The Concept of “Death”
There are a great deal of ways to go about questioning the survival of one’s own profession. A brief investigation – beyond the consequential clichés of automation – of professions concerned with creation over the last century reveal similar paths: the laborious process of creation is increasingly less laborious. Although this might sound exciting to professionals saturated with generations of PC desk jobs, it does not promise less labor, and it does little, if anything, to provide the comfort of being protected by their creative abilities A variety of these have been erased, splintered, or bootstrapped on account of the slow, and then sudden automation and computerization of creative tasks. While “splintered” or “bootstrapped” can both be used to describe the diversification within the architectural profession due to technology – such as the erasure of the archetypal master-orchestrating central genius – professional erasure perhaps best describes more automatic labor rather than creative professions. There is something about the artistic and intuitive fabric of creative professions that soldiers on. While the draftsman’s obituary has been penned, the artist or the architect has survived on account of its very reliance in the imaginative process of creation. The speculation of where all this digitization might lead, however, may have more concern to cause, because there exists a rather evidently invasive progression: The oil painting became human-generated digital illustrations, which became independently software generated images – and somewhere in between there is a robotic arm painting with a brush. Subtractive processes such as carving became milling, and additive processes such sculpting became 3D-printing. Architecture is not exempt: drafting became the CAD[1] file, the 3D model, the digital render, the metaverse real estate, and the AI-generated representation of architecture via the mere text-based expression of an ambience or symbolic virtual scribbles. None of these require the carefully refined skill of a perfected craft as much as they require the increasingly more relevant endeavor of understanding and mastering multiplying digital tools. With a little lack of reassurance, one could be persuaded to think that the architect’s demise is predetermined as well, ascertained by the observable evolutions of not only other professions, but its own as well. What welcome anxiety. At the same time, however, architecture has become more thrilling, as it matures into a disorienting limbo of exciting insecurities. A few words of text can through AI convey hundreds of hours of 3D-modeling and photoshopping. A decade ago, a little coding could generate virtual 3D models that adapt automatically to alterable data inputs without having to burn hours redesigning from scratch. Today, evidence of software plugins or AIs (supposedly) that can generate entire 3D models including near-contruction ready architectural drawings through the simple task of drawing a rectangular footprint have already captured the interest of social media algorhithms. No architect that has witnessed or utilized a tool of the sort forgets the weightless relief of imagining endless nights of labor flee their responsibility the first time they witness such magic. So how do we come to terms with an anxiety that is so thrilling? Or a thrill that is so anxiety inducing? Must we all master the necessary tech to prevent another obituary? Afterall, our contemporary digital lives and work increasingly require digital sustenance. Or is it exactly that that slowly makes the profession more vulnerable as it suppresses centuries of humanistic heritage?
As a student, I was excited by the prospect of learning new digital design tools, but as a professional, I have come to compete with completely untrained (in architecture) individuals that render architectural images or utilize software with much more proficiency. YouTube tutorials are becoming more relevant than architectural education as they cater to an increasingly curious producer and consumer of architecture and design. Although it is an exciting time, witnessing the intensifying transition of a profession that previously guaranteed a job that only a trained professional could carry out brings about a certain sense of uneasiness. If we consider the fact that with no formal training and the employment of the right digital tools one person alone can emulate the production capacity of one hundred CAD-wielding architects, it becomes easy to question the substantial amount of time it takes to become a CAD-wielding architect: between five to almost ten years in some countries. If we are to believe that what seem like endless years of training safeguards our work, it is only because institutional licenses enforce it. Without which, the job of most architectural roles can in crude terms be otherwise boiled down to a couple online tutorials, showing up on time and leaving later than contractually agreed upon. It is therefore belief in these institutions as reigners supreme of the profession that formally safeguard the architect as the sole contender to his profession, but this does not do enough, if anything, to safeguard the architect from the lurking “emancipation” of his own labor. We must therefore also believe that we are the sole capable producers of architecture (with or without new tools) in a thus-far human centered profession. No one wants to be, in theory, substituted by a combination of beautiful AI-renders and an intelligent space-syntax organizer – digital tools that also immensely empower the human creator. Like the passing of any other paradigm, we must readdress our professional belief system. So, what is in fact the belief system that upholds the profession?
Under this testing pretense, belief (in general) might therefore be described as the greatest driving force of a creative profession struggling to reconcile the anxiety and excitement of fumbling with new tools and technologies that prompt its own evolution. Belief in the ephemeral expression of the hand gesture, belief in a hostile machine takeover or belief in a collaborative blend of the two? Afterall, these technologies provide the opportunity for new, exhilarating architectures but that through so much digital facilitation are also somewhat dehumanizing. Within this very gripping spectrum – ranging from nostalgic anxiety to fanatical excitement – lie a multiplicity of expressions of beliefs in the creation of architecture and what it consists of, so it becomes increasingly important to discuss them. What in fact should we then believe? Should machines eventually be awarded architectural licenses? AI solutions already provide direct to consumer services and the first AI “lawyer” has already been sued. Or do we limit the use of advanced software within architectural practices to force a preservation human participation? Perhaps a regulated balance between the two beliefs may safeguard the architect from a form of death? Excitement is always welcome, so how do we address this anxiety? As Jacques Lacan reminds us, the prospect of death is a scrutinous inspection of our beliefs, in that discussing death provides some degree of sustenance and self-validating faith in our profession:
Perhaps it is not belief in the romance of the hand gesture, the efficiency of the machine, or combination of the two, but that some encouragement of machine use prophesizes the death of the architect. Perhaps simply discussing death prevents it. So, if belief in death sustains us, shall we never die? In other words, if we believe the architect is going to die, does it provoke enough response against it to ascertain the profession’s continued inclusion and relevance of the human creator? If only it were that simple. In order to understand this question, we must first understand its proposition; What does “death” mean with regards to the architect? Because if the architect has never died before, the profession’s heritage would be bland and consistent rather brimming in seemingly endless “isms” or technological paradigms that have countless times fundamentally transfigured the architect and his profession. Death is periodic. In order to soldier on, the architect must exist in constant cycles of death. Deaths bring reinvention or redefinition of the profession as much as they bring abandonment or cessation of certain activities or practices. The wheel killed the architect by compressing travel time and expanding urban footprints. The printing press killed the architect via the diffusion of copies of his original designs. The radio killed the architect via the diffusion of speech, an activity that before required a physical gathering place. The airplane killed the architect by facilitating globalism and its consumerist homogeneity. Glass and steel killed neo-classical architects and the elevator divorced us from the exclusivity of horizontal urban sprawl. The elevator empowered a new, more vertically enamored architect while the automobile cemented a separate urbanist. There have in fact also existed technological transfigurations of similar importance that resulted in an evolutionary split rather than death and substitution of the architect, suggesting that creative professions endure through their own complexities. Advances in botanical science coupled by the timely 19th century sociological realization that green spaces are healthy urban aggregators, “robbed” architects of landscape design, which was thus far poor under their administration. The advent of the automobile killed the architect but also made him more interesting, solidifying the urban planner as a separately contending profession (in the very early 1900s, a mere few decades after the first cars). [3] Similarly, more recent digital tools have encouraged an ever-splintering tendency of the profession into other coexisting specializations, such as interior design, lighting design, façade design and image production to name a few. History is replete with examples of death that either erased some parts of the architect, splintered the architect into other professions, or created new architects via enhancement.
