Technology has always “shaped the way architects think but today, AI represents a more profound shift because it challenges ‘the human dimension of design’,” said Matthew Blunderfield, who was chairing the Architecture Foundation’s Barbican event on ‘Architecture in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.' This set the stage for a discussion on how artificial intelligence is fundamentally altering the field.
Shajay Bhooshan, Associate Director at Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA), detailed the firm’s “open-minded” approach to AI. While early experiments with OpenAI’s Dall-E text-to-image generator in 2022 were intriguing, ZHA found AI's true transformative potential when it customized its data sets to its “own language and spatial ideas.” This allowed them to use AI for “predicting win-win outcomes,” with Bhooshan likening architecture to a “turn-by-turn game.” Currently, 25% of ZHA staff use AI technology daily, including for learning to code.
Michael Drobnik of Herzog & de Meuron admitted that AI technology is evolving rapidly, making it challenging to keep up. He predicted that soon, AI “agents” – more advanced than current chatbots – will operate independently, performing complex tasks beyond their programmed instructions. However, AI is already streamlining the design process. For example, animating still images for "storytelling" has seen a 400% to 1000% increase in productivity, and experiments with “drawing automation” suggest a potential 30% time saving.
He urged architects to own their own data because "AI needs to operate on large datasets" - a point reinforced by the final speaker, Foster + Partners’ Martha Tsigkari, who opened her presentation with an image of Alice falling down the rabbit hole.
Like the other two speakers, she emphasized AI’s ability to free up architects time, leading to greater efficiency. “Work that was taking ten people three months is now taking one person two hours,” she stated, before asking, “But what does it mean?” This question highlighted the uncertainty surrounding AI’s long-term implications for architecture and more specifically, architects' future employment.
And she raised the prospect of future competition coming not from other architecture firms but from AI-native companies built from the ground up on AI technologies. As she put it, “We will be competing with software.”
Architecture in the Age of Artificial Intelligence was on June 2nd, 2025
