Yep. Buuut it’s the programs at work.
This is the big tech fail. Inability to imagine or perceive outside the screen. It’s dangerous!
Also, I’ve lately been wondering about how AI will evaluate humanity. I would estimate “like ants” is not far off.
And most of us tread on ants.
The one on the left looks like a brain.
On the plus side, the computer assisted designs seem well proofed to prevent casual visits by Hounds of Tindalos
I think objectively speaking an AI would not be kind in their assessment
In Wissippi we don’t have money for books, but hey, we expanded sportsball!
As a general rule of thumb, hierarchical societies prefer square houses (as opposed to egalitarian villages with round houses). But given that most Americans grew up in a square built environment that shapes our perceptions of perspective and angles, it would be pretty hard to expect us to just know how to navigate this more organic shape in a way that makes sense to us.
I don’t know that I can disagree with you here, except to say that geography was often the stronger factor than social dynamics (which are obviously geographically affected as well) in residential architecture, so I’m not convinced this is a particularly accurate predictor.
The Indian subcontinent is a good example, I think, of rigidly hierarchical society with a strongly curvilinear architectural tradition.
Certainly most of our homes, and almost all plans are linear in the US. City planning in the US was developed with some egalitarian concerns- standard plotting, for example, so that lot sizes are constant within a given area. But curvilinear forms are plenty common to our daily experience, and I feel confident that people here would adapt to different domestic forms fairly easily.
However in order to make these spaces work outside of niche confines, we would necessarily have to stop planning around the car so damn much, and that will require a lot more engineering than getting people to be comfortable living in a Bucky Dome.
ETA: my point about geography and design only concerns pre-mechanized architecture.
Wait, so it just had a big empty roofed-over courtyard in the middle?
Was there at least a gym in there, or was it just an uniform expanse of institutional floor tile?
(I used to vote in a one-story elementary school with a sunken gym and hall windows looking down into it. That was kinda neat.)
Do you have a source for that? It sounds like interesting research, but also like the sort of thing that could be an intuitive guess repeated as fact.
I suspect you’re right, mostly because the author says so. “The creative goal is to approach floor plan design solely from the perspective of optimization and without regard for convention, constructability, etc. […] The results were biological in appearance, intriguing in character and wildly irrational in practice.”
Well they can’t be any wider than the doors or you’d have a lot of students jammed into the corners. I think the computer model is assuming that escape will be orderly and optimize the total time to evacuation and not the maximum exit rate (flow) at a given instant.
The whole thing is truly a great example of what happens when you give a very incomplete model to a computer.
A battle royale of a home team and two visiting teams on a hexagon court with 3 baskets in half the corners and played with 2 balls, plus a 3rd ball for the final period. We can dramatically decrease the number of games by facing off 3 teams at once instead of 2, really flattens the ladder tournament.
Alternatively, at a great deal more expense, a hexagon court divided into thirds. Land, sea, and air. It’s water polo + soccer + dodgeball all at once.
And the team that gets the Golden Snitch wins!
It was just all one big building with a large rectangular space in the middle, like the second floor didn’t extend out so you’d be overlooking down to the middle. And the courtyard was often used for PE, school assembly type stuff and activities, graduations, etc but on an average day when classes were in the courtyard would be left empty. I wouldn’t say the design for the building was bad, it was fairly versatile but dreadfully boring looking and prison or warehouse-like. Wish i had pictures but i don’t, i could try to dig some up… lemme check.
Edit: Found some… again not my pics. Also must add that the school design was not common 
i have no idea why they built it the way they did. Was cheap? Probably likely
To be clear, I didn’t mean to say that the hierarchical society/right angle housing connection is a hard rule across different geographies. What I had in mind were archaeological studies of the same areas over time, so that the geography is held fairly constant. You see this across many continents as for example in the Fertile Crescent where late Neolithic villages with round houses are replaced by towns with square/rectangular houses and greater inequality.
It’s pretty accepted among archaeologists for the last 40+ years because you see it repeated across so many places. Here’s a classic source on MesoAmerican villages: https://doi.org/10.2307/1593820 Here’s a less well-known one from Jordan: https://books.google.com/books/about/Early_Village_Life_at_Beidha_Jordan_Neol.html?id=83GAEpB-d2kC&hl=en
I think this needs to be an article I need to read.
Sounds like some of the kids in our neighbourhood when I grew up.
The interior rooms would suck to be in all day.
There’s also the price.
If more buildings were constructed of and by giant swarms of von neumann nanofabricators there would probably be less incentive to align with commonly available prefabricated structural materials. (and somewhat more students inadvertently metabolized by their lunchroom in order to facilitate expansion; but nobody said that progress would be free…)
