we'll find out eventually whether AI or at least mid-journey AI understands new urbanism and I'm hopeful that in the future we can actually feed it parameters and feed it code and have it write code for us that would be really exciting so stay tuned for the next iteration [Music] thank you [Music]

Channel: Brian Lemmerman

Views: 12,053

Keywords: AI New Urbanism, New Urbanism, Seaside, Seaside Florida, DPZ New Urbanism, DPZ Seaside, Andres Duany, New Urbanist Planning, AI, MidJourney

Id: dmdE8FrkPOU

Length: 9min 34sec (574 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 23 2023