Andreea Robu-Movilă

Teaching Assistant, “Ion Mincu” University of Architecture and Urban Planning Bucharest, Romania.

Andreea Robu-Movilă is a PhD architecture researcher and a practicing architect with a specific interest in Neuro Architecture (a field at the intersection of Cognitive Science, Computational Science and Architecture). She founded the NeuroArchiLab which is research group and  A.ttune ArchiLab, an architecture office oriented towards applied R&I. She is also the president of Architecture of Alterity Cultural Association that promotes the critical written discourse in architecture, being a co-editor of  ,,Designing the Profile of the Future Architects’’ editorial project by SHARE Architects.

LATENT REPRESENTATIONS. In “Quest of Truth” between Mental Space and Latent Space in Architectural Design Process

Keywords: mental space, latent space, presence, co-representation, architecture design

Abstract: This paper addresses the “quest of truth” in the new paradigm of computational design in architecture, revolving around the concept of representation. Departing from a neuroscientific understanding of the mental representations, to a scientific understanding of the nature of computational representation, the paper brings to the surface the radical alterity of these two mechanisms of representation. Computer science used the astonishingly complex human brain as an inspiration for developing its artificial systems, as artificial intelligence research has been being founded on the issue of representation. Latent Representations of the Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) emerges as a core notion in computational science, referring to the hidden meaning distributions and inferred layers of features and characteristics that the machine model learns during the training process in order to understand reality and address tasks. These computational representations are structured in what is called Latent Space that can be seen as an analogue of Mental Space.  Considering that the training is done only based on existing human artefacts, the essence of Presence gets diluted by each re-presentation. Constructed at the expense of representation upon representation (and so on), Latent Representations distances themselves from Presence and Reality when compared with Mental Representations. Secondly, the question of embodiment that gives meaning to architecture is also analysed, in a quest that do not pursue  the pure “truth” (hardly to be captured), but for more meaningful representations. Lastly, the paper launches an invitation to reflect on co-representation as a form of capitalizing on radical alterities and to reflect on the simulacrum as  “post-truth”.