Overview
Gonzalo Pena Alvarez is an architect from Chile, working at the intersection of craft, technology and construction, with experience across Chile, Spain and Australia. His finalist entry, The Listening Market, comes from a long-running personal research question: how can sound become a design criterion in architecture, rather than an acoustic problem solved at the end of the process?
The concept
In architecture, sound is usually treated as a by-product — something to control after the fact. Gonzalo's proposal does the opposite. The Listening Market uses 3D-printed titanium acoustic capitals attached to the existing cast-iron columns of Old Spitalfields, transforming the Victorian structure into a system that can spatialise sound and create different atmospheres across time. Rather than adding an object to the hall, the project tries to tune the building. The market stops being only a place of exchange and becomes a place where one can embrace the atmosphere — a transmuted experience of noise. The deeper architectural ambition is for sound to help spaces do something more than acoustically perform: calm, gather, repair, and perhaps even help heal relationships between people, communities and the city.
Workflow & process
Gonzalo began by reading the place. He did not know Old Spitalfields deeply before the competition, so the first hours went into history, structure and understanding why the iron hall mattered. He tested many directions — elevated platforms, dramatic lighting, temporary installations, more radical insertions — most of which became useful failures. The pivot came when he stopped thinking about what to place inside the building and started looking at the structure itself. The capital became the key element, and the project moved from something abstract into an architectural operation: column, capital, floor, ceiling, sound, atmosphere. Gendo was crucial because it allowed him to work through controlled iteration. You cannot simply ask AI to 'tune the building' and expect an answer — each image had to be corrected, redirected and refined. But the ability to reimagine one feature at a time while keeping the larger architectural intention alive became the most valuable part of the workflow.
Interview
Q: Was this your first time using Gendo, and how has your relationship with it evolved?
I discovered Gendo only a couple of weeks before the competition. I tested it briefly and was immediately impressed. I had already been experimenting with my own small tools and workflows to help me create and control architectural images. Some worked, but when I used Gendo I felt I was seeing a much more complete version of what I had been naively trying to build myself. The canvas, the precision, the image quality and the possibility of iteration felt extremely powerful. Gendo 48 became the perfect opportunity to test the tool deeply and under pressure. What I understood very quickly was that this was not really an image competition — it was about using AI as a design copilot. That is how I approached it. When a new tool is genuinely powerful, you can feel it immediately, and Gendo did what I hoped: it accelerated my ideas enormously. I tested and tested until I was exhausted. My canvas is messy, but it's powerful because you can see many ideas appearing, failing, evolving and becoming more precise in a very short time. The real challenge was not producing many images, but maintaining one architectural intention throughout the entire process.
Q: What did the result mean to you — and what would you do differently next time?
Honestly, I needed the prize — but I also knew how difficult it would be to win, so during the competition I tried to forget the result and lose myself in the process. The 48 hours became a way to test the limits of AI as a design tool. The real breakthrough was the 3D-printed extension of the capital: a piece that could complete the column, reinforce it and tune it at the same time. That was the 'why not?' moment. Suddenly an idea I had been carrying for years — sound as a design criterion — became feasible through a specific architectural detail. Finalist means a lot because it validated that direction. It showed me an idea coming from research, intuition and experimentation can compete internationally when it becomes precise enough. Next time I want to spend more time on the final submission — I knew the idea was becoming powerful, but I also knew it still had another level of clarity and refinement waiting inside it.
Q: In your own words, what was it like to compete in Gendo 48?
I truly enjoyed it. The competition felt so fast, almost like a dream or a blink, but at the same time extremely intense and powerful. Gendo 48 confirmed to me that these tools are not just a passing layer on top of architecture. Used with intention and consciously, they can become real copilots in the design process — helping us test, fail, refine and accelerate ideas without removing the humanity of the architect. For me it was exhausting, exciting and very clarifying. I would recommend the experience to every designer today, not because AI gives you the answer, but because it forces you to ask better questions, faster and deeper.
Key takeaways
The Listening Market is the kind of entry that justifies a competition existing at all. A long-held research interest in sound, a building that lent itself to the question, and a workflow disciplined enough to keep the idea intact across hundreds of iterations. Gonzalo's account of using Gendo as a copilot rather than a renderer is one of the clearest articulations from this year's cohort, and the proposal itself extends what architectural acoustics can plausibly mean.