Spatial speculation through John Conway’s Game of Life: fostering creativity with autonomous algorithms

Abstract

This article seeks to present an experiment involving a cellular automaton inspired by John Conway's Game of Life. The developed algorithm uses simple composition rules to generate viability diagrams of single-story single-family homes, considering the amount of social, private and empty spaces. The objective of the experiment is to illustrate a line of thought that seeks to use AI as a creative, aesthetic, imagery, stylistic, linguistic and critical stimulus for the development and advancement of architectural discourse. Through the experiment, a co-authorship relationship was observed in which the algorithm generates a contingent event represented by the feasibility diagram, and the architect reacts to this event by maturing it into a less abstract solution.