Designboom_ Fascinated by the omens and prodigies abound in concepts of ‘impossible’ structures, Kaveh Najafian takes on AI design tools to traverse the boundaries between the real and unreal. Using text-to-image program Midjourney, the architect envisions a new realm of surreal and experimental furniture design. The Louhi lounge chair series realizes a fascinating amalgamation of impossible forms and materials fused in unintentional compositions that are at once familiar yet odd and dysfunctional.

Named after a shapeshifting queen in Finnish mythology, the collection encapsulates the emerging wave of AI-generated design and its innovative way of conceptualizing inputted ideas. As such, Kaveh Najafian’s conceptual chairs emerge as ‘impossible’ and impractical structures where form prevails beyond function — a surreal result of unintentional experimentation.

Kaveh Najafian sees the recent surge of AI assisted art and architecture as a driver which has radically shifted designers’ practices to waver between the impractical and conceivable, and the real and unreal. In his recent series, the architect explores notions of intentions and realizing the impossible, which supplemented by emerging tools such as Midjourney have opened up boundless avenues of creative imagination and expression beyond functionality and practicality.‘In AI art, everything can be everything, everything is possible but all in an impossible world,’he comments.

AI assisted art and architecture, however, has abruptly moved the concept to an uncharted space. Here there are no real or unreal, simply because the intention behind the creation is not clear, or better said, there are no intentions at all to begin with,’says Kaveh Najafian.

‘There are no references to compare, there are no battlegrounds anymore. Every image that is produced by AI at its current stage of development, is like a painting by a super talented 4-year-old. It is impossible to say if, for example, a table in children’s painting is real or not, not because of poor technique or its lack of accuracy, but simply because most of the time it is not intended to be a table as we understand it, and that is what gives authenticity and sophistication to children’s paintings’.