Technological progress has in some way always reformed the architect over time. If the architect would have never died, parametric[4] renders or midjourney[5] dreamscapes would today be praised as celestial mirages – yet they are very present architectural propositions that continue to gather momentum. Both are very real – one built and one digital (for now) – implying a very evident evolution over time of the architect and its transient belief system. However, this time, the death of the architect seems a little different. The transfiguration of the profession with respect to the human as the central creator seems much more profound and deeply questioned. It does not simply amplify the scope of the profession; it also speculates a relief from it. As demonstrated, the architect has died before, but until the advent of the digital, the exclusivity of architectural knowledge tended to follow its author to the grave, which means an architect had to be human by necessity. The ‘loss of architectural knowledge’ has been rendered obsolete by being centralized in readily available digital tools or accessible online content. Very quickly, the idea that death might be knocking again proposes a reexamination of a profession that occurs under more complex conditions than we have ever interacted with.
As we transit once again through profound change in the architectural (as well as other creative) professions that burgeons after decades of maturing, the challenge posed by the consequences of the digital paradigm to tradition and heritage must be considered carefully. How does the architect die this time? Is there concern for some sort of erasure? Does the profession splinter yet again? Or is it death by substitution of a new, more geared up human and/or machine architect? Perhaps it is too early to tell, but to understand this we must first understand how the digital and its endlessly increasing repertoire of tools – from CAD to AI – affect or influence the profession. We must understand how achieving today’s accessibility of information online and the diffusion of digital tools have influenced the learning, production, and consumption of architecture and challenged the antiquated notions of authorship that define the humanism we tend to hold onto so dearly. From a brief gloss over the recent history of how digital tools came to be, we can observe how these influenced architectural learning and education, how accessibility to these fostered more collaboration and multidisciplinarity within a splintering profession, and how all of this is altering our perception of authorship. Only then can we understand what is on the other side, or the next stage of the architect’s evolution.
The increasing availability and resolutive capacity of digital tools can be consolidative of 21st century architects, but there are instances of abandonment of tradition that may be hard to come to terms with. For instance, although sketching reserves an inherent value in resolving spatial ideas intuitively – ie. “trust the process” – hand drawing is understood as no longer professionally relevant with regards to the formal process of producing architecture. Rather, it becomes an ever more ambiguous creative exercise whose humanistic “necessity” dwindles as a romantic but ultimately subjective sentiment. We indulge in a variety of digital tools that facilitate generating or representing design that have also evolved to not fully require the quality of human participation – in some cases, almost not requiring it at all. Herein lie a plethora of strange but possible, and fundamentally existential questions; If a computer could[6] design a fully functioning building unsupervised, would we have to require from it an architectural license? Do we credit its authorship to the programmer or the inputting consumer? Do we implement a sentimental blockade that restricts the use of algorithms’ or AI’s capacities to generate infinite design iterations so that the necessity of the trained architect’s input as a spatial interpreter is safeguarded? Because a heavily regulated architectural world puts us at a severe disadvantage to computers. Computers easily outperform us in rule-based systems. For digitized building codes, there exist already examples of software that translates them into compliant, possible geometries. We are however versed in finding loopholes via interpretation of what building codes do not fully express in terms of limitations, so there still exists, for the time being, a fundamental necessity of human participation in an ever-digitalizing architectural world. Does that mean we can ignore the increasing habitual dependence on the efficiencies of the computer in favor of populating the metaverse? Afterall, the gaming and esports industries have already populated it with 250 million users – 25 times more than Superstudio’s ominous 1971 virtual consumerist critique, “New York of Brains”.[7] Should we preserve centuries of nostalgic humanism and bring about a “neo-renaissance”? Relentless AI prophecies seem to be putting many on edge. Or is it exactly that humanism that we should bootstrap in order to solidify a commensal partnership between man and machine? [8] As such, do we completely deregulate the constraints of the industry to a “post-norm” [9] architecture that takes advantage of computing but values human decision-making input? Or, as digital tools are no longer simply tools for solving technical problems but used to extrapolate improvements to our designs as well as create them anew, do we encourage a tendency that has relieved us of much labor to fill in for our creative input as well? Be it motivation or despair since the normalization of CAD, this “death” is ripe for discussion, and discovery not only in what lies ahead, but discovery also about ourselves as unrestricted creators. We may align ourselves as suffocating victims, visionary pioneers sailing new waters with purpose, or anything in between.
