Diffusion, Archive, Perpetuation: Reimagining Chinese ornament in the age of mass design and artificial intelligence Part 2 Project 2025 Tsz Kin Law University of Hong Kong | China In the age of mass design, architecture is increasingly detached from its site, memory, and culture. This thesis aims to revive architectural ornament, but not as mere decoration, but as a machine of memory, a tectonic language, and an act of cultural resistance.Drawing inspiration from traditional elements such as the Dougong structure and southern Chinese ridge tiles and walls, I propose an architectural archive: a self-adapting ornament database utilizing AI diffusion models. These forms are embedded into building components, not as decoration, but as structural expressions conveying symbolic meanings and cultural memory.This thesis counters modernism’s aversion to ornament, particularly Adolf Loos’s “Ornament and Crime,” by proposing a design approach inspired by John Ruskin’s ethics of craft and Antoine Picon’s digital concept of ornament. It explores a hybrid workflow that combines AI and manual craft to create an act of digital architectural archaeology: shards of memory reimagined for the future.In rapidly redeveloping cities like those in China, where architecture risks uniformity, this work proposes ornament as a means of local continuity, not nostalgia. The architect becomes a curator of memory, utilizing machines to extend, rather than erase, history through new technologies and craftsmanship. Tutor(s) Christian Lange