DESCRIPTION

AI is already part of our lives even though we might not realise it. It is in our phones, filtering spam, identifying Facebook friends, and classifying our images on Instagram. It is in our homes in the form of Siri, Alexa and other AI assistants. It is in our cars and our planes. AI is literally everywhere. Artworks generated by AI have won international prizes, and have been sold at auction. But what does AI mean for the world of design?

This issue of AD explores the nature of AI, and considers its potential for architecture. But this is no idle speculation. Architects have already started using AI for architectural design and fabrication. Yet – astonishingly – there has been almost no debate about AI within the discipline of architecture so far. Surely, nothing can be more important for the profession of architecture right now. The issue looks at all aspects of AI: its potential to assist architects in designing buildings so that it becomes a form of ‘augmented intelligence’; its capacity to design buildings on its own; and whether AI might open up an extraordinary new chapter in architectural design.

Contributors: Refik Anadol; Daniel Bolojan; Alexa Carlson; Sofia Crespo and Feileacan McCormick; Gabriel Esquivel, Jean Jaminet and Shane Bugni; Behnaz Farahi; Theodoros Galanos and Angelos Chronis; Eduard Haiman; Wanyu He; Damjan Jovanovic and Lidija Kljakovic; Immanuel Koh; Maria Kuptsova; Sandra Manninger; Lev Manovich; Achim Menges and Thomas Wortmann; Wolf dPrix, Karolin Schmidbaur and Efilena Baseta; M Casey Rehm; and Hao Zheng and Masoud Akbarzadeh.

Featured architects: Alisa Andrasek, Coop Himmelb(l)au, Lifeforms.io, Nonstandardstudio,SPAN, Kyle Steinfeld, Studio Kinch and Xkool Technology.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Matias del Campo is a registered architect, designer and educator. He is currently Associate Professor at Taubmann College of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Michigan, where he teaches design studios based on AI. The work of Matias del Campo was featured at the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale, ArchiLab 2013 at the FRAC Centre, Orléans, France, the 2008 and 2010 Architecture Biennale in Beijing, and in the 2011 solo show ‘Formations’ at the Museum of Applied Arts (MAK) in Vienna. In 2017 his work was shown in a solo exhibition at the Fab Union Gallery in Shanghai China. 2018 SPAN showed an installation at the exhibition “Time Space Existence” in the Palazzo Bembo, together with Francois Roche and Meta Design. Most recently Matias del Campo was awarded the AIA Architect Studio Prize, the Accelerate@CERN fellowship, served as Technical Chair of the ACADIA Conference and guest edited an edition of AD, Architectural Design published by Wiley in London, UK. His newest book “Sublime Bodies”, published by Tongji University Press in Shanghai, was launched on March 22nd, 2017. In 2018 Matias del Campo was voted into the board of directors ACADIA, the Association of Computer Aided Design in Architecture.

Neil Leach is a theorist and registered architect. He is currently Professor at Tongji University, Shanghai, Professor of Digital Design at the European Graduate School, Assistant Professor at FIU and a member of the Academia Europaea. He has been a NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts Fellow, and has also taught at SCI-Arc, AA, Cornell University, Columbia GSAPP, DIA, IaaC, ESARQ, University of Bath, University of Brighton, University of Nottingham and London Consortium. He holds a MA and Diploma of Architecture from the University of Cambridge, and a PhD from the University of Nottingham. Neil Leach is the editor of 5 books published by Wiley, including the recently published issue of AD, 3D Printed Body Architecture. Overall he has published over 30 books, which have been translated into 7 other languages. In addition he has organized 16 international conferences in the UK, Germany, USA, China and Romania, and had curated several exhibitions, including a number for the Architecture Biennial Beijing. In 2011, along with Philip Yuan, he established the DigitalFUTURES annual series of workshops, conferences, exhibition and PhD program, which has become the leading series in China, and possibly the world. This series involves leading figures, such as Achim Menges, Patrik Schumacher, Mark Burry, Philippe Block, Gilles Retsin, Wanyu He, Antoine Picon, Nader Tehrani, Meejin Yoon and Roland Snooks, and attracts students, academics and practitioners from all over the world. The 2019 edition of DigitalFUTURES, called ‘Architectural Intelligence,’ involved 4 separate workshops dedicated to AI.