A humanist would say architecture can only be expressed by humans for humans, while a materialist will say that we are, and rightfully so (for now), intrinsically tied to the material world, its textures and environmental qualities, and therefore architects must be human. Pragmatists such as Hans Hollein would tell us that since everyone can perceive the environment in some shape or form, “All are architects” – something easily achievable with diffusion generative digital tools. Not so dissimilarly, admirers of Yona Friedman’s urban policies would say that “people are architects, not architects,”[10] and the generations inspired by Negroponte and the Architecture Machine Group will dedicate their efforts to the first computer that may appreciate the gesture. A hedonist might say architecture must be made by machines so that we may finally pursue a long-promised “dolce far niente” sponsored by digital automation, and a well-funded academic or researcher will tell us it is the most exciting time to be alive. And who knows, after a few more years of arch-tech research and development, technocrats could start saying it is cheaper to let computers design autonomously. The sheer diversity of thought arouses a great sense of juvenile excitement to participate in the discussion. Most importantly, a young architect in the making must find meaning. So, as Lacan expressed, in this provocative attempt to generate dialogue, claiming the architect is going to die might well guarantee her survival.
The Origins of “Death”
In all their traumatic violence, it is no surprise that paradigm shifts are habitually unhurried. After all, Modernism – the most “glorious” chapter of recent architectural history – was the delayed architectural accommodation of technological progress introduced by the Industrial Revolution. Modernism, often employing uniformity and cleanly lacking ornamentation with a neglect of both historical heritage and cultural context provoked a delayed reaction against its industrial mentality. The Post-Modernist rebellion against the rigidity of the Modernist doctrine laid the foundations for the smooth adoption of digital tools in architecture. The introduction of variation, differentiation, and choice through what is now most commonly referred to as reactive complexity and contradiction,[11] provided the ideal technical means and digital conditions to germinate an investigation that started with the easy manipulation of splines – a symbolic departure from the enslavement to the orthogonal drawing. It is also noteworthy that the smooth transition into digital design was largely ascribed by the rather quick transition into digital culture, and its extraordinary ability to cater to the individual consumer. This would eventually facilitate the proliferation of user-friendly and easily accessible consumer-grade design software, perhaps suggesting that the fervent excitement of the Post-Modern rebellion is still not yet over.
The accessibility of digital tools, like Post-Modernism, denoted a sense of newfound freedom. Alberti made boxes because he had to; we make blobs because we can. [12] What we can do becomes a superlative degree of freedom to which we can by no limit express unconstrained design as an evolutionary capacity of our ability to produce it. Can, delineates an action that is carried without necessity, through tools that encourage a newfound process of designing and architecting expressed as an act of discovery rather than prescription. “Because we can” is expressed as an act of playfulness and experimentation; an essential characteristic inherent to the enactment of creativity, relieving it from a “necessarily” dogmatic process. Playfulness in this sense becomes a cultural generator, sustaining a culture of enhanced space-making capacity. Thus, the digital space is a playground.
This very playground slowly resulted in the disassembling of architectural tradition by inducing a desire to experiment with new tools. The presence of these from the 1980s to the early 2000s was met by a generation of architects willing to experiment with new modes of architecture making that defined new guiding principles for understanding how architectural forms can be organized. Eventually, this consolidated into a trend that has over the decades seen the institutionalization of computationally driven experimentation and research within architectural academia, and later, practice. With a few exceptions in the 80s commonly attributed to high modernist and deconstructivist experimentation with CAD, the adoption of computers within the architectural practice usually fulfilled the purpose of increasing productivity rather than experimentation.
These new pedagogical approaches that began germinating in the late 20th century embraced interdisciplinarity (combining architecture with digital manufacturing, material engineering, computer programming, robotics, etc.) in order to take full advantage of the digital space. These aimed to reframe design research in order to stimulate innovation, and distance itself from traditional programs. Well known educational programs such as the Architectural Association’s Design Research Lab, SCI-Arc’s experimental origins, the Department of Architecture at ETH in Zurich, or the TU Delft School of Architecture in the Netherlands, all already well established before the turn of the 21st century, quickly spearheaded experimentation with digital tools, desktop manufacturing and robotics at a time that traditional architectural programs offered nothing of the sort. Computers at the time were scarce and costly, accessible mostly to large businesses, military contractors, and major educational institutions. Without institutional support, the limitations of these tools and applications would have been obvious and could have resulted in a premature end to this movement, confining architectural software to being exclusively for the purpose of increasing the ruthless efficiency and production of architectural practices we know so well today. Academia however, has taken a more critical position, using computers to reshape the scope of the profession, acting as testing grounds for new design imagination.
During the late decades of the 20th century, external forces such as the rapidly growing software industry, played a critical role in subsidizing research for the development of digital tools, supercharging the evolution of the architect. Experimentation was funded in the hopes that these ideas could be applied to the real world. These partnerships fostered a more tightly knit collaborative architecture culture that led to the expression of new forms and less laborious ways to generate them. One could conclude that thanks to funding, we resume a postulatory conviction towards the widespread application of machines and enhancement of the architectural character perfectly timed with the cultural context of the digital age. 21st century standards ensure that a digital practice is not only an integral part of human production, but also conducive of human behavior and interaction – as is often now the case, an advocate of digital architecture is a well-funded idealist, and in some cases, prophetic, even. In a satisfying turn of events, following the hurried maturing of 20th century individual genius designer, the Digital Era is heavily commanded by architects – something to be proud of.
