What is the future of architecture?
The world evolves, automates, and the man is increasingly contributing to his development, but more of processes are automated. This comes with positives - more time for what we really are good and less lost time or money. Hardly soon there will be architects robots, but certainly technology is moving in that direction and innovation are welcome. What is the architect? Today, he is the person who builds and helps develop cities. It is something like creativity, technology and reasonable thought. It is the point where human thought and the intelligent machine intersect. It is exactly the point where projects are created that change the look of the city.
Where is the symbiosis between architecture and AI?
Today artificial intelligence or AI changes the way architecture is practiced, but the man-robot debate in this article is not as much a focus as how AI develops the design, how architects react to it and work with these technological developments.
In fact, what kind of innovation is the artificial intelligence generated in the construction industry? Much of the artificial intelligence that we have encountered so far is "weak AI", known as ANI - artificial narrow intellect. ANI follows pre-programmed rules so it looks intelligent, but it's actually a simulation of a human thought process. With the latest innovations, there is a shift towards what we might understand as "deep learning" where the system can be trained and adapted. Designers' interest in this process comes from the fact that AI is being applied to more creative tasks such as writing books, creating art, web design, or self-generating design solutions due to its enhanced speech recognition and image recognition capabilities. Over the past 20 years, there have been periods in which funding for such projects has been difficult for the industry, but almost everything indicates that we are on the verge of an explosion in the development of AI. This will not only shape but also move the design industry in the next century. And this, in turn, fully proves that AI has the potential to influence the architectural process as well as designing a series of different stages of construction.
According to Michael Bergin, Autodesk's principal investigator, integrating AI systems into architectural design will allow architects to use the computer as a true partner in solving difficult design problems rather than a super-powerful 3D editing board. Somewhere in the future, all design tools look like systems that accept any type of input that the designer can create to enable collaboration with the computer to target a highly efficient design that meets all the diverse design team needs.
This would mean that future architects would be less busy with the work of preparing and more skilled in specifying the problem, which would make them more synchronized with their machine "partners" in the project. And that architects who adopt AI as a tool to serve will have the opportunity to synthesize a wide range of high requirements from project stakeholders, including clients and engineers, and produce design documentation. The future of AI in architecture and urban planning promises a lot. Read more in our next article on how AI systems affect design software development.
