Humble Burn

27/07/2025

Can a machine think like an artist?

Post 2/3 - Precedents + Positioning

This project wasn’t about using a machine to represent space ✨architecture✨. It was about using one to interrogate it.

The drawing machine sits at the intersection of two lineages:
1. Technical - from 18th century automata designed by clockmakers, to the Jacquard loom, to scientific medical and environmental instruments, to plotters & coders, before arriving at current AI/ machine learning systems.
2. Conceptual - from surrealist automatism to Nat Chard’s critique on the contingency of architectural drawing and Philip Beesley’s sentient structures. These are machines that don’t necessarily draw but challenge authorship and provoke new ways of thinking.

Our machine joined the discourse. Built from salvaged parts, it wasn’t just a tool, it was poly-propositional:
🌀What kinds of spatial language emerge when constraints like scarcity, absurdity, and unpredictability are embedded in process?
🌀How can machines shape our reading of space, and of each other?

For longer reflections, I’ll unpack this further on Substack: deanvandervord.substack.com

University Studio:

A question I hear asked all the time. Will AI driven machines be able to fully replicate human creativity?

22/07/2025

Ten years ago, during my MArch at Westminster, I led this drawing machine project as part of DS22, a design studio exploring critical architectural practice in contested territories.

We were asked to respond to site conditions through our own reading of the landscape. Our exploration began with focus on the material restrictions imposed by the site’s borders. To emulate these constraints, we salvaged objects stripped from Westminster Architecture School during its 2015 refurbishment. This defined our material palette and led us to explore low-tech, site-specific methods of fabrication. It seems even more aggressively analogue in light of today’s tools.

The outcome was both a sculptural interpretation and a device for interrogating the physical and social landscape.

This is the first in a short series of posts on the project:
1. Materials and techniques (this post)
2. Precedents and art history context
3. Machine drawings

I’m intending to provide more in-depth longer format design insights via Substack so if you’re as into that as I am, find me at deanvandervord.substack.com

Machine team: | Studio:

05/07/2025

Imagery and pages from our recently completed Brief Development for the rebrand of a small family restaurant. A thread connects the carefully curated concoction of elements from the client’s biography. This then begins to construct a narrative that feels coherent and true to him, leading to the expression of a unique and honest experience. Can you guess the linking themes?

1. Caltagirone Ceramics
2. Morano Glass
3. Florentine Leather
4. Vintage Ferraris

29/05/2024

A plan of our previously posted Cocoon Room. The layout was prioritised with the first decision to have a large desk by the natural light and the long view out the window. Then the line of sight from the entrance to the window was kept as clear as possible to avoid the room feeling cluttered while packing in as much storage as possible.

14/05/2024

A greek temple in The North East could easily be seen as the pastiche work of a completely out of touch aristocrat. However, knowing the obscure (practically unknown) narrative behind the design should transform that perception. It weaves congruent stories to elevate it to one of my favourites and an emblem of Humble Burn’s principles.

Literature on the monument commonly references the temple which the monument was supposedly based on as The Temple of Hephaestus in Athens. Literally minded critics dispute this by pointing out formal discrepancies but they completely miss the point. Hephaestus is the outcast and maimed god of the forge, fire and craftsmen. This resonates profoundly with the industrial heritage of the region.

The narrative is also imbued into the material of the monument with its blackened gritstone, not a mere metaphor but an index of the burning coals which defined the regions identity.

10/05/2024

An unusual view, from a forsaken landscape, of an overlooked and underrepresented landmark.

Is better than one seen countless times before.

01/05/2024

More photos of the bespoke joinery that balances storage and tight embrace with a restrained openness for the curation of found objects.

23/04/2024

One way I look at these images is as qualitative explorations of culture. They represent factual and fictional narratives that are important enough to be carefully drawn or stitched or painted. For that reason, each one could provide a fertile starting point for an architectural project.

13/04/2024

A walnut cocoon for a child to grow in. It’s designed to enable fluent work with access to integrated storage and multiple lighting modes while most importantly providing connection to her family in india.

03/03/2024

15/02/2024

18/11/2023

Design is by people with identities for people with identities. Social identity enters into the design process as well as business decisions. This post begins to break down social identity by exploring its language so we can engage in the discussion.

I’ll post a long for opinion piece on LinkedIn because TLDR.