A former pupil of Zaha Hadid, from whom he inherited the limit-defying attitude and visionary flair, Tim Fu has long been exploring the fertile (and sometimes treacherous) territory of Artificial Intelligence as a support, along with computational modelling, for design practice.  We’re at a crossroads”, Fu reflects, “a moment of profound change. AI is igniting a revolution in design. By tapping into the creative potential of machine intelligence, we can bring this groundbreaking development to life with unmatched speed and precision”.

The testing ground is the Lake Bled Estate complex on the shores of Lake Bled, Slovenia. The project comprises, on an area of 22,000 square metres, six new exclusive villas close to Vila Epos, a listed historical monument by Jože Plečnik (1909).

The guiding principle of the intervention is the profound connection to the natural and cultural context of the area, integrated with sophisticated technologies to provide living comfort and minimal environmental impact.

The biophilic design of the dwellings is integrated with local vernacular traditions, investigated and re-proposed in a contemporary key as for their typological and constructive characteristics through Artificial Intelligence throughout the entire design process. “This is the first time AI has been this extensively embedded in the architectural process, from prototyping design to optimising for heritage and environment” added Rada Daleva, Project Lead at Studio Tim Fu.

The villas are oriented towards the centre of the settlement, which has a public park, with paths through the greenery overlooking the lake, as the social hub of the estate. The volumes of the villas, with two, three and four bedrooms, re-propose in their exteriors typical architectural elements of the region (such as the pavilion roofs and the "rizalit", a projecting and often decorated façade element, here reinvented as a luminous, full-height atrium open to the landscape) while the interiors reveal radiant spaces, where the boundaries between interior and exterior are blurred by the large windows.