5. LEVEL;

Yann Lecun, Chief AI Scientist at Meta states that even the “smartest” AI models until today cannot understand the physical space nor invent innovative concepts in reference to our manifold world. His statement beautifully connects the fields of this research: the physical world and digital approaches to solving future challenges in complex realities. As the introduction outlines, architecture is a discipline with great history compared to the very young discipline of computation. Yet, information technologies are changing architecture forever by forcing architects to rebalance the tradition of the thousands of years old discipline. Based on its origin, AI does not have the urge to do architecture. It is architects using artificial intelligent technologies to do so. In essence, AI does not care about society, plus it is tricky to make a machine responsible for an action or output done wrong. Even less does AI have the urge to do good architecture as long as it is prompted to do so. To figure out if the implementation of AI technologies in architecture can become “a good thing” architects need to face these challenges and make them their own instead of solely using third-party solutions, dictating them how to create. The third level revealed that architects may lag in creative ideation competence during AI-supported processes compared to other disciplines, resulting in other fields adopting AI technologies faster due to potentially higher confidence or competence in ideation tasks. So the sooner architects take up on them, the better, which might be quite challenging for a historically conservative sector like architecture.

In the course of the research the possible transition into the “Imagination Age” was discovered. A concept that suggests humanity entering a new era where creativity, innovation, and imaginative thinking are the primary drivers of economic and societal progress. It emphasizes ideas, design, and storytelling over traditional industrial and information-based skills transcending from analysis and rational thought of the Information Age. Taking this into account, future professionals are required to focus on bringing the right mindset. By having an excited interest in complexity and being curious, one simply transfers seamlessly between software solutions while interacting with architecture. With the accessibility of AI and understanding its limitations alongside its strengths, courageous creatives can strike the right balance. Supported by online information all professionals can learn everything. It is about one's attitude towards reality and becoming a digital creative persona. The power thereby always lies with the human practitioner curating and refining provided outputs. A process of adding narratives, context and meaning to ideas, artificially augmented to create projects of higher quality. Blindly using generated AI outputs leads to a boring homogenization of creativity and architectonic outputs. But with architecturally interested humans tweaking outputs to celebrate local culture or a related occasion, future architecture is able to be as nuanced as never before because of its embodied values. It deeply resonates with its surroundings and uplifts its people, because logic is not enough to do architecture. So what happens if future architects have the ability to conduct vast amounts of information or digitally empowered urban planners interact with Big Data and spatial information systems only one click away, always ready to respond and thereby become a valuable resource and playground for the future?

After all, this research once more reflects on previously mentioned Darwinian evolutionary processes, as it states that life complex enough to predict and exploit regularities in its environment gets rewarded with evolving into the next stage of intelligence. Now, this “smarter life” creates again a more complex environment for competing life forms, which in turn evolve to be more complex, eventually creating an ecosystem of even higher complexity in life. Here we need to clarify the strong support for the darwinistic thought about human life as a species, rather than the individuum (as it is often promoted like today). The latest technological advancements might have the impression of great threat to some of us, but if one starts embracing this development focussing on its possibilities, it immediately becomes a source of great opportunity. It makes things more complex, but less complicated. Probably unlike many others, this work argues that with the rise of Artificial Intelligence and despite rising complexities things get surprisingly easy to handle, when addressed with the right skills. Change proceeds never in a linear manner, in fact it often demands a lot and it rarely comes easy. But once accepted, it represents just the next level in an interlinking process called time. A society able to enter the next stage of evolution needs its own architecture. What does this contemporary architecture look like?

Looking back on history and with those technological resources in our hands architects can easily become creative gods or everybody and nobody at the same time. Not because they are omniscient or even close to being better or smarter than our ancestors but of the technology developed. Time—past, presence or future—are just conditions professionals choose while effortlessly strolling in between them. Although architecture can appreciate this sudden absence of constraints, grasping the almost limitless agency it implies can be overwhelming at times. But providing the possibility to completely redesign reality and the relation to things, imagining a future how we commonly want it to be, puts architects into an incredibly powerful position to shape the world of tomorrow. This development will potentially help to find answers to the feeling of powerlessness in a world of growing complexity and uplifts creatives into a position capable of handling the current information overload. If accepted, architects might use this opportunity to redefine their role as somebody organizing space and giving materiality to our world, by shining light on places deserving it, making them appear in appropriate colors and materiality. Think of architects building assistants that collect, curate and present information to even better understand our surroundings and create new links between things in everyday surroundings. They build or shape tools towards their professional needs, openly sharing sources and making them accessible for others. Entering the next level elevates architecture in a way that enables imagination, tell inspiring stories, feel or live in a way that makes the current everyday burdens less dominant. Architects start to arrange the beautiful, functional and sustainable built environment again rather than being drafting-machines or digital visualizers constantly running out of time. Suddenly, architecture is no longer about good or bad designs (and even if, who is judging?). It is about applying values and meaning to projects, about the ones able to creatively tell uplifting stories by enriching our ideas with large quantities of data, making it look like a walk in the park as they produce better results. Referring back to the concept of transformational creativity, by stripping off the time consuming parts that are currently controlling conditions in architecture can open up a space where architects adapt, able to focus on core principles evolving into next generation architects. The Architects 4.0.

The information needed for the future-proof transformation of architecture is not a mystery. It is everywhere and ready to be taken on. The challenge is more about us opening up towards shaping the future rather than sticking to the past. But moving towards a digital future in architecture does not mean to neglect the past. It rather suggests more of a Renaissance-kind of approach. “The reaction to this new complexity of design and traditional feeling of powerlessness must be an architectural (r-)evolution. An architectonic renaissance of the digital.” The outcome of this evolution, however, is deeply dependent on our ability to explain our aspirations. Imagine professionals utilizing AI technologies including sub-areas like deep learning, neural networks or machine learning. By doing so, they elevate into a position of understanding future needs and possible solutions better. Rendering them towards architecture, helps to gain back lost power on the built environment. Furthermore, and as discussed previously, professionals need to understand the results of AI tools not as final products but as inspiration with them in charge, controlling and guiding outputs into desired direction. Therefore, practitioners have to understand, and communicate, ideas about architectural quality in new languages. For this reason, a more collective and active engagement is suggested to have a meaningful influence in the outputs of those powerful technologies. Overcoming infantile maladies of new digital tools by pushing further as what they “allow to do” and using them in architectonic favour, tasks and needs, those tools and the possibilities to create with “everything” right from the beginning opens up new dimensions. Initially it might be overwhelming, but it enriches ideas as soon as one starts playing with the power of knowing everything.