RMIT Temple (aka Greek-God Dad-Bod Pavilion)
The Temple explores the use of augmented reality to design, fabricate, assemble and hand-paint light weight, low-cost deployable architectures. Working in augmented reality allows architects to skip the step of translating 3D designs to 2D drawings for construction, and this dramatically impacts the feasibility of more expressive architectural form making. The RMIT Temple (affectionately named by the students as the Greek God Dad Bod Pavilion after the naked figures that appear to hold up the building’s mass) was crafted by students using augmented reality guides over the course of a week, a task that would likely have been outside of current (conventional) construction capability.
At Fologram, we’re interested in how this approach to making might enable new kinds of temporary shelters, performance spaces, retail spaces or sculptural-spatial installations. The structure was designed in response to various sites in Fitzroy and the geometry of the frame speaks to the kinds of forms found in street art and graffiti around this area. The relationship between the architectural masses of the pavilion and the articulation of individual framed components or the silhouette was generated through a design feedback loop that moved from explicit modelling to interpretations of this modelling using CLIP Guided Diffusion models rapidly becoming ubiquitous amongst creative practice. This process produces a kind of spatial graffiti that is unleashed by the ability to easily fabricate arbitrary shapes and forms in augmented reality.
