Visions of Comfort: The Rise of AI Dream Homes and the Metaphors of the Ideal Interior in Contemporary China Part 2 Dissertation 2026 Yihui Chen Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture | UK Behind the frictionless beauty of AI ‘dream homes’ lies an older architectural question: how does a society picture a good life when dwelling is under pressure? This dissertation approaches it through a Chinese case: viral AI-generated interiors on social media. Set against rapid urbanisation, commodified housing and the pressure to ‘settle down’, it asks how housing anxiety becomes visual pleasure, and what desires, shortages and displacements register when home appears not as a building to inhabit, but as an endlessly reproducible image.The dissertation describes these images as ‘architectural shuangwen’, from the Chinese term for feel-good web fiction. Like shuangwen, AI dream homes offer instant consolation and wish fulfilment; unlike fiction, they contain no plot, struggle, or reversal. They present only the finished image of success: glass walls, panoramic rain or snow, warm light, expansive interiors, refined taste and a life without clutter, labour, or conflict. Through visual genealogy, close reading and platform analysis, the dissertation traces how this fantasy draws from real-estate advertising, lifestyle media, globalised interior design, image-generation models, and recommendation algorithms.Its outcome is a critical framework for how architectural desire is produced, standardised, and depoliticised under platform culture. It argues that these images translate structural housing contradictions into taste, mood, and lifestyle, turning a shared urban predicament into private aesthetic aspiration. In response, it asks architecture to look beyond seductive comfort and recover more diverse, collective, and materially grounded ways of imagining dwelling. Tutor(s) Mark Dorrian