AI Can Turn Hours Of Architecture Work Into Seconds. But At What Cost?

It was on a plane from St. Louis to Atlanta that Eli Hoisington, co-CEO of HOK, found himself sketching on his iPad. A visual artist, Hoisington said he still enjoys the process of putting pen to paper — or in this case stylus to screen. 

Just a year ago, he would have taken those drawings and started a long process of iterating — likely bringing in a rookie architect to do some of the early visioning. But today, Hoisington is able to accomplish that next step within an hour. When he gets back to his desk, he uploads the sketches, overlays and cleans them up and presses a button.

The artificial intelligence-driven software then spits out several variations in seconds.

AI tools are just now getting to a point where they are advanced enough to be useful to architects, half a dozen individuals in the profession told Bisnow. Their firms have increasingly been experimenting with software and determining how best to use the technology in their practices. 

But as firms dip their toes in and wade around, questions about security, privacy and the future of the workforce are bubbling to the surface. 

Hoisington remembers having a moment of realization seconds after he used the AI assist for his iPad sketches. 

“Who am I teaching? I’m teaching a software program. I’m not teaching a person,” he said. “That kind of hit me.”

At the moment, firms are using AI tools like Dall-E, Midjourney and Veras for early-stage iterating, architects told Bisnow. With the technology’s ability to immediately create dozens of images in seconds, teams can supercharge early-stage ideation. 

“It's definitely great for early stage storyboarding and sitting down with clients and coming up with a vision of what you're trying to do with the project and just iterating quickly,” said Radical Galaxy Studio Managing Partner Matthew Shaffer, whose firm creates renderings for commercial developments. 

But architects say that’s about where its imaging usefulness stops — for now. 

AI has been around in some form for over seven decades, but the technology exploded into public consciousness near the end of 2022 when OpenAI made its Chat GPT and Dall-E 2 tools publicly available. Those technologies and others like them are now being implemented across disciplines, from marketing to banking to education to medicine. 

Architecture is no different. As the technology advances at lightning speed, firms are starting to explore its possibilities more and more. 

At the annual American Institute of Architects conference this week in Washington, D.C., there are nine seminars on AI and its implementation within the profession. Architects Lindsey and Thad Rhoden, a husband and wife duo, are leading a session called Crafting Your AI Implementation Plan: A Roadmap to AI Integration. 

Last summer, the Rhodens started a consultancy to help individuals and firms use AI in their practices. The business, called Pebble, is just getting off the ground, they said, and the D.C. appearance is a trial run. 

Lindsey Rhoden, who works in business development for Fanning Howey, started playing around with ChatGPT when it came out, and one day, used it to help her create a meeting agenda. It was her “aha” moment. 

The architecture, engineering and construction community tends to be so busy they often have their “heads down” in their work, she said, with little time to learn new techniques. But she saw this as an opportunity to push them forward. 

“There's a whole opportunity to really figure out how to get ahead of that, how to help us to do things better, faster, smarter, more efficient,” she said. 

“We saw this as that big pivotal moment,” Thad Rhoden said. "Similar to, you know, when computer-aided drafting came on board versus hand drawing.” 

Their session is more focused on tasks like using AI to get data, conduct research or create agendas — fairly mainstream uses that aren’t unique to architecture.

But architectural visualization is another story. And for that, the technology is advancing rapidly. Architects told Bisnow that while just 18 months ago it wasn’t really usable, it is now starting to be put to use in design processes.

“It's emerging in most firms,” Form4 Architecture co-Founding Principal John Marx said. “People are playing around with AI, they want to know what it's been doing.” 

It's still early for the technology, though, and the industry is being cautious about wading into uncharted territory, especially as it relates to privacy. 

“Data protection and interface is something everyone's worried about,” HOK’s Hoisington said.

Once a firm exposes its internal workings to AI it’s out there for others to see, and Hoisington said his firm is looking very carefully at those implications. 

“I would wager many companies are thinking the same way we are, which is ‘how do you create that kind of wall, the firewall of data to protect what we're doing — control it but have interface with the world and the internet?’” he said. 

