| San Francisco, CA (January 26, 2026) – MAP (Metropolitan Architectural Practice) announces the forthcoming publication of Architecture X Architecture: A Dialectic, a new monograph examining the implications of machine vision and generative AI for architectural visualization and design methodologies. Edited by Oscar Riera Ojeda with project direction by Christiane Robbins, the volume includes a foreword by Kum-Kum Bhavnani, essays by Bill Seaman, Katherine Lambert, Christiane Robbins, Kyle Steinfeld, and Amanda Wasielewski, and an afterword by Aaron Betsky.
Since its founding in 2005, MAP has pursued a vision of architecture grounded in material inquiry, environmental intelligence, and interdisciplinary experimentation. Over two decades, the practice has developed work spanning built projects, spatial research, media culture, and ecological thinking. Through this lens, architecture is understood not only as a constructed object but as a field shaped by environmental forces, cultural legacies, and emerging modes of perception and representation.
In 2015, MAP extended this legacy through MAP Studio, a research lab dedicated to investigating how architecture operates when perception, computation, and environmental systems become inseparable. The studio’s methods integrate analog drawing, synthetic image generation, ecological analysis, and digital fabrication, treating images and sensing infrastructures as active participants in design rather than secondary documentation. This shared platform has informed MAP’s concept of “neo-ecologies,” which describes emerging spatial conditions in which architectural and imaging systems, digital infrastructures, biological processes, and energetic flows co-produce one another and radically reshape how we perceive the built environment.
Architecture X Architecture: A Dialectic presents the culmination of this research developed between 2022 and 2024. The publication examines AI image systems, recursive visual processes, and algorithmic “hallucinations” as integral to how architectural form is generated, interpreted, and circulated. Framing the image as a site of cognition rather than representation, the book considers how synthetic vision reorganizes perception and expands architectural methodologies within a hybrid material, ecological, and computational field. The volume is published in two editions: a hardcover in slipcase and a limited-edition hardcover in a box with three signed prints.
A limited number of review copies are available. To request one, please contact dalia@bluemedium.com. |
