MIDDLETOWN RELIEF Permanent installation, Middletown Community Library, Pennsylvania, 2023 Collaborators: Andrew Saunders, Scott Erdy, Penn MSD-RAS Program
DEEP RELIEF: PAINTERLY IN THE AGE OF BRUTE-FORCE COMPUTING
Middletown Relief is a two-story architectural wall installation designed by artificial intelligence and fabricated by a 6-axis robotic arm using hot-wire foam cutting. It is a permanent public artwork at Middletown Community Library outside Philadelphia, and one of the first built works to combine AI-generated form-making with industrial robotic fabrication in an architectural context.
The design process began with a VGG-19 convolutional neural network trained on ruled-surface geometries derived from the sculptures of Naum Gabo. The network redistributed and hybridized these geometric features in ways that neither the designers nor the algorithm could have predicted, producing compositional field conditions with a complex, non-standardized part-to-whole relationship that would be impossible to achieve through conventional design methods.
Fabrication was constrained by the robotic arm's single-wire hot cutting process, which can only produce ruled surfaces. Rather than treating this as a limitation, the design methodology was built around it: every form the AI generated had to be reconstructable through the sweep of a single heated line through foam. The result is a surface whose apparent complexity resolves, on close inspection, into a coherent geometric logic of light, shadow, and directionality.
Two years of concurrent research and development preceded installation. When the team arrived at the library with all components and a scale model, the wall assembled in a single day.
Neural Networks + Explicit ModelinG
Variation 1
Variation 2
Variation 3
Original output from the VGG-19 deep learning neural network and cloud-based computing
Explicitly modeled interpretation of VGG-19 output
Initial detailed study of explicitly modeled geometry for fabrication
Middletown Relief Proposal
Daylight study of Middletown Relief Proposal
Fabrication process
Example of fabrication process (6-axis robotic hot-wire cutting)
Robotically Control Hot-Wire Cutting
Epoxy Coating of Foam Parts
Foam Parts
Mockup (In Situ)
Weitzman School of Design University of Pennsylvania
Penn Praxis Design Fellowship
Installed January 2023
Faculty: Andrew Saunders, Scott Erdy
Design Fellows: Matthew White, Riley Studebaker, Caleb Ehly, Claire Moriarty
Research Assistants: Jesse Allen, Cecily Nishimura, Yujie Li, Macarena De La Piedra, Benjamin Hergert