HOK is looking into developing its own AI tool that it can control internally. Some things they’re OK sharing, he said, but some things they’re not. And with confidential clients, it’s an especially sticky business. 

The firm is creating an AI team to explore opportunities and challenges with AI, Hoisington said. HOK had a firm-wide meeting in April to talk about investing in implementation and hopes to get a strategy up and running this year, after an investigatory phase over the past few years.

Pedro Pesantes, a practicing architect who has been dabbling in AI on his own time and asked for his employer not to be named, said that he knows of a number of firms that are already in the process of creating their own “bespoke” AI tools.

For images created by AI programs, the issue of who owns the products and if there could be any legal ramifications is another concern.

“There’s all sorts of ownership and copyright ideas that we’re really not sure of quite yet,” KGD Architecture principal Tom Donaghy said. 

KGD has been playing around with AI internally, Donaghy said, but the tech isn’t there yet for it to do exactly what the firm wants. KGD has reached out to programmers to see if it can add its own features to software. 

The fear of technology replacing humans is an old one, and one that has become a prominent part of the conversation with AI. 

For now, human architects are expected to remain a crucial part of the equation for a variety of functions, including legal reasons like signing off on design documents and ensuring buildings are within codes, as well as choosing the right materials and creating plans within budgets. 

But there is an open question of what types of architectural work AI could replace. 

“There’s certain aspects of visualizations I think it's going to take work away from,” Shaffer said.

He’s not concerned about his firm, Radical Galaxy Studio, which is in the business of higher-end renderings. But he said there’s a real threat to cheaper companies, especially those overseas. He said his firm has always been an early adopter of technology tools and started playing with AI in 2017, and he is excited about the emerging possibilities. 

“For us, we're just excited to just push things further on the higher end and being able to leverage some of what's out there with AI now and what's going to be out there in the future to really take things to the next level,” he said. 

But Shaffer’s not the only one who foresees a threat to some jobs, and he does worry about a future where architects are no longer needed.  

“There is a great danger of that happening, yes,” he said.

“I fear that that could be the case, sadly,” Marx said when asked about the possibility of developers sidestepping architects and curating images on their own. 

None of the architects said that they have — or have heard of — any clients doing the renderings on their own, though Marx said some have hinted at it.

The technology is also not yet at the point where it can develop fully realized products, even if the firms or their clients wanted it to. 

AI is still delivering images with things like floating furniture, people with three hands and buildings that would be impossible to build in the real world. And it often takes hours for architects to get AI to see their vision. 

“What ends up happening is somebody will spend hours putting in prompts,” Shaffer said, “Then they'll spend the next day trying to fix the 16-finger hands or the floating cars or adjusting materials, and users get frustrated fairly quickly with using it as a tool.”

But all of the architects Bisnow interviewed said it is developing rapidly. Its capabilities now are unrecognizable from just a year ago, and there is no telling what a few months or years could bring. 

“It's been tenfold, a hundredfold, a thousandfold, in terms of improvement of performance and speed of output,” Pesantes said. “So just because I'm saying we're not there yet, doesn't mean we won't be there tomorrow.” 

As it gets more advanced, there is a fine line between the technology moving things along and taking away the creativity of the process. 

Many of the architects Bisnow interviewed see the real benefit in the mundane — the ability to use AI discretely for tasks that are repetitive and unimaginative to both free up time for creativity and reduce errors.

“We need to control AI to where it replaces all the things I don't want to do, or maybe it could be better at than me, to remove the human errors,” Donaghy said. “If I could use AI to go through all my projects and evaluate them based on the codes, that would be a huge benefit, and it would lessen my risk.” 

It is becoming increasingly clear that however it is used, AI is the next frontier of architecture, even if we’re in a Wild West moment. 

“I do think it's going to cause disruption across the industry,” Shaffer said. “I don't think it's a fad. I don't think it's going away. Just seeing some of the advancements that have come out in the last year or two are pretty groundbreaking.”