Originating from adoptions of the aeronautical, manufacturing, and shipbuilding industries of the 80s, [13] digital design tools slowly took on a life of their own, and despite being extensively pioneered, it is without doubt the most rapidly expanding domain of design. All pertinent themes to this expansion – such as software, robotics, Machine Learning, cybernetics, Artificial Intelligence and any other possible heavily technological applications to the world of design and construction – are conceptually almost a century old, but remain heavily experimental, with much promised yet to be discovered; a subject whose speculative nature becomes, with time, increasingly feasible. Although the hypothetical scenario of widespread adoption leaves much to be resolved, ventures such as robotically assembled buildings, AI-organized labor or production of design, computational design solutions (as well as creativity) have been demonstrated to be possible and relevant, in particular with regards to alleviating the cost of the comparably slower and less consistent human labor. Yet again, an imminent generation responds to the ideological shortcomings of its precedent. Increasingly curious architects, designers, innovators, and artists grappling and fumbling with digital tools push the boundaries of what we now understand as the limits of digital manufacturing, computer intelligence and how these two may interact with or without a supervisor. By means of this very emancipation, architects have also become entrepreneurial, and must therefore also undertake the challenges of the entrepreneurial world. In developing ventures archipreneurs must focus on proposing scalable value propositions with market-ready products or software rather than dedicating years to perfecting the art of remaining shockingly faithful to the ideal of working in a large office or running their own architectural practice – an ideal that remains heavily present through generalist academic engraining. However, designers are increasingly more inclined to embrace a post-human worldview.
Replete with opportunities, the entrepreneur seeks to facilitate architectural problems at their core, not only to businesses and institutions, but also to consumers. Ventures have proposed a variety of solutions made up of existing technologies aiming to produce architecture without necessitating professional architectural input on behalf of the end consumer to their services by integrating the said input in the developing of their eventually accessible product. Be it digital platforms like MayiDida (part of WinSun’s services, a company known for impressive feats of 3D printing homes by setting records in both speed and magnitude of contracts), that host collections of ready-to-3D print home designs made available by designers who upload directly to the platform that is accessible to consumers including the services to print them within 24 hours. Or, as maturing startups like Gridics, comprised of a purchasable software package with access to enormous amounts of urban data (made available through municipal agreements) that automatically conducts feasibility studies or discern building envelopes according to digitized local building codes and norms (as well as providing other services) by simply selecting a desired property or building site from a city map. The immense variety of entrepreneurial efforts extend from new, more automated construction methods to automatic floorplan generation. It is much easier to grasp the profound potential that architectural ventures which propose the role of the architect as becoming more indirect or less essential, than to quantify precisely how many architects or non-architects are investing themselves in architectural ventures and whether they succeed or fail. What is however undeniable is that the shiny Silicon Valley-gleaned tech culture too seduces the architect away from his traditional and increasingly undesired and unfeasible contemporary business model based on decades of archi-fantasies fetishized around the central genius or making it as a “starchitect” – desires obsessively taught by the natural structure of architectural academia; that your special ideas could equate your desired recognition. The irony is that while entrepreneurship isn’t explicitly part of architectural education, architecture can be seen as an entrepreneurial endeavor. Yet to be a starchitect or a star entrepreneur requires nonetheless a degree of opportunistic self-importance that may only manifest under the pretense of being a human creator, but both roles progress away from regarding the human as the central producer, perhaps making him more special.
“Death” by Education
Consider digital technology as an intangible perpetual example of human creation that compounds our rebellion against God (the traditional notion of an architect). No matter how grand and seductive, the technological achievements of a profession challenging the known and championing the unknown are, they remain inextricably upheld by a long history that has, for much longer than not, valued (exclusively) human creation. As many mid-20th century architects express, it is because we are emotionally invested in the ownership of our work and this may have something to do with the way architecture is taught. Architectural education resists to a certain degree the inevitable dehumanizing efficiency of a CAD-only practice. It is symbolically engrained through academia by not formally teaching industry standard CAD software required to be a desirable candidate.
Unsurprisingly, the efficiency of a CAD dominated working environment does not mean we can work less hours more efficiently, on the contrary, we must do more in the same amount of time. It is only sensible that the straining disappointment of freshly minted architects be alleviated by new tech that they must learn on their own time. The challenge is in fact, as many architectural technologists suggest, to see technology as an enabler, to expand architectural insight and produce better architectural output. That the forces pressing an architectural sense of self-examination should in fact be understood as educational tools to intelligently adapt to the surging demands of the industry.[14] Considering that the industry’s ability to employ new methods of architecture making is growing and that educational institutions have also begun to embraced this more at large, there exists still a fundamental cultural disconnection between the two. Although some educational institutions are beginning to offer more specialized courses, it is not common for architectural candidates to graduate a bachelor program with proficiency in any ubiquitous industry software, such as BIM,[15] Revit or more parametrically, Grasshopper. Yet these are imperative to being a desirable candidate with the chance for upward mobility. I presume that like me, most learn via online tutorials or by asking for help, but it is hard to know them all well and at the same time. Many computational designers argue the digitization and augmentation of architects and designers is an essential and pressing matter – that to fulfill the potential and evolution of the discipline, we must invest in digital technologies.
We navigate an educational environment that promotes the maquette as an essentially profound process for students to understand the formalization of solid and negative space as physical things, but also a métier where the BIM 3D model is professionally imperative to formalize an architectural project.[16] It is therefore justifiable to be fearful when architectural education teaches and preaches handcraft, only to release its army of proteges to try and conquer an industry dominated by the ruthless efficiency of evermore automatic software. It is an academic deficiency that informs us of the profession’s tendency to preserve a broader culture of architectural nostalgia, but fighting innovation with nostalgia has never been efficient enough. Beyond industry-subsidized academic research, with the exception of very daring universities willing to investigate all these gripping themes, there exists an ideological canyon between architecture academia and industry. With all its seemingly infinite content, the web – the most significant tool in the repertoire of digital users – has filled this void.
“Death” by Accessibility
The relentless sharing of knowledge online has enabled access to new methods and tools which were previously exclusive to academics or industries spearheading their development. The amount of total active CAD users has soared from about a total 19 million users in 2012 to presently over 100 million Autodesk users alone.[17] The pervasiveness of the digital era is about consumer-scale accessibility. The proliferation of digital tools, and more importantly their designer-consumer oriented overall user experience, brought on the degradation of architectural education, from skills that should be taught, to skills that must be learned. We must therefore understand the role increased accessibility to digital design tools and their resources have on the profession, and how these have fostered a resourceful internet community.
