Architecture constantly evolves in response to culture, context, technology, and global challenges. Despite its shifting forms, it remains rooted in the abstract idea of shelter. This idea dates back to Marc-Antoine Laugier’s Primitive Hut—a symbolic, minimal structure representing architecture’s purest form. As new tools and media emerge, they continue to reshape both the way architects think and how architectural ideas are expressed.
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The Digital Hut reimagines the Primitive Hut through the lens of today’s digital culture. It uses game engines to procedurally generate interactive spatial archives, allowing architects to explore and manipulate architectural ideas in a virtual environment. This project investigates how media ecology can become an active part of the design process, offering new ways to engage with and rethink architecture.

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The Digital Hut | Level 1: Light & Terrain

Unlike art, architecture is deeply rooted in context—whether physical like landscapes and urban surroundings, or environmental such as light. From historical drawings to modern renderings, architects have long manipulated light, color, and setting to communicate their vision of the primitive hut. These techniques have evolved into post-processing practices used today to influence perception and presentation.
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This level explores how procedural algorithms can generate navigable post-processing volumes—each offering unique visual interpretations. By adjusting light, terrain, and color schemes, architects can experiment with how visuals shape perception and spark creativity. A wireframe mode reveals the technical logic behind the Unity scene, uncovering structural layers like the “mother mesh,” which reacts distinctly to different light wavelengths, suggesting an intriguing relationship between color and spatial comprehension.

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The Digital Hut | Level 2: Primitives

Architecture has always been intrinsically linked to geometry—the study of space, shape, and proportion. From Da Vinci’s explorations with Platonic solids in Divina Proportione to Le Corbusier’s reverence for pure forms like cubes and spheres, simple geometries have long been seen as the foundation of beautiful, meaningful design. Contemporary architectural thinking continues this legacy, with spatial strategies like those in Operative Design encouraging designers to manipulate basic forms through verbs such as twist, subtract, and scale.
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This level explores geometric form-finding using Rhino primitives—spheres, cubes, cylinders, and pyramids—as the only building blocks. Within a first-person, navigable environment, users engage directly with these forms, rotating and reorienting them to shape abstract spatial configurations. The aim is to reflect on how simple solids can generate complex architecture, and how interactivity and perspective influence our spatial understanding.

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The Digital Hut | Level 3:  Scrapped Rooms

Conceptual architecture often starts within a featureless white cube—a blank canvas with no historical or spatial context. Assuming it's a room being designed, rather than altering the geometry of the room, the focus is on how information-rich interventions, like textures or objects, can reshape perception. By introducing materials and elements such as wood flooring or furniture, the level explores how architects engage with material culture to redefine space. It also considers how different media—perspectives, sketches, renderings—contribute new layers of spatial understanding through visual projection.
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The level uses procedural algorithms to simulate these interventions based on simple word inputs from the architect (e.g., "Texture," "Chair," "Wood"). With custom web scrapers, textures and 3D models are fetched and applied in real time to generate a navigable environment. It also experiments with overlapping graphical projections, allowing users to explore the space in both first-person and isometric views simultaneously. These dual perspectives and the blending of texture and projection create new 2D patterns from 3D navigation—pushing the boundaries of how architecture, media, and time can intersect.

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The Digital Hut | Level 4: Is Everything Architecture?

This level explores how architecture evolves by questioning both its methods and its essence. While pioneers like Le Corbusier reimagined architecture through industrial metaphors like the assembly line, others—like Hans Hollein—pushed further, declaring “Everything is architecture.” Hollein’s vision, fueled by telecommunication advances, proposed that architecture could be simulated through media rather than experienced physically. Similarly, vernacular architecture, with its context-driven, participatory nature, also prioritizes meaning over aesthetics—both approaches reframing the primitive hut as something deeply tied to context, emotion, and available resources.
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In this level, the internet becomes the new context. A custom scraper pulls 3D models from free3d.com based on keyword inputs. These models are automatically arranged in Unity to create a grayscale, navigable environment that varies with each session. The differing origins and scales of these objects cause a spontaneous and unique spatial composition every time—highlighting how randomness, accessibility, and digital context can reshape the architectural imagination.

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