Iloilo Processional Theatre wins first place

Iloilo Processional Theatre has won first place in the AI and Vernacular Architecture competition.

The scheme is a performing arts centre for a city whose cultural life already happens in the street. During festivals such as Dinagyang, Iloilo turns itself into an open-air stage, and the brief we set ourselves was to give that a permanent civic home without taking it indoors.

Michaella Tafalla led the design, working with Luke Parkhurst of Afterform Studio. Afterform also produced the procedural model, the visualisation and the film.

The building was generated procedurally in Houdini, driven by Python written with Claude Code and Codex. Any parameter could be changed and the whole scheme rebuilt from it, rather than remodelled by hand.

The part we are most pleased about is not the imagery. It is that the entry was interrogated the whole way through by a panel of six AI agents built to attack it, and that the panel was frequently unkind. It scored the scheme structural-dominant in all three rounds of testing, and the behavioural culture weighting never moved off 0.15. We published those numbers, and the verdicts behind them, in the process breakdown.

The full project is published as Iloilo Processional Theatre, and the method is set out in the process breakdown.