Some widely used software – for free-form and parametric design – like Rhinoceros 3D and Grasshopper which have a joint online forum that received almost seven hundred thousand visitors in 2022 (up 500% from 2017),[18] matured entirely out of the feedback from their online community. From YouTube tutorials to uncertified online masterclasses, the endlessly available resources online have popularized their own subject matter. Quickly, a ‘need’ to learn became a ‘want’ to learn that fed itself online until it became a substantial open-source community. Coupled with the arrival of desktop manufacturing through commercially available 3D printers, tinkerers of the world united in the universe of digital fabrication to encompass a new kind of consumer; the prosumer, who consumes but also produces. The postmodern bricoleur became free; free to produce and consume without constraint. Independent from the need to specialize in expertise, and independent from manufacturing industries, these communities became self-nurturing. Autodidactic non-architecturally trained prosumers not only mastered 3D modelling but in a very short time also brought about homemade 3D printers, forcing the industry to make them more affordable. This affordability only furthered the online craze closing a gap between the digital capacity of a professionally trained architect, and a Yona Friedman-like 21st century digital layman, instilling a reverse demoralizing notion that when everyone is an architect, no one is an architect. As Jacques Lacan exclaimed in the very beginning of this introduction, it becomes increasingly easy to believe the architect is dying.
With regards to the necessity to be trained for almost a decade in order to be an architect, belief in the industry provides little sustenance. One would assume that fortunately the necessity to be licensed in order to be called ‘an architect’ safeguards us against everyone who isn’t that has acquired at least the same if not more capacity to design. Supposedly however, 95% of buildings in the world are designed by unlicensed designers, and only 2% of homes are designed by architects (I heard this once from Neil Leach). But this is not so much about sowing dissent and pitting licensed architects against unlicensed designers as much as understanding the engrained discouragement that maintains architects segregated from prosumers. Must we preserve methods of accreditation and revise architectural education to save the architect? Or the reverse? Perhaps revise both? Belief in the death of the architect might perhaps then best be first expressed in the form of uncertainty and disorientation as indication of instinctual survival: considering the essential experience of working for a large firm, should young architects postpone launching studios to learn new digital tools or instrument the barrage of new AIs automating visual production and floorplan layouts to stay relevant?
Specialized knowledge is widely accessible, and while this is an empowering and positive literacy revolution, when combined with an increasing dependency on digital tools it reveals a dilution of the profession’s necessity for academically trained professionals. It is a propagation of its own dismantlement that bears witness to a hostile takeover of productive user convenience; a digital convenience that replaces the previous need to exclusively consult trained human architectural aptitude (think of craftsmen such as under Gaudi’s orchestration of the Sagrada Familia). The professional indispensability of the architect is questioned for the first time. Peter Eisenman might be right (see his opening statement in this publication), but like most 20th century starchitects, he has secured Gaudi-like immortality.[19] The premise of 21st century digital tools and the accessibility online communities have fostered however, encourage more collaboration, and less top down architectural brands under one orchestrating “genius”.
When speaking of multidisciplinarity, collaboration and orchestration of the two within architectural history, the most evident example is without doubt Antoni Gaudi. Consider the complexity of Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia. It delineates a series of issues that we can observe as repeating through the widespread use of digital tools; its artisanal complexity, like many computer or AI generated design projects remains popularly attributed to a single “genius” under a sense of authoritarian authorship, despite requiring the input of a large diversity of specialized operators. For all the extensive time spent computing design elements via intricate models, Gaudi was faced with a much more daunting task. The complexity of his designs required extensive collaboration with a large number of assistants which included experts from a variety of disciplines: artisans, craftsmen, artists, mathematicians, engineers, builders, and so on. As the central figure he always led the way, allowing however, space for individual expression of his collaborators’ abilities. He was an expert orchestrator of multidisciplinary collaboration. [20] A project was about the exchange of information, much like it is now required in the digital fabrication of a BIM model. A BIM model aggregates all of a project’s information, simultaneously hosting the coordination of structural, electrical, mechanical, plumbing, fire protection and architectural models, like Gaudi, requiring the collaborative input of a wide variety of specialists. The arrival of the internet, however, meant that not only collaboration could happen much faster, but that it could also happen in real-time despite contributors being in different parts of the world. Knowledge and expertise became online currency. Like Gaudi, the 2000s demonstrated the importance of collective intelligence, but this time, encouraged by networked communication incentivizing collaboration in both academia and practice simply by facilitation.[21]
As is evident, the inclusion of multidisciplinary expertise is nothing new, and with so many tools it is increasingly required. But with all the praise for collaboration that exists, the hard mathematical legwork is now done by computers, and ironically, it is only via early computer simulation in the 1970s and 1980s that we were able to fully comprehend the mathematical complexity of Gaudi’s basilica.[22] Physical models are no longer required to resolve design. We require instead, many specialized contributors in a splintering architectural profession[23] in order to employ the software used generate a complete virtual 3D model. Interestingly, no architectural license is required in order to operate any of these tools, nor does digital fluency grant you a license. Although it is required to submit a project for approval, it is not required in order to make 3D models, renders or 2D drawings within or outside of an architectural office. Considering this alongside the fact that these digital tools are available to everyone it becomes easy to expose the destabilizing distress caused to the architectural ego in the attempt to reach the status of the architectural genius. Or is it facilitated? With mere digital tools we can easily be dishonest Gaudis, or honestly be more than Gaudi — after all, the genius, deprived of computation, spent his entire life designing what can now parametrically, generatively or through AI (aesthetically), be simulated instantly.
If we were not to believe the architect’s role to be at least somewhat at “risk”, we would more effortlessly ignore the plethora of tools out there, in particular the rapid proliferation of generative AI tools. Not only do their easy access encourage autodidactic design, they also raise questions maturing dubious notions of authorship with regards to human involvement in the productive-creative process of designing, a process that is rooted in a long history of human-centered orchestration of design from the 19th century central Gaudi-like “genius”, to the late 20th century reactive “anti-architect” transition that brought about the profession’s first contact with the idea that machines can not only co-create, but create independently too.
