Artificial Intelligence & Architecture | Online Exhibition

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has already made its way into the industry, providing it with the means to meet new challenges. Its use in the field of architecture is still in its infancy, but the expected results already obtained are promising. This technology is much more than a mere opportunity, it is without doubt a decisive step forward, quite capable of transforming the architectural practice. This exhibition explores this engagement and its application to the built environment. Defining AI, explaining what it encompasses, both as techniques and as paradigms, is central to understanding its advent in architecture.

AI first needs to be considered from the perspective of the history of science and that of architecture. Rather than a “disruption”, the technological evolution surrounding and supporting AI is the result of a slow maturation. Indeed, the profession has been undergoing a transformation for quite some time. The progressive adoption of technological solutions has already profoundly changed each stage of its value chain: first by exploiting new construction techniques, then by developing appropriate design software, and now by introducing statistical computing capacities, including, in the forefront, data science and artificial intelligence. Henceforth, rather than a radical orbit change, we want to see a change of trajectory whose acceleration is ultimately in the continuity of a practice that has led architecture to what it is today. Modularity, Computer Aided Design (CAD), Parametricism and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are the four inexorably interwoven stages of a sequence that frames the slow hybridization of our practices such as we live them and can imagine them today.

Bringing together concrete examples and recent results achieved in various fields of research, we showcase for the first time an inventory of AI’s presence in architecture and a panorama of the latest advances in this field. Facade, plan, structure, perspective : as many scales for measuring the city to which AI can already contribute, whether real or hypothetical.

Between current theory and experimentation, this exhibit intends to shed light on the inception of a new technological era, leveraging the architectural practice, while offering it a renewed relevance.