The promises of AI have been gripping the world of architecture and design in recent months, but few have grasped that the revolution is already under way. Image-making tools such as Dall-E, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion have allowed the effortless creation of seductive visions: skyscrapers in the style of Frank Lloyd Wright, fantasy mash-ups of sci-fi and art nouveau, etc., but AI is already being deployed to shape the real world – with far-reaching consequences.
The writer of the article watched while on a zoom call with XKool, an AI company based in Shenzhen, a handful of little green blocks flashes up on the screen, filling a building site with a neat grid of uniform cubes. One second they form rows of towers, next they morph into low-rise courtyards, then they flip back into long slender slabs, before cycling through hundreds of other iterations, in a hypnotic high-speed ballet of bristling buildings. Corridors switch sides, furniture dances to and fro. Another click and an invisible world of pipes and wires appears, a matrix of services bending and splicing in mesmerising unison, the location of lighting, plug sockets and switches automatically optimised. One further click and the construction drawings pop up, along with a cost breakdown and components list. The project, Shenzhen Bay International hotel, was built in four and a half months from start to finish.
The late Zaha Hadid’s firm, ZHA, headed by Patrik Schumacher, has embraced AI for early “ideation”, using Midjourney to churn out options in its distinctive house style. “You don’t even have to do much,” Schumacher said in a recent online discussion, as images of swooping forms flashed on to the screen, like globs of chewing gum stretched into oblivion. “You show them raw and you can generate ideas with clients. The light, shadow, geometry, coherency, sense of gravity and order is so potent.” It’s no surprise that the firm’s heady visions for a desert spa resort complex in Neom, the controversial “smart city” in Saudi Arabia, were generated by AI.
Architects across the spectrum are adopting AI tools in different ways. One said they now regularly use ChatGPT to summarise local planning policies and compare the performance of different materials for, say, insulation. Others say their teams regularly use Midjourney to help brainstorm ideas during the concept phase. “We had a client wanting to build mosques in Abu Dhabi,” one architect told me. “I could quickly generate a range of options to show them, to get the conversation going. It’s like an instant mood board.”