How AI Can Help Us End Design Education Anachronisms

This article was originally published on Common Edge.

The rise of generative AI has given every design educator sufficient reason to reconsider both what to teach and how to teach it. Training an architect is a long process, and mapping it onto an uncertain future is a daunting task. Researchers at OpenAI, DeepMind, Meta, and similar companies seem constantly surprised by the rapid development and sometimes unforeseen capabilities of their AI creations. If even the creators don’t know how fast the future will arrive, it would be hubristic for any of us to claim that AI will do X or AI won’t be able to do Y in the next decade, which is about how long it takes to really train an architect.

The conversation about what and how to teach is already contentious, and it must necessarily evolve with technology. Parts of it will remain unresolved until the impact of these new technologies is more clearly understood. However, there’s another, easier conversation to have: what not to teach.

This conversation has also been historically contested and is inseparable from the discussion of what to teach. But in my own teaching and conversations with colleagues, there seems to be a consensus among design faculty that certain things should no longer be taught in architecture school. These anachronisms remain fixtures in most schools due to institutional and cultural inertia, and perhaps because schools are still able to produce great architects despite them.

However, AI will change that calculus. It gives us new arguments for purging some of the more ossified practices of design culture. What was a frustrating anachronism yesterday may become a liability tomorrow, compromising our ability to train young architects and their ability to continue the profession. With AI, we finally have the means and the motive to get rid of three things traditionally endemic to the educational process.

Masochism

If generative AI speeds up the process of visualizing and producing designs by a factor of 10, it would be a great tragedy to allow students to use all that increased productivity to indulge their instincts towards all-nighters and self-neglect. Despite the efforts of many design educators to curb these instincts, the culture of self-neglect and exhaustion in design school has proven to be a persistent and difficult problem to solve.

Part of the problem is certainly that there are still valuable lessons to be learned in the more masochistic parts of studio culture. Architecture school taught me to keep iterating, taught me to “kill my darlings,” taught me that another, better solution to any problem might be around the corner, if I could remain open to it. Once you embrace that feverish commitment to improving on your own work, all-nighters seem like a logical expression of that commitment. That was the justification, but it wasn’t the reason. The reason was that testing, proving, and demonstrating an idea takes a lot longer than having the idea in the first place. The human brain can have an inspiration in less than a second. But to test, prove, and demonstrate that idea requires execution in the form of drawings and models—lots of them. So if you care about your ideas, you’d better start a pot of coffee.

This may seem reasonable—at least to anyone who’s been to architecture school—as long as you ignore the downstream effects. As you stay up for several nights in a row to test and prove that one brilliant idea, your creative faculties steadily decline, compromising what might have been that second or third brilliant idea.

The importance of sleep for creativity cannot be overstated. Research consistently shows that a well-rested brain is better able to generate novel ideas, solve complex problems, and think critically. In a competition with machines, sleep deprivation will constitute a tactical disadvantage. If “creativity” is to be the inner keep of the architecture castle, then we must defend it at all costs by defending sleep and retiring the all-nighter.

But how will we get work done?! screams every architecture student everywhere. In an AI future, the day of an architecture student might look a lot like the day of a contemporary writer. For a creative writer, inspiration, and production often flow as a single act. Have a thought, type it out, repeat; revise later. Most writers stick to a disciplined schedule designed to maximize creativity, acknowledging that the human brain can only be so creative for so long and needs inputs like sleep, exercise, and food. Haruki Murakami rises at 4:00 a.m. and only works for five or six hours a day. In the afternoons he runs, or writes, or listens to music. Maya Angelou had a similar practice, writing only from 7:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m., and was so committed to her own focus that she would find a hotel and rent a “tiny, mean room with just a bed, and sometimes, if I can find it, a face basin.” Once she left her desk every day at 2:00, she lived a normal life of running errands, having dinner with her husband, and getting a good night’s sleep. No one could argue that Murakami and Angelo are uncreative or unsuccessful people. And a great novel has no less complex a structure than a great building. 

Imagine if an architecture student only worked six hours a day, but the entirety of that span was dedicated to pure creation, while machines took over the production?

As AI rapidly takes over the rote, mechanical aspects of design, humans must focus their efforts on only those things that a human can do. If you believe that creativity is one of those sacred cows, let us optimize for that by breaking this ugly tradition.

So tell your students to leave the studio at a reasonable hour and go home. Insist on it. Insist that they do their designs, do their best, and then go home, or go out. Advise them to meet other people their own age, preferably in disciplines other than architecture. Require them to get a hobby, or join a club or sports team. (Even an a capella group, if they absolutely must.)

Tell them what you already know: Life is what architecture is made of. Love, loss, risk, failure—these are the engines that power any real creativity. And sleep is the motor oil that keeps them working. So get some sleep, and let the machines take over the all-nighter.

Fetishization of the Image

For most of prehistory, architecture was primarily a spatial experience, appreciated through the inhabitation of its spaces. However, with the advent of mass media, architecture began to drift toward an image-based culture, more so than almost any other professional discipline. This shift can be attributed to the way mass media fragmented different types of professional success: commercial success (making money), professional success (being esteemed by one’s peers), and cultural success (being esteemed by the wider culture).

In most professional disciplines, these three types of success typically follow a sequential path. However, architecture has an alternative route, which I’ll call Path B. This route subverts the conventional sequence and, as far as I can tell, is unique to architecture. Through Path B, an architect can achieve cultural success by earning the esteem of their peers, even if they have limited commercial success or built projects. 

With sufficient professional and cultural success, one can then achieve commercial success, because clients will line up to hire the famous architect whom all the other architects admire. (It’s always interesting that some architects can win the Pritzker Prize—a prize that is ostensibly awarded to “architects whose built work demonstrates a combination of those qualities of talent, vision and commitment which has produced consistent and significant contributions to humanity and the built environment”—with a very shallow portfolio of built works, principally on the strength of their publications and theoretical works. Equally interesting is how those same architects then go on to develop an expansive practice brimming with large and expensive built projects).

To be sure, architects can go the conventional route, and often do. But architects also have this Path B that’s hard to imagine in any other professional discipline. We wouldn’t know who Warren Buffett was if his initial forays into investing had lost all his early clients their money, and we wouldn’t know who Johnnie Cochran was if all of his early clients had gone to jail.

The existence of Path B in architecture enables and encourages a fetishization of image-making. If your objective is commercial success first, you’ll focus on the things that clients care about, like meeting budgets, and building buildings. If your objective is professional success first, you’ll focus on the things that other architects care about, like novel ideas, forms, materials, and other forms of experimentation. Anything novel is much more easily made, and conveyed, via images instead of wood, brick, concrete, metal, and glass. So architects have come to accept the image of a thing as adequate proof of concept of the thing itself. One can achieve notoriety through the production and dissemination of images of all the novel buildings one could imagine without ever taking on the burden of their execution. Then, when one becomes famous and in demand, one can take on the task of realizing these ideas in built form.

The rise of AI in architecture fundamentally challenges the viability of pursuing Path B. With AI-powered tools capable of generating stunning, novel renderings based on text prompts, the mere production of impressive architectural images no longer signifies the same level of creativity and innovation that it once did. As a result, achieving early acclaim primarily through image-making will become increasingly difficult. How could it not be? We won’t grant our collective admiration to architects who produce work that can be easily done by a teenager with a ChatGPT subscription.