Overview
Julie Drane and Rémi Coutanson are French architects working at the intersection of heritage and technical practice. Their Honourable Mention entry approached Old Spitalfields Market with the curiosity of practitioners who already use AI tooling daily — and used Gendo 48 as an opportunity to test what a different, architect-built workflow could bring to that habit.
The concept
The pair came to the brief with a working interest in how AI image tools can be folded into architectural visualisation without diluting the discipline. Their reading of the iron hall is led by curiosity — testing how the historic envelope responds to different atmospheres, materials and inhabitations, and letting the building's existing presence stay central to each variation rather than be displaced by it.
Workflow & process
Rémi uses ComfyUI daily for architectural visualisation, so the canvas was approached as a comparison as much as a competition. Curiosity drove the process: trying Gendo's smooth canvas, interface and chatbot against a familiar pipeline to understand what a workflow built specifically for architects offered over a more general-purpose graph. The 48 hours became a structured test — same brief, same building, new tool — with the canvas itself acting as the place to make the comparison visible.
Interview
Q: Was this your first time using Gendo, and how has your relationship with it evolved?
First time on Gendo. We use ComfyUI daily for architectural visualisation, and we were curious to see what could be done in Gendo compared with that kind of pipeline.
Q: In your own words, what was it like to compete in Gendo 48?
The smooth canvas, the interface and the chatbot stood out. It felt like a more integrated way of working than stitching nodes together — closer to how we already think about a project than how we think about a graph.
Key takeaways
Julie and Rémi's entry is interesting precisely because they arrived as experienced AI users from a different stack. Their honourable mention shows what happens when an established daily workflow meets a tool built around the architectural surface itself — and the comparison they ran inside 48 hours is itself a useful artefact for any studio currently weighing its options.