This is a journey through architecture that never existed.

Inspired by the grammatical rules behind French sacral architecture of the Middle Ages, this generative tool is meant for creating a collection of 256 plans of fictional buildings. Each plan is a unique variation on semantic relations between architectural elements: from a regular composition resembling existing churches to a dynamic aggregation of vaults, columns and chevets. But always following the same set of rules extracted from multiple examples of gothic cathedrals.

Every church has its place and time in which it could have been built in an alternative series of historical events.

This artistic tribute to the research of Stiny and Mitchell about Palladian architecture or Duarte's work about Siza takes the topic of formalizing architectural language onto a lighthearted level by moving it to a slightly imaginary world.

To zoom, press a mouse button when over the image or touch the screen. To pan, keep the mouse pressed and move it around.

unbuilt #1

In aerial photos from 1945, you can see dozens of buildings crammed around the main street of Gallarta - a town 13 km northwest of Bilbao. The street leads to a small open pit where they extract iron. Images from 1956 and 1965 show how the road becomes shorter, and houses once surrounded by fields are now on the pit's edge. Some of them disappeared to facilitate access to the ore. The mine grew, consuming mountains, meadows, and settlements.

Gallarta disappeared in 1977, replaced by a chasm extending across the area until today. The open pit extraction in the mine stopped being profitable only six years later. The scar it left on the surface of the mountainous area is a monument to the disappearance of this and numerous other towns with similar stories.

Cantera is a project that brings these stories to a non-physical, generative space. It replaces atoms of stone and soil with digital bits. It draws landscapes inspired by the imagery of Basque stone quarries and iron mines and writes narratives about non-existent habitats where the boundaries between extraction, shelter, and natural forms become indistinct.

Cantera #2

Take your entire life, full as it is with the vastness of your lived experiences – and shape it into your cupped hands. Cherish this mesmerising world of yours as you would a ripe summer fruit, and behold at a glance its delicate yet dynamic balance — one change here or there, no matter how microscopic, affects the entire course of your world. 

How will you receive this world – its situations that overwhelm, its sights that awe, the catastrophes, the serenity, its steadfast commitment to the present? Will you look upon all of us here, adrift and fragile together, with love?


Adrift is a project that reminds us to make peace with our world – with all worlds – by stepping back to make space for an all-encompassing perspective.


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Created by Jacek Markusiewicz @jMarkusiewicz
Creative collaboration with Tender @tender_art

Click on the image for resolution options and to save a .png file. Saving higher resolutions may not work in some browsers; in these cases, right-click-save the image. All drawing and geometric methods are written by mrkswcz using javascript, except for the following:

The pseudorandom terrain generation uses Hydraulic-Erosion by Sebastian Lague, inspired by "Reconnaissance" by TENDER x Nat Sarkissian (MIT License).

For finding paths that simulate connections in terrain and potential locations of cities, a C# script was adapted from the article "Pathfinding Algorithms in C#" by Kristian Ekman published in Code Project licensed under The Code Project Open License (CPOL). The code was translated to javascript and simplified for performance.

Many pseudorandom effects are achieved with perlin-simplex by David Guttman and seedrandom by David Bau (both MIT Licenses)

For more information, please see the bundle.js.LICENSE.txt file included in the package.

The "heat death" event is a small tribute to lunarean's fxhash project. The code that generates the disintegration effect interprets a fragment of lunarean's code. Further contributions are its adaptation for 3d transformations and its recursive character that modifies certain parameters over time.

The project uses CPU for calculations and rendering – generating the image requires up to 500MB of free RAM. Testing was performed across browsers and devices, but please make sure it works on your device before minting. Note that there are minor colour-intensity differences between different browsers.


adrift #73

Start with something simple. Take four identical equilateral triangles and join them to form a pyramid. This is your building block – a regular tetrahedron, the simplest possible three-dimensional figure.

When you connect five such pyramids by attaching their faces, you will be left with a thin empty space between the first and last: a volumetric angle of 7.356 degrees. It’s too small to fit another piece and too big to be lost in numerical imprecision.

It is a surprising imperfection. You would expect a tetrahedron to behave similarly to its two-dimensional ancestor. When you arrange equilateral triangles, one next to the other like tiles, you can cover two-dimensional space without leaving an empty spot. You may go on forever, covering infinite planes and be sure that the six angles that meet at each point will add up to the perfect 360 degrees.

In three dimensions, it is not like this: you cannot use your building block to fully fill a void. It’s as if the mathematical rules –the ones we tend to idealise for elegance, harmony, and infallibility– broke when you raise complexity.

But mathematical beauty does not reside in perfection. It is through these exceptions that complexity emerges. So keep building, face by face, one block at a time, and embrace the surprising, chaotic aesthetics that appears. A different type of harmony – not based on impeccable proportions, but on unpredictability.

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The colours of the structures are inspired by 16 paintings of Polish artists from the 19th and 20th centuries.

