SENSE-AI Studio
SENSE–AI: Developing Spatial Experiences through Narrative, Senses, and Emotions with AI
ARCH 4001 studio. SAID, DAAP, UC.
This SENSE-AI design studio invites students to explore the complex relationship between architecture, human emotion, cultural heritage, and experiential design through the conceptualization and design of a new museum at Fort Ancient, part of the UNESCO-listed Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks. Using an AI-assisted design approach, students will explore how generative AI, computational analysis, digital heritage, and immersive technologies can support research, site interpretation, design ideation, visualization, and evaluation throughout the architectural design process. Students will investigate how spatial design can evoke, mediate, and communicate the histories, stories, and cultural significance of Fort Ancient—moving beyond functionality to create environments that resonate on psychological, sensory, and emotional levels. By integrating AI-assisted design with architecture, landscape, Indigenous cultural narratives, storytelling, and digital heritage, students will develop proposals for a museum that serves not only as a cultural and educational institution, but also as a place of reflection, empathy, discovery, and connection to the earthworks and surrounding landscape.
The studio examines how space can evoke memory, shape emotion, and deepen our understanding of history and culture. Students use AI-assisted design, Extended Reality (XR), and immersive visualization as design tools to explore ideas, test spatial experiences, and communicate narratives. Through digital modeling, virtual reality, and interactive media, they develop and evaluate architectural experiences that engage visitors on sensory, emotional, and cultural levels.
Working closely with the Fort Ancient team, students create museum proposals that tell the stories of Native American communities through research, design exploration, immersive prototyping, and narrative development. Building on the parallel research project Re-Story Fort Ancient and the 2025 SENSE studio, the 2026 studio emphasizes thoughtful design, interdisciplinary collaboration, and emerging technologies as means of creating meaningful places that connect people with history, culture, and one another.
This studio is supported by the Gensler Award. Gensler is a global architecture, design, and planning firm. Founded in 1965, Gensler has built a team of 6,000 professionals who partner with clients in over 100 countries each year on projects that act as catalysts for growth. We are deeply grateful for Gensler’s support.
Site: Fort Ancient Earthworks, Hopewell UNESCO World Heritage Site, Ohio
Program: Museum.
Before Meaning: Encountering Fort Ancient
Ming Tang, with the assistance of GPT
I enter Fort Ancient from the north as a storm is gathering.
The sky has darkened. Wind moves through the trees, lifting thousands of early autumn leaves into the air. They cross the road in waves, rise, scatter, disappear, and return. From inside the moving car, the wind seems almost to take shape—invisible curves made visible by leaves, chasing the vehicle as we follow the narrow road south.
For a moment, it feels as if the landscape is whispering.
I do not know what it is saying.
There is urgency in the approaching storm, but also an unexpected calm. The forest encloses the road. Beyond it, partially hidden by trees and hills, the ancient earthworks stretch across the plateau above the Little Miami River. Their scale is difficult to understand from any single position. They appear, disappear, and reappear as we move. What seems at first to be natural terrain gradually reveals itself as something shaped by human hands nearly two thousand years ago.
I know very little about what those hands intended.
And yet I feel something.
This contradiction stays with me.
It reminds me of standing before the Great Wall of China. We can study their geometry, construction, and history, but knowledge is not necessarily what creates our first response. Before explanation, there is size, scale, distance, and the relationship between a small human body and something much larger than itself.
Perhaps this is where what we feel comes before what we understand.
We ask questions about meaning. What is this place? Who built it? What did it mean?
But our physical experience asks something different.
How does the ground rise beneath my feet? How far can I see? What disappears behind the trees? What does the wind sound like? What happens when the sky becomes dark?
We experience a place through our bodies before our minds begin to explain it.
Fort Ancient makes this relationship particularly powerful. The earthworks carry histories, knowledge, and cultural meanings that extend far beyond what we can see today. Archaeological research helps us understand their construction and significance, while Indigenous oral traditions and the knowledge of descendant Tribal communities offer important connections to the people who shaped this landscape.
Yet as a visitor, I recognize how much I still do not understand.
The earth remains.
The embankments remain. The openings remain. The geometry remains. The little Miami river flows below the cliffs. Seasons return, storms arrive, leaves fall, and people continue to move through the landscape.
This raises a question for architecture.
How do we design a museum that respects the history of Fort Ancient while allowing visitors to experience the place for themselves?
There is a danger in telling a story too confidently.
Digital techologies give us powerful tools to represent the past. We can reconstruct buildings that no longer exist, generate imagined scenes, and surround visitors with convincing stories.
But powerful technology does not mean we fully understand the past. These tools should support historical research and Indigenous knowledge, rather than replace them with our own assumptions.
Perhaps the purpose of technology should not be to remove every uncertainty.
Perhaps architecture should not speak louder.
Perhaps it should help us listen.
A museum at Fort Ancient might begin not with information, but with experience: walking between earthworks, watching the horizon change, hearing wind move through trees, moving from darkness into light, and feeling the passage of time.
Then come the stories, histories, and different ways of understanding the place.
Experience before explanation. Feeling before understanding.
This idea also connects to our relationship with AI. Large language models can connect words, histories, images, and ideas at an extraordinary scale. Yet human beings experience the world through something more: gravity, temperature, balance, fear, touch, movement, and breath.
We understand through language.
But we also understand through experience, even before we find the words.
Driving through Fort Ancient beneath the approaching storm, I cannot say what the people who shaped this landscape two thousand years ago intended. Their histories deserve careful study, respect, and the voices of the communities connected to them.
The leaves continue to move across the road. The earth rises quietly beside me. The forest opens and closes.
I still have much to learn.
But my body has already begun to listen.
Links:
