AI will not replace architects - Patrik Schumacher from Zaha Hadid Architects

AI is a word that is everywhere since the past few months a lot of designers have started using AI specially generative AI to create some fantastic mind-boggling visuals well a few weeks ago we found out that even zaha hadid Architects one of the biggest architecture firms in the world was experimenting with generative AI so this got me thinking has AI already entered the professional space of architecture and design and if so what will be the impact of that how much control are we giving AI can it design on its own and most importantly will it

ever replace the designer to get answers for all of these questions I went straight to the top of the Architects and sat down with Patrik Schumacher himself so without further wait I bring to you my chat with Patrik on AI and its impact on the field of architecture so hey Patrik it's great to have you back on the channel you know the last time you were here we were discussing the metaverse and you know we discussed a lot of your ideas about the metaverse and and how it would play out in the future today I

actually want to invite you back to talk about a new technology that seems to have taken the architecture world and the world in general by a storm and that is AI especially generative AI and you know I wanted to know your thoughts on it because I recently saw you know some of your um the Roundtable conference that you had at digital Futures as well where you showed how Zha has been experimenting with generative AI as well so I was really curious as to how um Architects are using it and properly using it not just you

know in academic Circle so I was really excited to have you on and thank you so much for coming yeah my pleasure I'll have to talk about it I mean yes it's we're using it we have a group uh where we also see within the office all the teams who are experimenting or using it to ID to generate ideas Concepts formal ideas mostly compositional ideas through prompting usually using uh zaha hadid Architects somewhere in the prompt and then some hint for the program for the side so this is across the office I mean not everybody

not every project necessarily but quite a few teams and early stages so there isn't any build Works which can be attributed to that process but it helps us to generate quickly um various sketches of course we then have to remodel it and adapt it and it's more like inspiration than you know final design but what is interesting that and I mentioned that there occasionally if you're very close to the client we let them in and we show them also some some ideas uh we saw before we make the effort to to go in and use

that we we show them already and get some feedback and help help us to Target what might fit their purposes or expectations so that's that's all very productive let's say so I mean at present uh the use of AI is as you said it's limited to uh getting inspiration and getting those Initial Ideas right that's right that's right and when you said you sort of uh if you're close with the client you also show it to the client do you also invite the client to then also experiment with it and sort of I don't know

what to do maybe I haven't seen that yet uh some it's it's so easy enough that maybe maybe they'll do it I mean and I haven't yet myself being in such a meeting where somebody brought out an a by the way I also tried this and this is what I like please try can you make something of that but I'm sure that's cool that will come do you think that's a good thing or a bad thing though look it's okay I think ultimately a very mature client would trust their designers particularly on the high end

and particular you know it's a corporate or institutional clients wouldn't would want to take that burden and risk and potential embarrassment to to propose it to propose you know they should trust The Architects to hit the mark I mean what is very important for the client to describe um what kind of what they want to host with their building what's the processes what they're trying to achieve with their building so that's but then the rest they should leave to us and um of course they will manage they will look at it and they have to

feel good about it too they will have to see if we actually can fulfill their functionality promises budget constraints but the design generation and design decisions should be the architect so that's the way I look at it but you know in in what you were saying right now about you know what an architect also does beyond just the starting point of the design you know this sort of partly answers my next question but this is something that a lot of people ask is using AI sort of the end of human creativity you're letting go of

uh you know a human potential giving it all to a machine so does it eventually lead to a place where they don't think by themselves but just use machines to think maybe but it's all for this benefit of higher productivity more prosperity so and and I think it's also a form of creativity um where you can be stimulated you know usually also any Creator whether it's a writer or or artist or architect you look at precedent you'll you'll go through these books and look for Inspirations so there's no kind of pure creativity out of some

kind of depth of One's Own genius because that that own genius is basically empty right you need to kind of build that genius by absorbing a lot seeing a lot of course you need to know alertness but when you work interfacing with AI you also need an alertness because it throws up these you know it used to be kind of 10 images now maybe more you know four images of dally you have to you have some judgments and discrimination this is all about productivity advances I think all creative Industries are gaining enormous power and you

can do much more in a shorter time and that leads to better decision because these creations are not just creations for the sake of Creations you try to solve problems right you're trying to address issues and if you have more to select from and you're smarter let's say options to select from who already have a lot of intelligence and rationality then the decisions you're making are more sound and less wasteful and that's good for everybody the other very sometimes well will we be all become unemployed yeah and um will there be look for some things

like like metaverse spaces will that anyway the demand for them will be so huge that they're not enough architects in the world to address them so then you need to have some of that self-generation or using Ai and we we also work with these kind of modules so we're preparing an ease of generating material which also has already a lot of inbuilt intelligence so that's not worrying me and I don't think that we'll lose uh people or we have less designers and creators I think the productivity gains will go into better decisions the client wanting

to see more options faster and with more depths of understanding is not only image generation their eyes but also analytic Ai and generative geometry Ai and so on and all that has led to which we're working on already while was basically leads to not uh you know spending less percentage of the final product on design that has actually been historically increasing so in a place like India the architect gets one percent uh and uh of the equivalent project in the UK the architect gets four four or five percent that's a 5x and when it comes

to cultural building it goes up to 15 or all the design and Consultants together I couldn't get up to 20 of the value I don't think AI will reduce that because it pays to simulate understand have lots of options to think through before you make a huge you know five six year investment which costs huge resources it's better to spend this on finding out whether you actually totally happy with uh the results on many many levels so AI will help to increase that uh certainty and now a client wants even on competition stage in early

sketches they want to see photorealistic renderings and want to imagine that and be participating in this to understand what they're getting that's where this empowerment will go into so we will all be fully employed using AI yeah and and and as I said creativity I feel quite creative when I work with some of these systems when you get into it you you can perfect the dialogue and I think it's a better dialogue than between you the paper uh the pen and and a pile of books for inspiration yeah but it's not inherently less it's more

elegant more powerful more more productive but I don't think it's anywhere less creative than sitting with you know staring on an empty piece of paper and looking looking at books what and going trying to find an image you thought would might be an inspiration so so I don't think there's this kind of it always comes from inspiration you you mentioned that you know as you start using more AI tools it would also in the future be that your productivity is much higher you know it's usually starting yeah yeah so you see I mean you see

these old images of architecture Studios where there are lines of people in these huge giant boards just drafting with hand uh and we already see I experienced that I experienced that by the way when I started I mean as a student I was using a computer as I did when I came in the first there were no computers and if you did a competition I mean yeah this was kind of 15 people breaking their backs late nights I mean you get back pain even as a 25 year old then you have to draw over these

big drawings and if you make a mistake you have to scratch them and so on and so forth and then I mean this was and when when the computer was introduced we first did it for 3D sketching but then soon for 2D drawings I mean I could do um the work of 10 people literally and this was a thrill but I mean you know we didn't we didn't fire the rest of the people because we could do more we did yeah this was what I wanted to ask and also we could do things you know

faster and and give the clients more options Etc so I mean as you said you could do uh you know the work of 10 people with AI that would be even I mean it would go one step further of course and the thing is the other thing is also not only can you do the work of 10 people you can do things even 100 people couldn't have done yeah in terms of precision in terms of or you know in terms of geometry and also the realizability downstream where all these computational empowerment uh is also then

embedded in in in the engineering capacities in the production and the fabrication capacities where II comes also in at the moment of course the big rush has been with the image generation yeah and that's been fantastic and it's surprising and amazing that you have these huge models which are so diverse that they can generate comic strips and fantasy creatures and you know architectural propositions in the form of an image which have originality coherency proper light and Shadow and you can start to you know and even a lay person can start to see what it might

be like yeah so I actually wanted to go back to the statement that you said you know um in the future you will be able to do what even 100 people can't do so you know even when you look at your own studio in the future would you if AI can do a lot of the work would you then employ as many people to do the kind of work that you're doing because you will be able to not only create quality work but also do it in huge quantities like less people doing much more work

no I don't think we will have a shrinking office because of AI since we are early adopters I think we will be growing and catching market share from others and I don't believe in this scenario of talk many people being unemployed I believe that everybody will get involved in this kind of knowledge economy creative process you know these industries can absorb so much more innovation before in the 50s 60s 70s there was not very very few creators because these big assembly lines mechanical Master production non-digital Revolution yet you could you would have to make identical

