Huang, William; (2025) From Parametric Determinism to Emergent Fusion: Data-Curated Style Control in Connectionist Architecture. The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL (University College London): London, UK.

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Abstract

This paper interrogates stylistic control in connectionist architectural design through a falsifiable, data-curated design experiment. The “cocktail hypothesis”, which claims that style fusion can be deterministically steered by changing training-data proportions, was tested by training eleven Pix2Pix models on incremental mixes of cultural-facility and recycling-facility façade datasets. Outputs were evaluated through visual review and an independent classifier. At typological extremes, the models reproduced the expected styles consistently; in the mid-range, however, outputs collapsed into a blurred and unpredictable field, falsifying the assumption of linear control. The analysis treats this “indeterminate middle” not as an error but as a signature of generative process—an emergent style fusion aesthetic arising from subsymbolic features rather than additive collage. Ultimately, these findings shift architectural authorship from deterministic control to the curation of emergence, a practice defined by the deliberate selection, proportioning, and weighting of data.

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