Co-created with students aged 3 to 16 from Great Ormond Street Hospital School, Wild Imaginarium will serve as the primary entrance for one of the world’s leading children’s hospitals during a major construction period over the next few years. Designed to showcase life 'bursting' out the building, the project integrates interactive elements with public space design and architectural form.

Wild Imaginarium is the new entrance for Great Ormond Street Hospital, a groundbreaking artistic and architectural intervention that combines human creativity in the built environment with artificial intelligence. HAQUE TAN were tasked to create an engaging entrance experience that could serve as a bold wayfinding and visual marker for visitors and patients. Extending from inside the building foyer, out across its facade and pavement, and further into the street, Wild Imaginarium features a dynamic fusion of tangible real plants with earthly needs, and vibrant digital plants coming to life across the facade of the building. Each one was born from the imaginations of the young participants, who used generative artificial intelligence to visualise their creations. Never the same on two days running, Wild Imaginarium’s plants, both physical and digital, respond to changing seasons and weather in real time, encouraging slow viewing and reflection. We worked with GOSH Arts, as well as Hospital School teachers and students, for almost two years, delving into the use of generative AI as a tool for children – of all ages, abilities and medical needs – to bring their imaginations to life. With a critical approach to technology, we explored AI's potential to support the complex diversity of different people’s voices and perspectives, resulting in a collective effort that also reflected the unique contributions of each participant. As such, Wild Imaginarium is a testament to the symbiotic relationships between physical and digital, human and artificial, tangible and interactive. For children of very widely varying interests and abilities, this meant developing a common framework in which to describe how their reality fuses with their imagination. They used AI as much to create images from their imagination as to explore how best to articulate their desires for the world. As such, the focus was on how to enable them to feel creative and give them ‘superpowers’, able to do things together they never imagined alone. As their ideas progressed, they created a digital flowerbed of strange, colourful, alien-like plants, flowers, and hidden objects driven by their imaginations, using AI to generate everything from ‘a Pomeranian flower’ and ‘popcorn fungi’ to ‘fire-breathing dragon-head plants’. A key technical aspect of Generative AI, particularly for image and form, is that (with tremendous human input) it helps merge, in a convincing way, things that seem otherwise irreconcilable. So we were particularly keen to investigate the potential for AI frameworks to support the complex diversity of different people’s voices and perspectives, and the capacity for a symbiotic relationship between artificial and natural intelligences.

https://haquetan.com/wild-imaginarium/

https://www.architectsjournal.co.uk/news/reimagining-great-ormond-street-hospital-entrance-with-ai

https://www.ribaj.com/products/genai-images-liven-up-hospital-facade

Details

Building or project owner : Great Ormond Street Hospital

Project artist/ concept/ design/ planning : HAQUE TAN

Lighting control software : HAQUE TAN

Interaction design/ programming : HAQUE TAN

Project sponsor/ support : GOSH Arts

Descriptions

Facade type and geometry (structure) : Co-created with students aged 3 to 16 from Great Ormond Street Hospital School, the facade and public realm intervention consist of static, dynamic and interactive forms that respond to the physical environment, applied across the irregular, non-repetitive glazed façade with uniquely sized and shaped panes, through applied vinyl panels of plants created by children using GenAI. This blending of imagined nature and real world organisms is further blurred by digital displays embedded in the facade, in which the AI-powered creations respond to the physical world.

Participatory architecture & urban interaction

Community or communities involved : Children at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children Students from St George the Martyr CofE Primary School

Host organization : Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children

Issues addressed : Children at the hospital school helped create the facade, building on their visions of life, so the issues addressed include co-creation, getting them involved and giving them a sense of ownership of the entrance experience, often otherwise a daunting introduction to a hospital; also working with the school to help them work with cutting edge technology, building up their skills and knowledge.

Tools developed : Participatory GenAI framework to get children co-creating their vision for life.

Mediacredits

HAQUE TAN

Luke Donovan

HAQUE TAN

Luke Donovan

Luke Donovan

Luke Donovan

HAQUE TAN

HAQUE TAN

HAQUE TAN