Can the architectural flights of fancy and spectacular interiors generated by AI exist in the real world? The designers leading the way at this new creative frontier share their visions of the future
One of the first AI images to enter the public consciousness (entirely for the wrong reasons) was a surreal, nightmarish vision in which dogs’ eyes and heads blend in impossibly grotesque nebulae. The year was 2015, and Google had just released the image, created by its generative-AI tool, Deep Dream. Now, almost a decade later, Dall-E, Midjourney or Stable Diffusion, in conjunction with their human prompt-writers, can create convincing images of just about anything – from award-winning ‘photography ’ to magazine cover-worthy interiors and utopian cityscapes.
No stylistic reference is too geeky, no design movement too obscure and no mash-up is impossible, but where does this leave architects and designers? Last year, the architect and illustrator Anna Gibbs was quoted as saying it is ‘natural for architects to feel uneasy about a tool that, at first glance, looks as though it may be moving its favourite mug onto your desk and parking its bottom on your chair’. But not all architecture studios are sceptical. Last April, Zaha Hadid Architects’ director Patrik Schumacher admitted in an interview that the studio uses generative AI to iterate images and inspire design solutions. He explained how they utilise prompts and references to prior projects, then elaborate on what arises. ‘I feel very empowered by all this possibility,’ he added at the time.
Tim Fu, who left Zaha Hadid Architects to set up his own practice last year, has continued to work with AI tools, which, despite their promise, also have their limitations. ‘When we explore the creative nature of AI, we tend to let the machine hallucinate to its heart’s content,’ he says, pointing out that the resulting images still require ‘intense human involvement to make an idea work in its context’. Fu’s work may take him on flights of fancy, but he is also one of the pioneering designers making his theoretical work into reality – albeit, so far, on a smaller scale.
Working alongside the Italian manufacturer
Mavimatt, Fu designed the ‘Chromatic’ chair. Resembling the space-age designs of Eero Aarnio, with a generous pinch of Italian radicalism, the resulting, semi-spherical product is as much a product of AI and advanced manufacturing skills as of Italian craftsmanship, combining a carbon and fibreglass ‘chassis’ with leather upholstery. Fu’s ‘AI Stone Columns’, a series of stone capitals (the decorative top of a column) inspired by the swooping curves of parametric architecture, was conceived in Midjourney and translate
