THOMAS McLUCAS

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The project is concerned with the intersection between architecture and technology as a means for social reproduction. It challenges the contemporary state’s reliance on AI and the promise of technical resolution to socio-political issues. This is explored in a Finnish context focusing on the tension between the constitution, which conflates the privacy of the home with data privacy, and the state-sponsored AI program, Aurora AI. The mass housing system developed by Puutalo Oy in the post-war years is used as a conduit to describe the algorithmic logic of systems like Aurora and their flattening, normalising effects. The resultant proposal is a speculative future within which a designed algorithm infects/disrupts the Aurora Puutalo housing model, emanating from the data disturbances of an individual sauna and eventually taking over in Marttila, a suburb of Helsinki.

Developing methodologies of architectural masking and glitch, the project uses various methods of data-bending in order to create disturbances to undermine the normative and idealised vision of Puutalo Oy. The starting point was using the sauna as a typology to sit in opposition to this model housing. The sauna contaminates the image of Puutalo Oy and resists its normativity.

See an in depth project overview here