The Nest-Reimagining the uncanny Hoover Dam

Lake Mead,has experienced the driest period in the past 1,200 years. We are considering innovative ways to repurpose the Hoover Dam for its long-term future. This project has historically sought in AI-image production the often elusive but highly desirable aesthetic quality of the “uncanny”—the quality of being simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar and disconcerting to the human beholder. This project tries to investigate the aesthetic uncanny in the development of architectural forms and expressions by finding new opportunities beyond the aesthetic category of the uncanny to use AI image training in the workflow.This project will use this proposal as an opportunity for the re-imagining of Hoover Dam and its abutting landscape. Utilizing several AI network types—StyleGAN, sinGAN, style-transfer neural networks, etc.We will experiment with the ways in which training, and particularly mis-training artificial intelligence can produce something akin to an externalized and augmented imagination—an intelligent and creative autonomy not fully within my control. I will use these tools with the aim to disclose new architectural forms and expressions. We will use hundreds (upward of 1000) images to train with.In the foreseeable future, the Hoover Dam is creatively imagined as a porous “Nest” based on one of the potential AI machine learning result. This is not only a concept on form, but also in line with the program imagination of the future Hoover Dam. The “Nest” represents a home for future visitors and scholars. It is an infrastructure remains and is redesigned as a recreational destination,such as casino,hotel ,research lab for ecology and climate problems.

As the site becomes drier in the future ,the “Nest” has the porous quality which implies the future Hoover Dam will have multiple heights of water tunnel systems to accommodate the decreasing water level of the Colorado River.The water level will back to high level at the beginning due to buoyancy.Then the water will be storaged in the part of “Nest” for uncertain emergency use like worsening power shortage.The landscape design of the project utilized StyleGAN training to generate this AI potential image that mixes the site’s original landscape and machine details.