“The Architect is dead!” declares the editor of this collection, and no doubt numerous contributors herein have penned yet another obituary for the profession. Here they channel Nietzsche, who was apparently anxious that empirical reality had killed God and worried about the collapse of what he seemed to believe had been the previous coherence of the universe under the direction of the Deity. Somehow, the interposition of the Architect in the assertion is somehow both ridiculous and appropriate, as we architects seem to believe that at some point, we had the agency (and the right) to order the universe. Let’s see, when was that? Phideas? Michelangelo? Perhaps Le Corbusier? Patrik Schumacher?
Those of us of a certain vintage, amongst whom I count myself, have seen this movie before, and multiple showings of it. For me it was first screened when I graduated from college to bleak prospects at the end of the energy and inflation crisis of the 1970s coupled with the mass unemployment of architects. I survived doing working drawings of dreadful shopping centers whilst awaiting admission to grad school. After getting my graduate degree I entered the market in the midst of the liability crisis, where the profession suffered the double indignity of being told how to practice by insurance underwriters while giving away our professional autonomy to the insurable—cost estimators, construction managers, client reps, and specialty consultants. Next up, the 1990-92 recession that erased an entire generation of architectural graduates. We rode the gradual upswing well into the 21st century (with a small bump during the dot com crash of 2002) until the utter devastation of the 2009 global crisis, where 30% of all the architects in the US were suddenly unemployed. After a decade’s recovery, COVID slammed us in 2020 with similar force. Each crisis created refugees, and many never returned to the architectural fold. Death of some careers and scattered reincarnations, but the profession soldiers on.
There’s something about the relentless self-examination of ourselves, by ourselves, that seems endemic to the architectural psyche. Each of these perturbations in our economic well-being or agency seemed existential at the time. But I’m obliged to point out that, at this writing, the profession has enjoyed continuous increases in its fortunes for almost a decade[2]—save COVID fluctuations—and architectural unemployment is almost non-existent. Everyone is hiring, designing, and it would seem, building. All my students are working or expecting to be very soon. In the US, at least, more people are studying architecture, sitting for the licensing examinations, and becoming practitioners, than ever.[3] Who, exactly, is dead this time?
But if you can’t worry about the current crisis it’s best to begin anticipating the next one, since it seems that our demise is always imminent. Cause of death this go-round: automation, and the generally stultifying influence of all things digital. We’ll set aside for the moment that the building (not design) industry is the last human enterprise to get on the digital train—and has the productivity reputation to prove it.[4] Apparently building information modeling (BIM) has stunted design flexibility, 3D geometry modelers turn everything into blobs, crowdsourcing makes everyone a designer, and finally, as if these indignities were not enough, the oncoming wave of artificial intelligence and machine learning will put a stake in architecture’s heart once and for all, and according to some folks from Oxford, in that of all professions.[5] The recent arrival of image generators and chatbots merely accelerates that anxiety and suggests that once computers can learn, and information becomes universally accessible via the internet, the things that professionals do best—hoard specialized information and dole out access to it preferentially—will no longer require human specialists, so architects (as well as lawyers, dentists, accountants, and every other discipline) will be out of a job. And unlike after the industrial revolution, there won’t be new jobs out there to take their place.
I’ll leave the predictions of seismic change to the labor economists, but before the robot revolution is in full swing, I suspect that, existential crisis aside, past history will be a good guide to the architectural future, where technologies are integrated into design methodologies, education shifts accordingly, and projects are still designed by architects. I suppose if I were an accountant, whose job is essentially wrangling numbers and their forensic implications, or a beat reporter tasked with routine textual descriptions of the local school board meetings, I might be more worried that I’m going to be replaced by software. But just as spreadsheets and databases changed the nature of accounting, BIM has shifted the job of architects, who can now spend less time over-detailing and coordinating projects and more time designing them. AI, one hopes, is next. The formal exuberance brought to by 3D modelers and scripting brought the ability to write algorithms that will help future designers use computers to solve complex problems. There is no reason to think that AI won’t accelerate, rather than degrade this trend. Machine learning will likely someday take over a lot of technical analysis, rote production work, and project management that architects would rather not be doing anyway. Just as a decent BIM program takes care of your door schedules and coordinates your drawings, a bot may well predict the cost, energy usage, even occupancy patterns of your project as you design it. To the extent that insight improves the design, and/or gives you more time to work on it, all the better.
