Scroll through Instagram and, if the algorithm has deduced you’re interested in architecture, you will find threads of bizarre, often surreal buildings that seem possible but not probable. There are futuristic swirls of space-age stuff coagulated in buildings that evoke Zaha Hadid. There are Afrofuturist cityscapes with mud towers and spaceship docking stations which might be scenes from Wakanda, home of Marvel’s Black Panther. And there are exquisite modern interiors, complete with lens flare and dust motes so real you could touch them. All of these have been generated in seconds by AI on the back of a few words of prompting.
Dall-E, Stable Diffusion and Midjourney have made what might have taken an extremely skilled illustrator or animator a week to do into something any of us can commission in a few moments. There is no doubt those jobs are at terminal risk. Architects are already using AI to handle mundane tasks from distributing parking spaces and bathrooms to arranging blocks on an urban plan.
In the more accessible and more ubiquitous visual world of social media, one designer who has made waves through the application of AI to architectural imagery is Hassan Ragab. His striking works veer from dreamlike futuristic architectures in wild natural settings to surreal mash-ups of his native Egyptian cities with steampunk organicism, embracing everything from informal settlements and shabby 1970s towers to elaborate mosques and Antoni Gaudí. “It’s nonstop,” he tells me. “Every day there’s something new and nobody really understands what’s going on. Everybody is rushing in without really thinking about what they’re doing.
“In that way, it’s so different to architecture, which is so slow. I left my practice in 2019 and they’re still working on the same building.” The platform for Ragab’s designs is not the construction site but social media. He became viral through the seductive powers of his pictures. “It is very empowering,” he says. “It allows us a freedom.” Ragab might not be having any effect on real architecture yet, but architecture is now being used extensively by non-architects as a visual medium in itself. That is interesting and will feed back into real architecture as people become more sophisticated with seeing and understanding and manipulating AI visions.
Does he think AI will put architects out of business? “There is this idea,” he replies after a pause, “that humans are the only species, the only beings that can create ideas. That is not true any more. AI can do all these incredible things. Everything is possible and we should not be afraid, we should welcome it.”
While Ragab and others are provoking AI to hallucinate new, hybrid architectures, always strange and often alien, Wanyu He is determinedly designing them to be built. A former employee of Rem Koolhaas’s OMA, she founded XKool in Shenzhen in 2016 to utilise AI for design and construction. The problem when He shows me the buildings which have resulted from the AI collaborations is that, at least so far, they don’t look any different from (in fact they look clunkier than) most other mass development in China.
“If it looks like that,” she says, “that is because of human decisions. Because of economies.” She explains that the way developers are using AI now is to make buildings cheaper. “In the future, architects will be empowered to show the client thousands of options and refine the best one so that even on a low budget you will be able to get the best building.”
Unusually for an architect, she is also a writer of science fiction. “We worry about AI escaping human control and causing a disaster for mankind, and in my novels most of the future AI scenarios are not” — she thinks for a moment — “optimistic,” she says, with a slightly nervous giggle. “But it is this writing which gave me an awareness to prevent these things happening. AI should be a co-pilot and a friend, not a replacement for architects.”
Among the hyperinflating barrage of images on social media for the most extravagant and futuristic visions of AI-generated structures, the version of the future that crops up most frequently might well bear a resemblance to the work of Zaha Hadid Architects. Hadid seemed to predict a future suggested by sci-fi, rather than (the possibly more realistic) one that just resembles decline and the world as a huge informal settlement. Since she died in 2016, her practice has been headed by techno-optimist and libertarian Patrik Schumacher, who made waves when he revealed that the practice had been using AI models to regurgitate its own work, feeding in past projects to generate new ones.
At ZHA’s slick London offices, Shajay Bhooshan, head of the computation and design research team, clarifies what Schumacher meant. “Using AI as a sketching tool is low-hanging fruit. Images it has ingested come from our own buildings, so it is a pre-trained Stable Diffusion model fed with our own designs. What comes out depends on what images we choose to train the model with. So it is not just ZHA buildings but enough other architecture to give it a wider cultural understanding.”
He shows me on a screen a complex plan of a city settled into a valley. “Frankly, it is easier to just feed in our own work, though, because of copyright issues, but otherwise we put in everything, right back to Roman masonry.”
How do they find AI most useful? “It allows us to front-load,” he says. “It augments the process so we can get to what the client wants quicker with faster iterations and changes. It can then make trade-offs, say between budget and environmental impact, between pedestrians and traffic.” He then flips to another urban plan. “In many ways it makes good design more rapid and more affordable.”
And the downsides? “This is a rapidly changing technology,” he says. “There’s unexplainability, it is highly complex and we don’t always know how the input is converted to output. Midjourney and ChatGPT have been so successful because anyone can use them and millions are, whereas this field is still very small. We need to direct AI towards valuable architectural tasks, not just images for Instagram, otherwise it will not evolve.”
Less of a techno-optimist is Adam Greenfield. A writer, urbanist and former psyops specialist in the US Army, Greenfield suggests architects have yet to wake up to the potential destruction of their profession. “AI will strip away virtually everything that an architect does,” he says. But won’t architects be able to survive as brands, in the way fashion labels are now, with the prestige of a real Foster or Hadid building? “Do we really think that a client in the Emirates or an emerging economy is going to pay a premium for the presence of the ego when they could probably have their nephew feeding some prompts into an AI generator and probably get something even more imaginative?
“This is existential for architects . . . The people who are now most enthusiastic about AI have no idea what’s being done to them. What we need to ask at this stage is what are we here for? If we’re not here to bring our life experiences to bear on complex problems through our creativity, then what’s left? Eat and shit? The things AI is being called to do are the things which give us a stake in existence.”
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