Technology has long allowed architecture to push the limits of form and function. As early as 1963, Sketchpad, one of the first architectural software, allowed architects and designers to move and change objects on the screen. Quickly, the drawing of the traditional hand gave way to a continuation of programs in constant expansion – revise, sketchup and BIM, among others – which have contributed to creating plans and sections of the floor, the energy consumption of buildings, to improve sustainable construction and to help follow the codes of the building, to name only a few uses.
Architects presenting “transductions” see newly evolving forms of AI “as a new tool rather than a development at the end of profession”, explains Vigneri Beane, despite what some of its peers fear technology. He adds: “I appreciate that it is a somewhat annoying thing for people, (but) I feel familiar with rhetoric.”
After all, he said, AI is not TO DO work. “To get something interesting and the trouble to be saved in AI, a huge time is necessary,” he said. “My architectural vocabulary has become much more precise and my visual sense obtained incredible training, exercising all these muscles which were a little atrophied.”
Vien agrees: “I think these are extremely powerful tools for an architect and a designer. Do I think it is the whole future of architecture? No, but I think it is a tool and a medium that can extend the long history of mediums and media that architects can use not only to represent their work but as generator of ideas.”
This image, which is part of the Urban Resolution series, shows how the stable model of diffusion Ai “is unable to focus on building a realistic image and rather reproducing features that are important in the local latent space”, explains Kudless.