But there is certainly a wave of rationality soon to come to design and building, and not a moment too soon if you believe that, as McKinsey does;[6] the industry is in desperate need of improvement. Making the results of the building process more predictable by the intelligent use of technology will, in the proper hands, increase the credibility of architects and, by extension, our agency. Improving routine obligations that either challenge or distract architects but make clients crazy—the accurate depiction of design intent, cost and schedule overruns, leaks, technical performance failures, glare, or poor heating and cooling—does nothing to detract from the architect’s broader obligations to the ineffable, cultural, or aesthetic objectives of the craft, and, as I have argued before, actually creates more time and mental space to pursue them.[7] And since the depressing productivity of the industry has reached even the mainstream press, these improvements can come none too soon.[8]
And there will be, soon enough, a raft of new tools that could be directed toward these ends, particularly if the recent onslaught of natural language and image generation platforms is any indication. Those tools, combined with their analytical brethren spawned by adjacent disciplines like medicine or finance, will supplement human design conclusions, and as a result architects can actually prove to clients what they only now assert (and then hope) about their projects as designed today. Data collection and analysis from existing buildings will create a virtuous loop of insight that will demonstrate efficacy and improve subsequent design efforts. Design information created by architects will be the platforms from which automated construction processes—yes, more robots—will become possible. And none of these techniques can come too soon, as the buildings of the 21st century and beyond become more functionally, technically and, one would hope, aesthetically ambitious.
The challenge here is to see technology as an enabler to increase insight and improve results while maintaining the central value of architects as designers. Despite relentless advertising by the American Institute of Architects to the contrary,[9] it’s not our design talents that our clients question, but rather whether our ability delivers projects in concert with builders, as well as reduce their anxiety about budgets, schedules, leakage, energy, and the like. Analytical and simulative technology accelerated by machine intelligence might inspire architects, clients, and builders to play nicely together. It is absolutely necessary for these ends. It is a particularly important objective as construction is inevitably industrialized and driven by digital design information originating from architects themselves. Of course, if architects don’t deliver that information, our friends the builders will simply create it themselves, leaving us to our napkin sketches and frustrations.
It’s been argued that the fully digitized world holds within it the answers to every possible question[10] an architect could ever ask, or even that machine learning ends Enlightenment.[11] The robots are coming, a worry of the Luddites, and then H.G. Wells.[12] And while today’s AI might make your smartphone faster, your TikTok feed more annoying, or an engaging image of an imaginary cat surfing in Hawaii wearing fuzzy shorts, we are far from a time when complex, ambiguous, even “wicked” problems like designing a building can be handled in even a rudimentary way by a computer—compelling images by Midjourney notwithstanding. In fact, the guy who created the machine learning technique that makes your phone work has recently argued that we won’t have real artificial intelligence until computers don’t just show you targeted ads or write clever prose, but rather make counter-factual arguments, to wit: what would happen if we didn’t do X or Y or Z?[13] The algorithm that can do that well, and really operates with the causal sensibilities of human thought to anticipate future scenarios and the common sense of an adult, might someday threaten a flesh-and-blood designer. Neither the substantive theory nor technology exists for such things right now, and those particular robots are not coming to scorch the architectural earth anytime soon.
But if there is any danger in the coming Second Digital Turn[14] it will be our failure to see the opportunities of new capabilities of these embryonic robots and the resulting agency they lend us as designers. If the Susskinds are correct and robot architects will kill the human ones, it will be not because we were automated out of existence but rather because we didn’t prove that humans are actually better designers than computers and that human architects assisted by those robots were actually better than their computational competition. There will always be a certain class of buildings that today requires some architects to give birth to strip malls, big-box stores and crummy office complexes, and perhaps it won’t be so bad if those projects can be generated efficiently by an algorithm; they might even do a better job. But insofar as architecture is the setting for human existence and the making of places of beauty and dignity, it’s unlikely that machines can create those places in a way that humans could, nor should, settle for. Your local chatbot or image generator can produce convincing “fluent hallucinations”[15] but not real buildings in all their ambiguous, subtle, and often inscrutable complexity. Consequently, it’s entirely up to our profession to master and direct the tools accordingly, before they master and eliminate us.
Perhaps our relentless need for self-examination (and its accompanying paranoia) are essential survival mechanisms that have allowed our profession to weather these various existential storms that often seem to be of our own making. So, as we begin the psychoanalysis that will no doubt be part of this next iteration, we might consider the following advice:
There are already signs of the traditional defense posture being adopted by many professionals (i.e. the old ways are the best ways). Let us instead try to understand, select, and order the forces acting upon the profession so that we may intelligently adapt to the demands of the new clients and of the largest building challenge ever.[16]
These are timely and sage words, even though they were written more than half-century ago by the late educator Michael Brill, who saw enormous changes coming to architecture and made his best guess as to how to survive them. Let’s keep them handy as we’ll probably need them again—soon.