Simulations, Models, Twins

Projects to Review

Projects to look at before class, grouped by week. The syllabus links here from each week. Ask the same four questions of each: what does it show, what is the data, what is the mechanism, and what can't it see.

Some of these links have not been checked this semester. If one is dead, search for the title and maker.

Week 2 | Data and Representation

  • NYC Street Tree Map — The Parks Department's public map of every street tree in its census, which is the dataset used in Tutorials 2 and 3.
  • Mapping Historical New York — An atlas from Columbia's Center for Spatial Research that maps the 1850, 1880 and 1910 census manuscripts for Manhattan and Brooklyn at the level of the individual person.
  • Uncharted — Studio Folder, 2016; an installation of globes etched with where the Landsat satellites pointed their sensors each year since 1972, shown at the Oslo Architecture Triennale.
  • Explore Census Data — The US Census Bureau's search and table-building interface for the decennial census, the American Community Survey and its other programs.
  • White Collar Crime Risk Zones — Clifton, Lavigne and Tseng, 2017; a predictive policing map that applies the method to financial crime, published with a methodology white paper.
  • Eviction Lab — A Princeton research lab that assembled a national eviction dataset from court records and publishes it with its methods.
  • scrapism — Sam Lavigne's course materials on scraping, or creating your own dataset from material on the web.
  • The Render Ghosts — James Bridle, 2013; an essay about the stock human figures pasted into architectural renderings and an attempt to find the people who were photographed for them.
  • Renderlands — Liam Young, 2017; a film set in the render farms of India in which a worker builds a city out of discarded 3D assets from games and films.
  • Goodbye Uncanny Valley — Alan Warburton, 2017; a video essay on computer graphics after photorealism, and on the labor and aesthetics of the CGI industry.
  • This House Does Not Exist — Pieter Levels, 2022; a website that generates houses with Stable Diffusion using prompts written to imitate architectural photography, and ranks them by votes.
  • PHANTOM. Mies as Rendered Society — Andrés Jaque / Office for Political Innovation, 2012; an intervention that brought the contents of the Barcelona Pavilion's basement up into its public rooms.

Additional

  • OpenStreetMap and Overture Maps — The volunteer-made world map, and the corporate map data project built partly from it.
  • Center for Spatial Research — Projects from the Columbia GSAPP research center this course comes out of.
  • MONIAC — Bill Phillips, 1949; a hydraulic model of the UK economy, of which the Reserve Bank of New Zealand keeps a working example.
  • World Game — Buckminster Fuller, 1961 onward; a simulation of the whole planet's resources intended as a teaching tool.

Week 3 | Agents and Action

  • Conway's Game of Life — John Conway, 1970; a cellular automaton in which each cell on a grid lives or dies by four rules about its neighbors, and the canonical small example of a simulation.
  • ECMWF open charts — The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts' public forecast charts, including ensemble plots that show the spread between model runs.
  • Two Sides of the Same Coin — Kurgan, Miller and Vosburgh, 2025; 12,000 years of land use from the HYDE database, modeled backwards, which is a hindcast rather than a forecast.
  • NVIDIA Earth-2 — NVIDIA's family of AI models and tools for weather and climate forecasting.
  • NetLogo Models Library — Several hundred small agent-based models, all of them inspectable.

Additional

  • Boids — Craig Reynolds, 1986–87; the flocking simulation described in his 1987 paper "Flocks, Herds, and Schools," in which each agent follows three steering rules.
  • The Limits to Growth — Meadows, Meadows, Randers and Behrens, 1972; the World3 system dynamics model run forward to 2100, published as a book by the Club of Rome.
  • earth.nullschool.net — Cameron Beccario; an animated globe of wind, ocean and weather model output.
  • GraphCast and GenCast — Google DeepMind, 2023 and 2024; weather forecasts made by machine learning models trained on past weather rather than by simulating the atmosphere.

Week 4 | Design Practice; Software as Medium

  • ADU for You — WXY with HPD and DOB, 2026; a public tool for New York City homeowners with eligibility rules, a plan library and a cost estimator.
  • Leeside — KPF Urban Interface, for Quartz; an interactive model of a fictional rust-belt city absorbing climate migrants by 2040, in which the reader moves the scenario inputs.
  • A Fix for 42nd Street — KPF; a pedestrian flow model used inside a redevelopment proposal for the street.
  • The Pudding — A publication of visual essays built from data.

Additional

  • Sidewalk Labs Replica — A "synthetic population" model of travel behavior that began inside Sidewalk Labs and continued as a company after Sidewalk Toronto ended.