"In a window" by Anna Bilińska-Bohdanowicz
"Portrait of Jadwiga against a Yellow Background" by Józef Mehoffer
"Portrait of Zofia Okuń" by Edward Okuń
"Girl with chrysanthemums" by Olga Boznańska
"Nocturne – Swans in Ogród Saski in Warsaw by Night" by Józef Pankiewicz
"Soil" by Ferdynand Ruszczyc
"Obsession" by Wojciech Weiss
"Self-portrait in armour" by Jacek Malczewski
"Self-portrait" by Artur Grottger
"Portrait of Jadwiga Dembowska" by Leopold Horowitz
"Death of Barbara Radziwiłł" by Józef Simmler
"Before the Sunrise" by Józef Chełmoński
"With brushwood" by Julian Fałat
Study for the painting "In a Bower" by Aleksander Gierymski
"Woman Combing her Hair" by Władysław Ślewiński
"Still life with a heron" by Władysław Czachórski

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Click on the image for resolution options.

In live mode:

Click PNG to save the rendered image. [Saving higher resolutions may not work in some browsers; in these cases, right-click-save the image]

Click STL or PLY to download the digital model to view on your computer or 3d print at home [experimental - highly complex geometries are difficult to 3d print in practice]. The PLY format stores colours of the model that can be visualised in most 3d modelling programs.

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All drawing and geometric methods are written by mrkswcz using javascript, except for the following:
- three.js (MIT License)
- three-mesh-bvh by Garrett Johnson (MIT License)
- seedrandom by David Bau (MIT License)
- OpenSimplex Noise by Josh Forisha (Public Domain)
- triangle-triangle-intersection by stonkpunk (CC0 1.0 Public Domain Dedication)
Compiled using fxhash-boilerplate-webpack by fxhash (MIT License). For more information, please see the ./bundle.js.LICENSE.txt file included in the package.

The project uses CPU for calculations and rendering. Generating the image requires up to 500MB of free RAM. Testing was performed across browsers and devices, but please ensure it works on your device before minting.


7.356 degrees #167

Materials tend to take particular forms due to their physical properties, technological necessities or natural limitations. However, what rules should a simulated environment follow when no physical constraints are inherent to the digital environment?

This project continues the exploration of shaping digital matter that I began on hicetnunc in 2021. Each token creates an image of a unique sculpture generated with a custom growth/degrowth algorithm. The image is rendered with a tailored raytracing script.

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Depending on the device and CPU usage, it takes a few seconds (on fast computers) to a minute (sometimes more) on mid-tier phones for the 800x800px image.

Click on the image to open the menu. You may choose the resolution from preview quality to a print of approx. 30x30cm. There may be minor differences in tone or contrast for different resolutions.

In live mode:
Click PNG to save the rendered image.
Click STL to download the digital model to view on your computer or 3d print at home [experimental]

de|growth:generations #1

f-emerald generates unique ephemeral crystal-like structures that morph in space. each generation has a different shape, animation and colour palette. 

the crystals flicker with colours in the dark most of the time. there is, however, a 20% chance of obtaining a crystal on a bright background with a light colour palette and one out of ten structures is created in black and white. 

f-emerald #1

unbuilt #4

unbuilt

adrift #81

adrift

7.356 degrees #35

7.356 degrees

de|growth:generations #4

de|growth:generations

f-emerald #4

f-emerald

This is an album of cities too ideal to ever materialise.

It consists of 256 algorithmically generated plans that resemble drawings of Vincenzo Scamozzi, Pietro Cataneo, Filarete and other theorists of the Italian Renaissance. The cities differ in size, the grid of the streets, the landscape around them and the people that inhabit their utopian walls. They carry names that are Italian exonyms of real European cities, drawing a vision of a different world that enacts a mixture of military perfection with social superiority. Flawless, harmonious, unconquerable and utterly impossible.

History brought us many theories about ideal cities, but very few examples exist today. Italian Palmanova or Polish Zamość are the few to remind us how hard it is to shape reality according to ideals. When confronted with the material world, its idealism becomes the city's grates foe.

To zoom, press a mouse button over the image or touch the screen. To pan, keep the mouse pressed and move it around.

reborn #4

reborn #1

reborn

The Game of Life series explores how following simple rules may lead to complex behaviours. Each level of the structure represents one step in the evolution of cells, whose actions are driven by the rules established by John Horton Conway.

The initial generation is a grid of 128x128 cells on an unconstrained plane, where 1/2 of randomly selected cells are alive.

The image is generated with a custom renderer I wrote in C#.

Image no. 8 in the series.
Initial random seed: 4
Resolution: 4096x4096

Beacon

a structure morphing between stochastic complexity and geometric simplicity.

driven by a custom growth/shrinking algorithm. 
the animation is generated using a renderer written in C#.

mrkswcz

mrkswcz

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