Architectural practices and the planning and management of built environment lag in adopting state-of-the-art computer technologies – artificial intelligence and extended and virtuál reality in particular, and the sparse tools and approaches implemented provide only marginal contributions. A contrast reveals not only comparing to other industries and creative disciplines but to the opportunities at hand. The brief is to evaluates the situation both in the context of the IT field and in the sector of architecture and the built environment, to point to the causes of the sector’s current setup in terms of the starting points of creativity, the technologies used, and approaches to their development, as well as in terms of the economic, social, and political framework, subsequently to introduce the opportunities to overcome the falling behind, and outline the paths.
The “architecture of 90%”, or production architecture, is proving to be the target field for the effective deployment of AI in architecture and the built environment. However, while utilizing general adversarial networks and supervised learning, the past, recent, and current efforts, whether statistical or parametric, fail in this regard as a rule. Conversely, reinforcement learning from human feedback (as distinguished from learning with human feedback), and various imitation-based-, self-learn, or transfer learning techniques appear promising. Maybe surprisingly at first, the latest achievements in AI-driven robotics provide a blueprint: the research shall introduce CAD software as a uniquely suitable environment, in which an intrinsically rewarded agent-apprentice can learn from his master-human architect- and gradually take over his work and conduct partial tasks.
Within the research, three fundamental perspectives shall apply: authentic, poetic creativity that passes and precedes parameterization and algorithmization, second, novel, in architectural designing not yet applied learning strategies and training approaches, and third, concurrence of the fundamental three- and more-dimensional spatiality of both architecture and recently developed virtual reality technology, as well as the new theory of human thinking and intelligence that waits for implementation in machine learning (together with other novel computing approaches). Given the coincidence of the three aspects, a singularity is predicted for the next development of architectural craft and field.