“Death” or “Rebirth” by Authorship
The heritage of architectural authorship may be straightforward, but it is multifaceted. It has produced some interesting chapters since the renaissance, from Alberti’s conceptual endeavors to Gaudi’s mastermind direction. Despite, in retrospective terms, their work raising questions about contemporary notions of design authorship at their time, it never put their capacity to produce design as human actuators to question. It is only more recently, through great technological leaps, that notions of authorship have become more dubious. Hardware and software have been developed enough to begin shouldering much of the responsibilities of the creation process of design, slowly dissipating the human touch, propagating the idea that the doom and gloom of non-human creation is nigh. Generative tools for example, shoulder most of the creation process, but only if instructed, so there remains for the time being the necessity for a human actuator to input design criteria through some expression of creativity for anything to be generated.
However small the role of this necessity, it is an indispensability that we know we hold as providers of creative input, and this represents a profound demonstration of conscious self-importance – self–importance as a human co-creator – and within this self-gratifying realization survives the idea that without initial human input, there is no creating at all. For all the facilitation that so many familiar digital tools provide, AI tools still need to be instructed; Midjourney has to be prompted and ChatGPT has to be commanded. Nevertheless, to say “I made this drawing” in 2023 is – conceptually speaking – an inconsiderate and dishonest homage of self-worship which disregards the computer that facilitated it, demonstrating that co-creation is in fact increasingly more relevant, but that it is also an act of self-preservation during a transition that has already erased hand-drafting – something that was exclusively a human activity. The truth would be expressed as, “I co-made this drawing”; “the computer allowed me to draw this”; “thanks to the tools available, I was able to make this drawing,” but we already know that it is co-authored, and we have a desire for the human counterpart to retain its worship. So why credit something that doesn’t feel a sense of entitlement towards the partial ownership of what is produced? Not only does a computer provide a practical, efficient, and infinite place for us to refine our creativity, but most importantly, it provides a place for us to assert our dominance. It does not question our capacity to design or the beauty of its output. Certainly, commanding digital tools speaks to the human counterpart’s ability to manipulate resources to produce design. “I made this drawing” is the only evidence of creative input into something that would otherwise not have one. The tool has been designed to function in conjunction with human creativity, reducing laborious time and increasing potential investigation. It cannot draw by itself, but we can draw without it. Like many other industries, we have nurtured a design culture that values speed, so now we necessarily depend on digital tools to produce faster as we experience this subconsciously satisfying sense of human dominance. Operating digital tools may or may not require specialized knowledge, so with countless people around the world asserting dominance over computers and digital tools, why is it that the dystopian discomfort of AI-led futures scare us? Perhaps it is because the increased necessity of input required by us is met with a faster rate of reliance on them.
Whether enhancing our bodies and senses or facilitating architectural labor with virtual reality and robotics as Gramazio & Kohler have demonstrated time and time again, there is an attempt to ensure an evolutionary survival. These investigations were set forth in the 60s' and 70s' via notions of the “anti-architect”, spearheaded by notable personalities such as Nicholas Negroponte, Christopher Alexander, and Cedric Price (I count among them also Yona Friedman who influenced Negroponte through his ideas that eventually manifested as The Flatwriter computer), whose ideas I cover here very superficially (because there exists extensive literature) for the purpose of engaging with changing perceptions of authorship. In this sense, the traditional role of the architect was confronted with disciplines such as cybernetics,[24] robotics and artificial intelligence during a time of burgeoning technology and digital media. Anti-architects found meaning and saw these disciplines as opportunities to augment the architect’s competence by engaging with data processing, augmented problem solving, and bilateral feedback loops between computers and its users – in simpler words, collaboration with machines.[25] They introduced a sense of curiosity and admiration towards machines within a profession that remained so faithfully exclusive to human input. Slowly, the personal beliefs and motives of the existentialist “Man” became no less fervent than that of the paradigm of the computer and its totaling enhancement and facilitation of the design process. The fact that we no longer need to test and break things encourages us to collaborate with generative models and artificial intelligence. The cultivation of this collaboration poses a motivating incentive propelled by a romantic sense of shared ownership simultaneously pushing the boundaries of what is creatively conceivable and pragmatically applicable. This playful affair safeguarded fragments of humanism while fumbling with new means of production; means that begin to illustrate the faint distinction between what might be strict design necessity or fueled by mere aesthetical fetish, distinctive of the traditional role of the central architectural “genius”. Consider the difference between a strictly efficient and pragmatic residential building and a very aesthetically sculptural architectural icon. Both can provide basic environmental and spatial necessities, but architectural expression is strictly a product of the human experience and its ego. Rallying against the notion of the “genius” role of the architect, the “anti-architect” was intrigued by the possibility for an enticing new partnership between man and machine. This reestablished architecture as an instrument of political, social, and cultural critique, dabbling in and employing unforeseen technologies as tools to bring about possible (often eccentric and utopian) futures, such as Price’s Fun Palace or Negroponte’s SEEK (also known as Blocks World), which imagined societies comprised of self-organizing buildings that would respond accordingly to its inhabitants needs, suggesting the architect as no longer being strictly required. The intrigue of a melange between the scientific method (test, break, test again) and its interaction with the user (socially organized inhabitants) lied in the shaping of a feedback loop that constantly re-iterated space. Some believe this should be an irreversibly evolving human experience where the two can co-author (via the collection of multisensorial data), but what must be considered, is that such feedback loops end up forever obfuscating the originality of a design and the identity of its author – an already heavily debated notion questioned as far back as the Renaissance by Leon Battista Alberti through his formal invention of “architectural design”[26] and re-popularized recently by generative algorithms.
