Final Review of the Bachelor and Master Project Seeing Double: A Digital Twinning Studio at the Chair of Architectural Informatics.
About the project:
The last years witnessed a proliferation of Digital Twins. Everything appears in doubles: machines, human bodies, planets and even urban space. By now, every medium-sized German city seems to work on its own virtual doppelgänger. Science Fiction has become ordinary. Commonly, these digitization initiatives comprise a diversity of models, as well as simulations and analyses for urban planning. VR goggles and map viewers constitute the twin’s public “face”. Yet twinning precedes today’s digital technologies - double cities have always accompanied architecture and urban planning. The frescoes in Sienna’s Palazzo Publico present the duality of good and bad government... the city’s virtuous and evil doppelgänger. 1:1 maps and twin-like models are a long-lasting dream of rulers and planners. The first miniature of Munich dates back to the 16th century. It is a strange stretch between obsessive accuracy and idealistic fiction. Today, it has become harder to draw the line between the city and its representation, between data and simulation, narrative and number... red pill and blue pill. At the same time, virtual models show us a glimpse of realities that are invisible (yet). Disasters, floods, and heat islands devastate cities in computer games and urban simulations. We watch with fatal pleasure…
With this studio, we want to appropriate digital twinning as an architectural skill, a critical and imaginative perspective towards digital planning media. Yet, we remain suspicious of binaries. Or, to put it in Donna Haraway’s words: “One is too few, but two are too many.” Architecture theorist Keller Easterling suggests examining the world with half-closed eyes to grasp its underlying patterns. Seeing double is a more psychedelic approach to urban design, allowing us to hallucinate twinned cities, mirror worlds, and multiple spaces.
When:
Tuesday, 22.07.25
9.45 am
Where:
BIM Lab
Technical University of Munich
Arcisstraße 21
80333 Munich