Tur
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TOWERS THROUGH TIME

Human civilizations have always congregated around central gathering points, and in recent centuries they've deliberately planned complex urban environments around towering structures from which life, culture, and even streets radiate.

Following are some of the historical and architectural inspirations for Tur, each with their own style and purpose.

MEGALITHS

In ancient Western European civilizations (around 4200 BCE), megaliths were considered significant architectural, astronomical, and communal innovations. Megaliths, whose name translates to “great stone”, were used as tombs, celestial observatories, shelter, and territorial landmarks. During the Neo-Sumerian period (around 2150-2000 BCE), temple forms were further developed and elevated on a tiered hill, known as the Ziggurat, in the aim of being “closer to God”. The tower of Babel represents the ziggurat of the Sumerian city of Babylon.

The concept of the atlas mnemosyne in Aby Warburg's archaeology of archetypes is an early model for the study of typologies, such as those that occur in art and life.

Bern & Hilla Becher’s disappearing industrial architecture explores this idea of typologies in archetecture over the course of decades – surfacing questions around industrial function, structural decay, and the passing of eras.

In the book, Atlas of Brutalist Architecture by Phaidon, we see the iconic works of Marcel Breuer, Lina Bo Bardi, Le Corbusier, Carlo Scarpa, Ernö Goldfinger,Bertrand Goldberg, Tadao Ando, and others.

Brasilia, distinguished by its modern white architecture, evolved the industrial aesthetics of architecture into one guided by the technologies of the times, such as works inspired by the shape of an airplane, and those produced by architects like Oscar Niemeyer.

More than ever, the last century as seen how visionaries inspired by technology are able to create new realities that can only be expressed through hypothetical projects. Ron Herron’s A Walking City (1964) was originally set in a dystopian New York, where giant robot towers would walk over water and land to wherever they were required, having the intelligence to connect with others in order to create one big hub, like a city itself.

DRAWING NEW TYPOLOGIES

The creation of Tur pulled from the above lineage and began with hand-drawn sketches of towers that might occupy the anacronistic future eras of earth. Considering that the AI-fueled evolution of architecture will aggregate vastly from the past, while also producing incredibly novel approaches, these drawings pursued that same breadth. They explore evolutions of ancient castle towers, abstractly functional geometries, the assimilation of nature into monumental structures, and the aesthetics of technology.

These drawing were the basis for the earliest A.I. assisted sketches for Tur, and were critical in the shaping of the generative models and processes that produced the final set of 444 artworks, out of over 100,000 sketches, and outputs.

Artist's Description
Tur is an A.I. generated art series created by Ganchitecture in collaboration with Adam Berninger of Tender – and takes its name from the root of 'tower' and the german word for door or doorway: a metaphor for the passage between eras that these towers symbolize. For millennia, civilizations have used monumental structures to mark the rallying point of their tribe, their culture, and the claims they stake. Ultimately, these central pillars even became the symbols of their civilization, transcending each budding and ending of an era. Now, what has evolved from simple stone structures into complex temples and citadels is overshadowed by the complex urban organisms that define our greatest places of congregation. Tur imagines a future where the global technoculture reaches its tipping point, and dominance is contested between humans and artificial intelligence. The resulting cultural regressions lead back to the iconic towering structures of civiliazations-past as a means for asserting authority. These structures serve as a visible counterpoint to the increasingly unseen and pervasive controls applied through technology. The return to this priapic symbol of power of course derives its formal and structural qualities from the completeness provided by an A.I. driven survey of historic towers and imposing architecture. These raw, monumental, and anachronistic structures are imperfect and decaying – transforming their A.I. sources into a new typologies of future towers. Are these the creations of humanity’s last attempt at dominance or an auto-mechanistic creation of artificial intelligence that assimilates symbols of human power? Either way, their archetypal structures embody the anonymous remnants of future cultures: the places that last survive their epoch, and perhaps even the last earthly epoch.
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