A Participatory Living Laboratory at Fuorisalone 2026

The installation combines advanced AI technologies with the immediacy of hand sketches on A4 paper. Every contribution generated by visitors becomes live design material, continuously expanding a collaborative urban landscape. The experience unfolds as an open-ended process where uau studio’s vision evolves through collective participation. Individual ideas merge into a larger architectural system, transforming the exhibition into a living city generated by hundreds of different perspectives.

The Process

uau studio developed a custom software infrastructure connecting multiple artificial intelligence systems, enabling the transformation of a hand-drawn sketch into a three-dimensional architectural model. Visitors received a specially designed A4 sheet divided into two sections. In the first section, participants selected a series of predefined architectural characteristics for their ideal building — including scale, typology, materiality, and aesthetic language. In the second section, they freely sketched their vision by hand. Once completed, the sheet was scanned via smartphone. An AI system interpreted the selected options and converted them into a structured prompt.

This information was then combined with the visitor’s drawing and processed through a second AI model capable of generating a visual interpretation and transforming it into a 3D object.Each resulting building was automatically inserted into a continuously growing digital city composed entirely of visitor-generated architectures. The entire internal workflow was automated through custom Python scripting, allowing the process to happen in near real time throughout the exhibition.

Designing the A4 Input Sheet

To ensure a seamless automated workflow, the A4 sheet was carefully standardized so the system could accurately read and process every contribution. The layout was divided into two main areas: a structured selection panel on the left and a framed drawing area on the right. The selection panel allowed participants to define specific architectural parameters through a series of visual categories and checkboxes. The configurable attributes included: typology, scale, architecture style and character. This hybrid system allowed visitors to combine rational architectural decisions with intuitive freehand expression, generating a rich variety of design outcomes while maintaining a readable structure for the AI pipeline.

How AI interprets the drawings

The digitization and 3D generation process operated entirely outside Rhino, through a dedicated computational pipeline running on local machines and studio servers.

The workflow followed several automated stages:

1. Staff scanned completed A4 sheets and uploaded them into a dedicated input folder.
2. A background Python script detected each new file and automatically divided the image into two sections.
3. The left side containing the checkboxes was analyzed through a Vision AI API capable of extracting the selected architectural parameters into a structured text prompt.
4. The generated prompt was then combined with the cropped sketch and sent to an Image-to-3D AI system.
5. The AI returned a fully generated 3D model in .obj format, automatically stored inside an output directory ready for assembly.

This pipeline allowed the transformation of hand-drawn ideas into architectural objects within seconds, creating a direct dialogue between human intuition and machine interpretation.

Rhino as the Master Host

Rhino and Grasshopper functioned as the central environment where all generated architectures were assembled into a continuously evolving collective city. The base Rhino file contained the site context, topography, and a predefined urban grid composed of empty plots. Grasshopper continuously monitored the folder containing the generated 3D files through an automated file-watching system.

Whenever a new model appeared:

• the mesh was automatically imported into the scene;
• its dimensions were analyzed through bounding-box calculations;
• the object was proportionally scaled to fit the predefined urban plots;
• Grasshopper assigned the building to the next available position within the city grid;
• the final geometry was automatically baked into the Rhino environment on a dedicated layer.

This process transformed the city into a live architectural organism, continuously expanding throughout the duration of Fuorisalone as new visitors contributed their own visions.

Final Outcome

The final installation evolved into a dense and constantly growing urban landscape composed entirely of unique buildings generated from visitor contributions. No structure was identical to another. Towers stood beside minimal houses, organic forms emerged next to brutalist volumes, and speculative futuristic architectures coexisted with simple human sketches. The city became the physical manifestation of collective imagination — an evolving archive of thousands of individual ideas merged into one shared architectural ecosystem.