“Sometimes the house you come out of isn’t the same one you went into”

CeL5zQKWwAAIyl8.jpg-large[Images: From @strangethink23].

The recently erased and rebooted Twitter account for Strangethink@strangethink23—has been posting some really interesting images and GIFs over the past three weeks, exploring the procedural generation of architectural interiors.

The most recent theme/obsession seems to be the difficulty—and perverse joy—of adding staircases between levels in an “infinite non-euclidean house,” in their words, or an architecture of “infinitely generated nesting structures.”

The results are ostensibly only relevant if you’re a game developer, but they’re actually well worth scrolling through anyway, as they’re also part koan, part Borgesian fever-dream. The images and related tweets discuss things like “a bug where ghostly shells of floors can be left over from previous generations,” or the idea that “every inside is a new outside.”

CeQz1C0WAAEb15C.jpg-large[Images: From @strangethink23].

Sometimes the house you come out of isn’t the same one you went into. It’s okay though,” we read. Or: “Each generated house contains up to 8 other houses and each of those contains up to 8 houses and each of those…” “What’s inside that building? MORE BUILDINGS.”

Indeed, there is a running sub-theme of “big buildings inside small buildings,” hidden infinities tucked away behind the next doorframe or at the bottom of the next soon-to-appear stair.

My interest here is less in the actual aesthetics of the buildings—with their technicolor cantilevers and their relentlessly rectilinear rooms and balconies—but more in the sheer poetics of procedural generation itself: the dreamlike rules and subroutines of rooms triggering other rooms, of algorithms lying in wait before stuttering out a new, far bigger building inside the building you’re already in.

Check it all out now, before their Twitter feed is erased and restarted once again.

(Via @jimrossignol. Earlier on BLDGBLOG: Procedural Brutalism and British Countryside Generator).