Mohammad Qasim Iqbal: Using Midjourney I wanted to explore areas that verge on the impossible but are still grounded to reality allowing the viewer to get a glimpse of “what could’ve been.” My interests in the Renaissance are derived from my love for Palladio’s work, it amazes me how simple concepts are manipulated and controlled to form beautiful, balanced Architecture. Therefore, this series of images was about imagining a Renaissance with a modern material but allowing it to still hold the qualities mentioned before. The AI seems to respond well to prompts containing Renaissance references, this allowed images to become incredibly detailed, and complex very quickly. However, I wanted to achieve images that almost conveyed a whole scheme rather than just a series of facades like my previous Baroque one. To achieve this, I varied the prompt with interior terms and rooms such as atrium. The aim for this was to allow the AI to generate various interior images and this worked well as it can be seen in multiple visuals.
The choice of combining the Renaissance style with Corten Steel came about while doing several test prompts. Initially I tried concrete and normal steel as modern materials to represent the renaissance style however the concrete versions were also bringing a ruin type feeling and the material itself was coming across very cold and these were not qualities that I wanted to associate with the Renaissance. While trying normal steel I realised the shine and glossiness of the material was not ideal and therefore, I came to Corten Steel as it matches a material the Renaissance buildings were mostly made from, which was brick, but also it gives Renaissance style a weathered look that gave it a new character almost ideal for if it was built today.
