Playing Models brings its AI symposium to SCI-Arc
Architects who work in game engines gather in Los Angeles on September 18, free to attend, with an image open call closing August 31.
Playing Models, the annual symposium wedged into the overlap of artificial intelligence, architecture, and storytelling, holds its fifth edition at SCI-Arc in Los Angeles on September 18. It is free to attend, and the whole day streams live on YouTube, which has quietly become the symposium's second venue.
The series started in 2022 as a collaboration between the University of Florida and the Chair of Digital Architectonics at ETH Zurich and has since grown into a four-school affair with Carnegie Mellon and Lawrence Technological University attached. The announcement came from organizers Karla Saldaña Ochoa, Adil Bokhari, Lee-Su Huang, Agostino Nickl, and Wei-Chun Cheng, and the day is built as three panels: Models for Thinking, Models for Seeing, Models for Making.
Architecture has spent a decade drifting into game engines, and this is the room where that drift gets theorized. The participant list includes Damjan Jovanovic and Lidija Kljakovic of Studio Lifeforms, SCI-Arc faculty who build playable software as architectural practice, alongside Elena Manferdini, Winka Dubbeldam, and Casey Rehm. When Bjarke Ingels shipped an actual videogame in 2016, we called it everything good and bad about that architecture. A decade on, the architects are not outsourcing the question anymore—they run the symposium themselves.
There is also a deadline worth flagging: an open call for image submissions—AI-generated images that resist default aesthetics, computational drawing experiments, work that stretches what architecture can show—closes August 31. Selected pieces hang at the symposium, and the winner gets up to $1,000 toward airfare and lodging. One week left.
Games talking to architecture is half of why Killscreen exists. The free newsletter tracks these crossings weekly—the symposiums, the engines, and the people moving between them.