Week 5 | Sensing and Measuring

  • Trash Track — MIT Senseable City Lab, 2008; household waste tagged with location sensors and followed across the country.
  • Urban Intonation — Brian House; recordings of rats in New York, published alongside his writing on the smart city.
  • Sidewalk Toronto — The project archive of Sidewalk Labs' proposed neighborhood, read alongside the account of its collapse.
  • Flock Safety coverage at 404 Media — Reporting on the private license plate reader network installed across a large number of US municipalities.
  • Forensic Architecture — A research agency at Goldsmiths that reconstructs events from video, sensor and spatial evidence; browse several investigations.

Additional

Week 6 | Games, and Simulation as Play

  • micropolisJS — Graeme McCutcheon; the released SimCity source running in a browser, in which every coefficient is readable.
  • Nova Alea — Molleindustria, 2016; an eight-minute game about real estate speculation, the first in the studio's Playable Cities series.
  • Car Park Capital — Hilkojj Interactive, published by MicroProse; a tycoon game in which the player builds parking lots and uses propaganda to convince a city it needs cars.
  • SimRefinery — Phil Salvador, 2020; the story of the refinery simulation Maxis built for Chevron, one of several simulations the company made as consulting work.
  • Dwarf Fortress — Bay 12 Games, 2006 onward; a game with decades of simulated geology, weather and history running underneath the part the player sees.

Additional

  • Townscaper — Oskar Stålberg, 2021; a town-building toy with no simulation underneath it.
  • Parable of the Polygons — Vi Hart and Nicky Case, 2014; a playable version of Schelling's segregation model.
  • Simulating the World (in Emoji) — Nicky Case; a short interactive introduction to building simulations.
  • Micropolis source — The 2008 open-source release of the original SimCity code.
  • Half-Earth Socialism — Vettese and Pendergrass with Trust and Francis Tseng, 2022; the browser game that accompanies the book.

Week 8 | "Spatial Intelligence" and "World Models"

  • The Curse of Dimensionality — Kurgan, Chum, Krisch, Vosburgh and Zhang, Venice Architecture Biennale, 2025; an installation that makes the interior of a machine learning model spatial and inspectable.
  • "Lavender": The AI machine directing Israel's bombing spree in Gaza — Yuval Abraham, +972 Magazine, April 2024; an investigation into an AI system that marked about 37,000 Palestinians as targets.
  • Waymax — Waymo; a driving simulator whose simulated miles are offered as evidence to regulators.
  • We Asked an AI to Map Our Stories Across NYC — The City, February 2024; a newsroom used ChatGPT to place about 2,750 of its stories on a map and found the gaps in its own coverage.
  • Sora as a world simulator — OpenAI, 2024; a technical post arguing that video generation is a path to simulating the world.
  • Genie 3 — Google DeepMind, August 2025; a model that generates interactive environments navigable in real time.
  • AlphaEarth Foundations — Google DeepMind, July 2025; a model that combines Earth observation data into one embedding for each place on the planet.
  • World Labs — Fei-Fei Li's company, and the clearest statement of what "spatial intelligence" is meant to mean.

Additional

  • Machines Reading Maps — The Alan Turing Institute; text pulled out of scanned historical maps at scale.
  • Unsupervised — Refik Anadol, MoMA, 2022; an animation generated from the museum's collection data.

Week 9 | Living in the Model

  • Emissaries — Ian Cheng, 2015–17; simulations that play themselves, with no player and no ending.
  • Planet City — Liam Young, 2020; a film imagining the whole human population housed in one city so that the rest of the planet can be returned to wilderness.
  • Test Sites — Robert Gerard Pietrusko; a research project on the landscapes built for testing weapons and equipment.

Additional

  • Lawrence Lek — Sinofuturism through NOX High-Rise; game engines used to build one continuous fictional world across many works.
  • Hardly Working — Total Refusal, 2022; a film about the non-player characters of Red Dead Redemption 2 at work.
  • Mitigation of Shock — Superflux, 2017; a future apartment built as a room the visitor can walk into.
  • Wheatfield — A Confrontation — Agnes Denes, 1982; two acres of wheat planted on a landfill in lower Manhattan.
  • In Plain Sight — Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Laura Kurgan and Robert Gerard Pietrusko with the Center for Spatial Research, 2018 U.S. Pavilion.
  • Parallel I–IV — Harun Farocki, 2012–14; a video series on how game engines learned to draw clouds, water and walls.
  • Hito Steyerl, SocialSim, 2020 — A simulation of dancing police figures driven by data on police violence.

Module by Adam Vosburgh, 2026-09-08.