Karel Klein

Karel Klein is the co-director of Ruy Klein and an architect licensed in New York state. Her undergraduate education began on the campus of University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where she earned bachelor’s degrees in architecture and her civil engineering. From there, she went to Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation and was exposed to a myriad range and diverse manner of instruction. This was where her architectural education promiscuously and productively rubbed up against fine arts and a liberal arts education. This was also where the infamous “paperless” studios experiment took place under the leadership of Bernard Tschumi, and Karel was there to experience one of the very first of those pioneering studios.

Since graduating, and in addition to practicing, Karel has been teaching architecture studio courses at various institutions including Columbia University GSAPP, the Pratt Institute, and the University of California, Los Angeles. She currently teaches at Washington University’s Sam Fox School, the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc), and the University of Pennsylvania’s Weitzman School of Design. In these more recent studios, Karel has been working with her students on projects that collaborate with artificial intelligence neural networks as a provocation to conventional aesthetic practices in architectural design.

In her practice, Karel works with various artificial intelligence technologies. Her ongoing project is an investigation into crossbred image-objects produced using atypically trained GANs and their capacity for contemporary mythmaking in architecture. In the same way that “imaginative vocabulary” and “metaphoric style” were primary, if literary instruments for the invention of new mythologies for Surrealists, the strange and idiosyncratic qualities of images produced using artificial intelligence are similarly a kind of matter metaphored and made visible by the cyborg imagination. She is interested in a kind of re-enchantment of the architectural body — one that both foments and succumbs to sensual perceptions, and one that discovers new and unexpected relations to the world beyond the realm of the rational. 

To this end, she is concerned with the “diagonal science” of Roger Caillois, as well as the two constituents of the marvelous as dreamed up by Andre Breton: convulsive beauty and objective chance. She reads the philosophical prose of authors such as William H. Gass, who writes “sentences which make an imaginary speaker speak the imagination loudly to the reading eye” — who writes exquisite sentences that figure with intricate features which can be breathed, tasted, and touched. He does with language, in fact, what she, with the help of her artificial intelligence counterparts, hopes to do with the corporeal and material aspects of architecture. A textual and tectonic alchemy. Her essay for SCI-Arc’s academic journal, Offramp, entitled “Verto Pellis,” is an instance of this exploration.