The Artificial City Exhibition

The Artificial City is a solo architectural research project conceived, directed, and authored by Alper Turan, with fabrication and research assistance provided by students and staff at Tulane School of Architecture and Built Environment. The project investigates the use of Al image generation as a creative method for producing architectural typologies, rethinking authorship, and exploring new modes of formal speculation. The project centers on the use of Midjourney to iteratively prompt, document, and analyze hundreds of urban fragments. Each Al-generated image becomes a starting point for design: abstract, partial, and open to interpretation. Through curation and visual interventions, these fragments are translated into physical and digital forms, forming the foundation of a speculative city whose logic is shaped less by urban planning than by emergent formal variation.

The project was developed under Turan’s creative direction, with all conceptual development, design methodology, image curation, architectural drawings, and fabrication led by the artist. Turan started the project with a simple question: if Al can generate countless forms at once, how might the designer work with this one image at a time methodology. Rather than treating Al tools as efficiency engines for solving pre-set problems, The Artificial City embraces slowness, ambiguity, and interpretation. Images are not final products, they are prompts for future modeling, drawing, and recontextualization. This approach resists the idea that generative Al is merely a shortcut in the design process, instead treating it as a collaborator in speculative authorship.

The exhibition showcases Alper Turan’s original research and design work and was organized around his ongoing investigation into artificial intelligence and architectural authorship. Student assistants contributed to fabrication, model making, and research support during the exhibition’s development. As part of the exhibition, Turan presented his individual research and creative process in a public lecture titled "One Image at a Time" on October 6, 2025.

Project Lead
Alper Turan

Research Assistants
Andrew Audemard
Livi Bowers
Cadence Graf
Ignacio Massó Estévez
Andrea Santos
Gabriel Wetzstein
Helen Eubank Wexler

Fabrication Support
TuSABE Fabrication Labs
Nick LiCausi
Jesse Toohey

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Questions? Please reach out to Alper Turan at aturan@tulane.edu