This article is adapted from my 2024 Q3 quarterly GenAI for Placemaking newsletter, which went out to subscribers at the start of October, and which you are able to sign up for below.
Doesn’t it strike you that art and visualisation are rather similar? Certainly, if you’ve spent any time looking at architecture students’ end-of-year work, you’ll have been struck by just how fanciful it is in content and illustration-like in style. I don’t mean those as criticisms.
In fact, the sometimes complete reversal from this naïveté into the grim, AutoCAD and Building Safety Act suffused cynicism of the “real world” is a sad thing in its own right.
Recently, I discovered someone on Instagram who makes images using Midjourney, as well as his own hand-made stuff, a San Francisco based artist named Max Hudson. I don’t want to get into a discussion here about whether images made using a generator are art, partly because I’m not actually sure what side of the fence I fall on, and partly because even if you don’t take the view it’s art, calling someone who produces such images a “curator” seems to step neatly around the problem without being in any way pejorative.
The thing about his images that’s relevant here is that they are of environments, and often scenes that feature both a natural environment and built structures. Some of them approach the vedute or views of cities painted by Flemish and Italian painters through the 17th and 18th centuries, however others are devoid of people and buildings, almost barren.
He uses a fairly consistent art style, which began as watercolour and has evolved into wood block print. The selection of different influences in the content can be seen as a kind of eclecticism. This is a form of expression that yearns to move beyond the cynicism and sarcasm that has emerged in the post-modern age. It pulls in the direction of the sincere, the awestruck, even the spiritual.
Image: Max Hudson from Midjourney. View on Instagram
There is a quietness and stillness to this that I find quite striking. Human figures, where they appear, are usually small, dwarfed by their surroundings as they walk from place to place. But it’s not just the trees and mountains that are enormous; the physical scale, as with real redwoods and cathedrals, speaks of a massive passing of time too.
It speaks of stability, ancientness, a slow coming-to-be.
Image: Max Hudson from Midjourney. View on Instagram
A common motif, one that can be seen to resonate with people due to the relative popularity of such posts, is of the arch or gateway. We look through these portals, standing just at the threshold. They both frame the view and invite us forward.
The images combine the familiar with the impossible. They show our own world, just one where history did not take the course it did; one where, somehow, everything was stable, forever.
Image: Max Hudson from Midjourney. View on Instagram
The beauty of these pieces is in their quietude. An isolation that is not alienating. A stillness that is not deathly. A connection with clean air, grass beneath one’s feet, the immensity of the sky. Look at the compositions. See how low the horizon line is within the frame, how much of the space is taken up by sky. See how there are no machines. These are hand-made worlds, where everything has the hand of the craftsman upon it, and yet a world where we have achieved enough prosperity.
Image: Max Hudson from Midjourney. View on Instagram
The style here is perhaps typical of the late 19th century. It is a wood block print style of image, an art form that is labour-intensive (ironically, considering it is actually made using Midjourney) but which can be repeated for print runs. The late 19th century was a period responding to the industrial revolution, and where, in England, the Arts and Crafts movement flourished, the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings was founded, the Pre-Raphaelites arose in the art world. Though the Pre-Raphaelites stylistically favoured the realist and the detailed, and though the images here are far more still and minimalist, the four founding doctrines of the group…
- Have genuine ideas
- Study nature attentively
- Sympathise with the direct, serious and heartfelt
- Produce good images
… do seem to describe this work too.
Image: Max Hudson from Midjourney. View on Instagram
Is this a kind of architectural visualisation? It is getting close. Images like these could conceivably appear on an architecture student’s end of year display.
Images: Max Hudson from Midjourney. View on Instagram
What is it to have space over one’s head? Light, materials from the earth, dignified company? These are places where everything happens according to expectation. As Radiohead put it:
No alarms and no surprises
No alarms and no surprises
No alarms and no surprises, please
AI, in this case, is not an artistic tool, strictly speaking, but a survey tool. There is a landscape of artistic ideas out there, and those that feature people in place are architectural ideas. AI allows the rapid surveying of a wide territory of moods, tones and desires. These images are a synthesis of ideas people have already had, and that’s ok. They are self-consciously presented as AI-generated by their creator. With this body of work, you can see what people yearn for. Perhaps Max Hudson is in fact a kind of surveyor.