AI Architecture

What is AI Architecture, and how will it impact the way we are currently designing our buildings?

Edited by. David Cando

Introduction

Technology has always been progressing in different fields and architecture is not the exception. Today I have found an interesting essay written by Stanislas Chaillou/ Harvard GSD / 2019 "AI + Architecture". In his work, he had talked about how AI has slowly been introduced into the architecture design world and how different characters in the history have contributed with its improvements, to the point where, now different architectural entities, use this technology in order to create floor plans, and share the information with other users throughout parametric calculations.

There are three different thing AI can do;

(1) To generate floor plans

(2) To qualify floor plans

(3) To allow users to "browse"

In order to achieve this, investigators have chosen to use Generative Adversarial Neural Networks or GANs, in order to tackle two main intuitions. (1) The creation of building plans is a non-trivial technical challenge (2) The design of space is a sequential process, requiring successive design steps across different scales (urban scale, building scale, unit scale)

He argues that the methodology, inspired by current Data Science methodologies, aims at qualifying floor plans, throughout the creation of 6 metrics. They propose a framework that captures architecturally relevant parameters of the floor plan. On one hand, Footprints, Shape, Orientation, Thickness & Texture, are three metrics capturing the essence of a given floor plan's style. On the other hand, Program, Connectivity, and Circulation are meant to depict the essence of any floor plan organization.

Four Perdiod Sequence

There are four basic components for Ai to work, Modularity, Computational Design, Parametricism, and finally Artificial Intelligence, in his article he emphasizes that these components are not air-tight steps, all of them depending on one another as each period interpenetrates and borrows from the precedents.

Modular Systems

Modularity could be set as the starting point of systematic architectural design, it consists of architectural grammar, contributing to simply and rationalize building design.

Stanislas refers in his article to Le Corbusier which was one of the most influential architects in the modern epoch, his diagram is shown represent how architecture was now going back to have more interaction with the human body, thanks to this drawing, objects could be standardized including spaces and herein buildings.

Figure 1. Cobusier's Modular (Chaillou, 2019, p.11)

Computational Design

One of the pioneers in CAD (Computer Assisted Drawing) software, was Professor Patrick Hanratty, 1959. He released software called PRONTO. Later in the ladder, Christopher Alexander (architect and professor at U.C. Berkeley started to lay down the principles of Computational Design. The founding principles defined in his books "Notes on the Synthesis of Form, 1964" and "a Pattern Language, 1968" he states that concepts like: recursions, object-oriented programming as well as their application to design have represented a radical move forward.

All of these examples can be seen in the images below, in which we can see Parametricism has been used in the generation of spaces and buildings.

All images and information have been taken from: Articles | Stanislas Chaillou.