Before the printing press was invented, the copying of texts for example, were carried out manually. Due to this, they were perpetually both voluntarily and involuntarily altered, forever distancing it from its original source and its respective author. Alberti explained that similarly, a building was an altered copy of an architectural drawing, a thought that at its time, is not so dissimilar to today’s generative design algorithms. In a comparable dissipation of authorship, generative design algorithms digest a curated assortment of images to learn how to manufacture – via process of a finite simulated evolution – an ideal variation. Through the transcendence of computational decision-making culminated at every iteration of the image from its original copy, it slowly evolves away from the original human input image. At every iteration, it becomes increasingly attributed to the machine as creator – a computational learning process that Alberti could only begin to comprehend once the built copy of a design materialized as the first iteration of a design, one building at a time. Through this generative process, the computer becomes the architect, but only by means of human input, and on account of the author of the generative program. Here, the architect is a system of parts; a concoction of participants determined by an ever-increasing amount of specialization indispensable to the sustenance of its process; a Paskian delight. It no longer preserves the ego of its “genius”, but creates an “independent” understanding of architecture, uncorrupted by the conclusiveness of an “architectural design.” For the first time, in yet another act of rebellion, the architect does not obsess over the finished object, but rather over the process employed towards achieving it.
Evolutionary computing is widely used as a part of a process for optimization of design outputs by combining several performance criteria. With regards to its architectural process, the architect no longer works towards a human-led absolute solution. Rather, the architect employs a Darwinian process of flexibility towards the production of multiple design options that can be adjusted to the needs of the project whereby results of the evolutions are discarded to better inform the fitness of a design through genetic algorithms. Whereas we must learn by textbook or real life and real time examples of “failures”, the learning capability of computers is unstoppable. Computers have the capability to collectively learn from a single “mistake” determined by a human or non-human judge. It is a space ripe for the input of human creatives who must code a specific form-finding procedure. This process cannot be accomplished by software engineers alone the same way the Sagrada Familia could not be built simply by masons, requiring a master orchestrator. From resolving the distribution of forces on a chair to organizing a neighborhood, these ideas descend from a long history of “morphological thinking” that comes from studying nature’s behavioral principles that dates back to Darwin.[27] Now, within the fitness process of a generative design function, as David Rutten explains in a later chapter, the architect designs, and the computer critiques.[28] So if a designer provides an evolutionary algorithm a design to be improved and evolved, and the resulting final output cannot exist without the designer’s initial input but it looks nothing like it, who is responsible if its structure fails once it is built? Legally speaking, obviously the architect and/or engineer are implicated via their signature, but conceptually, may they not then hold the computer accountable? Or the algorithm’s author? Is the designer’s agency forfeited? The algorithm has done the majority of the decision-making process under instructions of the designer that designed the algorithm. One could say the architect dies to the degree to which that architect abdicates responsibility; in some instances, attribution of responsibility is a negotiation. What can no longer be negotiated however, is the degree to which a software exercises “ownership” over digitally produced work – can an architect or designer justify every decision made by the algorithm? If not, what value does he or she provide? In extreme cases, the architect, or “actuator”, holds little to no responsibility by simply enabling/operating the machine to design.[29] Perhaps both parties must be held accountable in being useful exclusively for their respective usefulness. In other words, using the human for what the human is good at: awareness, perception and decision making, and using machines for what machines are good at: precision and repetition. It might be naïve to assume any process from designing to fabrication possible without the rigorous involvement of the architect, who is therefore solemnly responsible for coping with the software’s ability to produce, simulate, interpret and assess a design. In other words, an author must assume responsibility for its computationally enhanced capacity and therefore its byproducts.
Embracing the possibilities brought on by enhanced design and fabrication tools and their creatively emancipating capacity (as Achim Menges argues in a later chapter), there has never been a more exciting time to be an architect. In such instance, death or rebirth, as you may gather, are a form of rebellion necessarily symptomatic of being an architect; that instead of being locked in simplistic dialogues of “man vs. machine” we should critically interact with new methods of designing and building intuitively, bridging the vacuum between human activity and computational design. As characterized by many parametric design labs, architecture is about evolving models to help us achieve flexible and resilient buildings informed by ever-changing environmental data inputs, such as people flows, social programs, weather patterns or material durability – a possibility that is a lot less distant than it seems, and to some degree, an almost inevitable evolution of the architect. If we trace a trajectory, the modernist architect was followed by the proto-parametricist, followed by the “anti-architect” and the agent-based parametricist. If the architect dies again, towards what does it evolve? One may argue that we perpetually kill ourselves at the turn of every peradigm, in a perpetual act of reinvention of our discipline, our roles and how (not why) we do what we do. In over-dramatic Nietzschean terms, how shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers (again)?[30] Perhaps through another rebirth.
Rebirth as “Übermensch”
Architects, artists and tinkerers alike must one way or another come to terms with the potential automation of much of their creative process. This could include parts of their skill and eventually, perhaps even parts of their curiosity. Easily accessible design tools, particularly generative AI, have already automated the generation of floorplans, graphic representations, and 3D models – processes that are still premature, but for now necessarily initiated as well as terminated by human operators. The human capacity to produce design has been enhanced by these tools, and thus, will cultivate an increasing dependency on them. Of course, however, not all are attracted to this idea, there are those that grow a weary detachment, clinging to their intuitive touch. The architectural metaverse for example, is exciting, and presents a new universe of real-estate, but not all make sense of it. The introduction of new thought paradigms has always caused friction and disparity which grows in intensity with the proposed paradigm until a presupposed death or rebirth of the persona in question occurs, whether this produces a new architect or not. The anxiety caused by the alienation of young architects from the ability to cope with so many new tools they are not trained to use, and the excitement generated by those commanding them are palpable. I hope, at least, that the inability to express this anxiety other than pitting man against machine provides a hopeful distraction from the surviving monotonous labor of architecture which the same tools were supposed to frees us from. In a sense of defeatist relief, if we cannot alleviate our own labor, then at least we may become supervisors rather than producers of digital output.
