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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 help of GPT

I enter Fort Ancient from the north as a storm is gathering.

The sky has darkened. Wind moves suddenly 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 acquire a form—long invisible curves made visible for a moment 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 topography, the ancient earthworks stretch for miles along the plateau above the Little Miami River. Their scale is difficult to comprehend from any single position. They appear, disappear, and reappear as we move. What seems at first to be part of the 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 other ancient monuments, such as the Great Pyramid. We can study their geometry, construction, history, and possible meanings, but knowledge is not necessarily what produces the first response. Before explanation, there is mass. There is scale. There is distance. There is the relationship between a small human body and something incomprehensibly larger than itself.

Perhaps this is where the somatic precedes the semantic.

The semantic world asks us to name things. What is this place? Who built it? What did it mean? What happened here?

The somatic world asks something different.

How does the ground rise beneath my feet? How far can I see? What disappears behind the trees? How does my body move through an opening in the earthwork? What does the wind sound like? What happens when the sky becomes dark?

These experiences do not require language. The body encounters the place before the mind constructs an explanation for it.

Fort Ancient makes this distinction particularly powerful because so much of its original semantic world is inaccessible to us. Its builders did not leave written texts explaining why these enormous earthworks were constructed. Even the name Fort Ancient carries the history of a misunderstanding: later observers interpreted the earthworks as fortifications. “Hopewell,” too, is a name imposed by archaeology, not necessarily a name by which the people who created this landscape understood themselves.

We therefore arrive carrying words that belong largely to our own time.

But beneath those words, the earth remains.

The embankments remain. The openings remain. The geometry remains. The river remains below the cliffs. The sun continues to cross the sky, seasons return, storms arrive, leaves fall, and human bodies continue to move through the landscape.

This raises a difficult question for architecture.

How do we design a museum for a civilization whose stories we cannot fully recover?

At the 9/11 Memorial or a Holocaust museum, architecture can work alongside an immense archive of names, photographs, recordings, objects, testimonies, and documented individual lives. At Fort Ancient, the condition is profoundly different. The absence of written testimony creates a silence that architecture should perhaps not rush to fill.

There is a danger in filling that silence too easily.

If we construct a complete narrative, we may simply replace what has been lost with a story of our own invention. Digital reconstruction, artificial intelligence, immersive media, and extended reality make this temptation even greater. We now possess increasingly powerful tools for making the past appear to speak. We can reconstruct buildings that no longer exist, generate voices we have never heard, populate landscapes with imagined inhabitants, and surround visitors with convincing narratives.

But technological confidence is not historical knowledge.

Perhaps the purpose of technology here should not be to eliminate uncertainty.

Perhaps architecture should not speak louder.

Perhaps it should help us listen.

A museum at Fort Ancient might therefore begin not with information, but with encounter: the compression of a path between earthworks; the changing horizon; the sound of wind moving through trees; darkness followed by light; the distance between bodies; the weight of earth; the passage of time.

Only afterward might language arrive.

This reverses the familiar relationship between information and experience. Instead of telling visitors what a place means and then asking them to experience it, we might first allow the body to encounter something it does not yet understand.

Somatic before semantic.

This may also reveal something about our emerging relationship with artificial intelligence. Large language models inhabit an extraordinary semantic universe. They can connect words, histories, concepts, images, and narratives at a scale no individual human can approach. Yet human beings inhabit another universe as well: one of gravity, temperature, balance, fatigue, fear, proximity, rhythm, touch, movement, and breath.

We understand through language.

But we also understand before language.

Driving through Fort Ancient beneath the approaching storm, I cannot say what the people who shaped this landscape two thousand years ago intended to tell me. Perhaps they intended no message that could ever be translated into my language.

The leaves continue to move across the road. The earth rises quietly beside me. The forest opens and closes.

I still do not understand.

But my body has already begun to listen.

Links: 

Re-Story Fort Ancient with AI

•  Gensler Award

2025 SENSE Studio