copies millions and millions of and to do something different you would have to Res fit all the tools and now we have reprogrammable tools you just feed in a new G-Code or you 3D print the component you have these kind of flexible it's a big difference between a printing press and let's say Photoshop in the in the end of in the printer which prints anything you want so it's a universal printer now we have this Universal robotic fabrication machines plus all these Productions which are just software service or software facilities these and in these Innovations

will pay in these upgrades so it makes sense for everybody to participate in and also think that the air helps more people to anticipate because now fabulous and fantastic you can these systems write code and the way you would interface is already much easier for Architects for instance with this tools like grasshopper and using plugins to to get access intuitive access to a lot of sophistication and become kind of sophisticated Traders and that's why also I don't believe they do you know as a some people think well the knowledge economy is only for that kind

of top 30 or even if you can bring it up to 50 but there will always be this kind of other fifty percent who cannot participate who can only do manual work but in a sense creative work will be made easier um and so I think everybody participates in it I do believe that's part of our human psyche and of part of happiness is to to do something to progress to create something to improve yourself and improve uh the lives of society and and that will be that's the power here that's what I and to

make that easier is the thing is the great power of of AI not the substitution because because I don't believe that I think it will be uh human machine interfacing we will be directing and guiding and having developed intentionality of what what we want to create um there's a lot of suggestions coming from these systems but they're not final decision makers you know when I'm hearing your uh Outlook to the Future as well what I'm hearing is you know AI will inherently become a part of the society in general and henceforth our profession and construction

industry as well the people who are not as open to AI right now and uh people who are not experimenting with it right now do you think they would just get left behind or be forced to work with AI in the future oh I think they will pick it up and they will learn to love it I mean it's I mean the adoption right of chat GPT is you know is unbelievable it's the fastest ever people just realize this works this gives me this empowers me that I can learn something quickly I'm using it all

the time for a lot of questions I have whether it's you know historical knowledge political questions but also uh legal questions I want to know so so and yes of course some of our own capacities might slightly a trophy so your own memory recedes a little bit if you're always relying on calendars and notifications in your pocket kind of super compute on your pocket or you know calculators and and you know uh you know nobody knows how to draw a route you know how to calculate the square root so these things were a trophy but

what the heck is you know a good let's say Good Riddance for all of those techniques which are you know um you know capacities we can use our brain kind of capacity and energy for better things perfect I think um that covers all of my questions that I had for you today as well um but if you want to give like a final uh note to especially all the young students and Architects out there because I had put out that I'll be interviewing you and they've sort of sent me a lot of questions as well

um but I saw from the majority of their questions that a lot of them were just worried about their future and what AI would mean for their future nowhere is at all I mean this is any design I will have Avalanche of work coming at them through India through Africa but also through the metaverse so I wouldn't worry about this explore AI learn it and know it be efficient be competitive your competitors and peers will use it so you should also use it and but also what I find what interesting for those who have um

more an analytic intelligence and computational understanding I know some mathematics perhaps as well or you know to get into let's say developing these systems more so I think our profession our discipline should have its own specific tools and not only relying on a universal tool which everybody is using so I think they will I think we'll make some progress and gains I mean of course the these huge generative models General models kind of have the advantage of enormous resources which are poured into them and mega supercomputers but I think eventually we could we we should

start this and eventually they will also our industry is large enough to also have great systems which are more specifically crafted to our needs and our expertise so the discipline and profession we will and and I know quite a few researchers and people are interested to to make it more our own as a discipline I think that's important and that's I think who I would invite bright students to join that because I think there's a lot of future there so if we rely more on platforms and tools we need to become also tool Builders or

in participate in the process of building these tools yeah and that's what we're doing outside the Architects for many years with different interfacing with different software and and and and Cat and other development um teams um also with you know uh and this is Unreal Engine team the Epic team Etc and many others and this would be also with the AI teams I think hopefully we get into contact every anyway we are on to that and that's I think exciting it's not for everybody uh to be on the tool development side but on the end

user side all of us are involved yeah in terms of creators and that's what you have to get into for sure perfect um thank you so much that was some brilliant advice and that was it you guys that was my chat with Patrick now this is an edited down version of the whole chat I had with him the full unedited conversation was an hour long and it is available to watch for all the channel members also what did you think about everything we discussed in this video let me know your thoughts in the comments below

if you can support this channel in making more such content do consider using the super thanks feature on YouTube and that was it I will see you guys soon with more such content until then bye bye thank you [Music]