Any belief or hope of survival would dictate an indoctrinated evolutionary course of the architectural figure; an augmented architectural character; a discourse of man and computer; or Nietzschean terms, an Ubermensch.[31] Or as Stelarc describes in a later chapter; a contemporary endeavor of “meat, metal and code” as machines expand their “behavioral vocabulary” and humans progressively perform with “machinic repetitiveness”.[32] This would prove Lacan right. Active belief or faith in the architect’s death would provide sustenance for continuity, as an augmented architect. Ironically, there is little faith involved in operating a machine, other than of course, faith – in programmers or software engineers – that the machine will perform as expected, or as expectedly unexpected. [33] To those that do not welcome a rebirth, faith personifies the “inevitable” technocratic dismay that remains relentlessly prophesized, so we drag a necessity to make maquettes and draw by hand which begs the question; does unrestricted digitalization make us less human in a global Post-Fordist network society? Perhaps it’s time we redefine what it is to be a human creator in contemporary terms, because with time, the human counterpart becomes increasingly less responsible for creating. In 2018 (5 years ago already!) for example, Christies auctioned the first ever portrait painting authored solely by a computer. The intelligent computer software (more specifically known as a General Adversarial Network)[34] that authored the18th century-like painting was produced by OBVIOUS, a Paris-based art and coder collective with no painters. This was done, obviously, with a large quantity of initial human input that instructed the program how to go about creating the portrait, supposedly with no human input during the process. This blurs authorship into a very thick boundary between the author of the software which is human, and the author of the painting, a computer; this sentence alone is a very young, but surprising concept of creation. Is that Übermensch? Or is that art without an artist?
We have already come a great distance from the beginning of a discourse of “man vs. machine” and are well our way into a discourse of “man & machine”. Creators are to some inseparable digital degree, already part silicon and circuits. Not only via the diffusion of digital tools and what they produce, but also through our daily relationship with the digital universe, and the data it produces about us – the lifeblood of machines. At present, we are inextricably digital, but until a server (literally) independently and explicitly instructs a computer-architect with the command, “I prefer no natural light and cooler ambience” without the help of a human operator, it is safe to say we are required. And despite the growing real estate of data centers by the millions in square feet,[35] the foremost matter of architecture is (still) human behavior. Even those acres of structures that house servers run data for human use. ‘But are we forever indispensable?’ is the fearmongering not-so-stupid question we should at least ask ourselves at least once before we don’t. We already respect computers or robots as immensely productive members of society but for now also understand the human role as crucial for providing input for design to happen. It is exactly that balance that we are calibrating. The promise is that the development and employment of AI tools will allow architects to concentrate on more sophisticated and creative ambitions for the amelioration of society – presuming that digital tools will not only not complain about having to do all the leg work, but that these also not take over the creative process completely. The thought of AIs sitting and blabbering around a table scribbling with pencils until they get it right might even sound romantic, but if we go as far as anthropomorphizing then we might as well drop the “-morphizing” and keep the “anthropo-”. I also doubt this would expand the market for the graduates to come who will most likely have studied the very thing the AIs are doing. Do we limit machines to efficient repetition so that we may preserve a romance with creation?
The introduction of new technological paradigms in the effort of facilitating or replacing the need for human labor are becoming familiar. The digital or AI paradigms have only recently matured – in commercial terms – since the Information Era, but they aren’t the first, and most likely won’t be the last. In a sense, there has been an Übermensch’s at the turn of every paradigm, at which point the previous ones become forgotten déjà-vus, from which we distance ourselves just enough through time in order to slowly transition into another “feared hostile takeover,” that in the end, is not so hostile, but so welcomed. Is it now, that we desire the Übermensch to live?[36] It surely makes a more desirable candidate when job prospecting.
The concept of the architect’s death is a manifestation of the profession’s continuous self-reevaluation and transformation. The advent of digital or AI tools, their increasing capacity to produce design “independently” while becoming more accessible online have significantly influenced, and will continue to change the way we learn, produce, and consume architecture. The novel ways these change our profession antiquates, often intentionally, notions we currently understand as prescriptions of authorship which for so long have defined and defended the human touch as the sole contender of relevant creation. The human-centric self-importance derived from millennia of creation retains a sense of belonging and longing that instils in some the comfort of contributing to a sense of meaningful heritage that is not so easily forfeited, and to others, a repelling worn out monotony that motivates a certain propensity towards exciting research and development. This includes a spectrum of thought-provoking explorers in between. Death is not definitive. Wherever the future of architecture lies, whether it is in welcoming or rejecting a highly engrained technological future that requires always more a supervisor than a creator, or whether it lies in embracing the complexities and possibilities of an increasingly digital future while also honoring the heritage and humanistic values that have defined the profession for millennia, the architect dies and reinvents himself. The exploration of different beliefs, from the role of machines to the importance of human decision-making, is vital in shaping the architect's evolution and determining the path forward. We must reevaluate the architect's traditional role as the sole creative authority in the design process. With so much possible digital automation, perhaps the only contending author to the finalization of the design process is municipal approval, if that too, is not automated.
Under no circumstance should we determine now whether we will have to pen a full obituary on the architect, but flirtation with the angst brought on by the idea that creation was once an exclusive human activity remains to some degree a vital act of self-preservation given the architect’s determination to being so existential. So, within the widespread fear and anguish of having our indispensability questioned lies the opportunity for us to prove it once again. Ideally, many would say, in favor and harmoniously synchronized with the paradigm “straining” our vitality. I for one, was never trained to be an Übermensch, but it would sure be convenient to be one.
If you found this text invigorating, confusing or rantful at times, let it be a representation of the confusion and incoherence energy of an industry that a young architect-to-be is trying to reconcile while it presents a great many changes and opportunities that may at times be motivating, and at times be demotivating. Many were unable or unwilling to print this, so perhaps it is just me, but I am both nervous and excited about things to come.