Welcome to the very first design competition where once and for all we will decide who is better. The architects or the AIs. Each team will be tested on their design skills, rendering skills, and the ability to describe their work.
The winner will be unanimously decided by our Discord server, Archibeans. Oh, hey, guys. Welcome.
And to make sure human architects can perform at their best, HP provided the Z8 Fury G5 a powerful workstation equipped with 56 cores, 128 gigabytes of RAM 4 RTX A6000 that will speed up any human made process. Thank you HP for sponsoring this competition. Much appreciated.
The competition's pull from different phases of the design process and will lead to the design of a 280 square meter house on a hill. Design a floor plan for a 280 square meter house on a sloped terrain The site is approximately 3000 square meters and approximately 20 degree angle. The house must have three bedrooms and a pool and take advantage of the view overlooking the hill.
So how many square feet was that? Sorry. It's 280 square meters.
What was the angle of the slope? 20 degree slope. As soon as they said plan, I knew we had the advantage.
Our strategy was to simultaneously develop three different ideas since we knew the next challenge was to create a compelling rendering. We will pick an option that leads to the most compelling form a challenge within a challenge. Option one The cantilevered with the bedrooms on the bottom volume and the kitchen and living spaces on top.
Both volumes cantilever over the slope with minimal interruption to the landscape. The intersection of the two volumes create a light filled double storey atrium that connects the different spaces of the house. Option two The fan.
Like the name, suggests, this option maximizes the width of the site. Like a fan and creates wide open views onto the hill. We've got our bedrooms which are angled towards the sun and living and kitchen spaces, all in one story with a pool right in the center.
Option three The Cascade. This option follows the landscape. Each volume gets a unique view and the interior spaces overlook onto each other, creating a connection between different floors.
Each of the bedrooms get direct exterior access with a pool jutting out next to the living spaces. That's actually pretty good. All right.
We need to pick a plan. Okay. Well, I really like how your sits in the topography and yours.
Look. Absolutely. We need to pick one plan.
Guys, let's just pick something that looks good in the renders. what the hell? Oh, wow.
That's a crack. Yo can you try to model this? Yeah.
Hmm. Yeah, right there. It's kind of cool.
Challenge number two. Develop The floor plans into two compelling conceptual renderings that tell the story of your building. Take into consideration the unique characteristics of the site.
The word compelling is the key to this challenge. All right, team. So what's the game plan?
So someone needs to populate the site. Someone need to do the building . The pool.
That's going to be our money shot No, they're not the pool. Please, not the pool Not the pool. All right, I'll take the landscape.
Okay. I'll take the building. So, Trushit you take the pool.
Okay, That's really creepy. The setting often makes or breaks a render. And because we didn't have a huge amount of time to spend in Photoshop, nailing down the context.
Right in our rendering software was essential. Because of this, we decided to use D5, which has thousands of high quality models. You can easily plop into your model.
You can see the changes in real time. It's super intuitive and you can render complex scenes without a problem. So you can really speed up the visualization process.
We laid down the grass and combined different types of vegetation that we felt worked in this landscape. We wanted to bring focus to the crevice at the center. So the flanking volumes on either sides should be quieter, a bit more integrated with the site.
We decided to use wood siding with the soffit and balcony in dark metal. After playing around with a bunch of different material options, we landed on concrete for the mass wall. The pool is the money shot.
The entry experience should be exquisite. With the refraction of the pool showering you as you enter the house. Equally important is the view from the top, with the infinity pool overlooking the hill.
Okay. Are you guys ready? All right, quick, let's set up the views.
Nice, guys. Look, DAMN. How about a video?
They can't do that, right? Aare we allowed to do that? Well, nobody said we can't.
Okay. Video it is. What about snow?
Let's do snow. AIs can't do video animations. Right?
This is the last and final challenge. Prepare a 150 word description of your project. Now, please wrap up all of your work and package it for us to review.
The last hour of the deadline is typically when everything starts to crash. However, with the HP Z8 G5, we can have multiple apps running simultaneously since it came with 128 gigabytes of RAM that can even be expanded up to two terabytes. The case is awesome.
Two redundant power supply for hot swappable M2 storage, super quiet cooling system and plenty of connectivity. The Z8 is the top of its line, so it's a little bit expensive and might be a little bit of an overkill for what you need. But HP also has other versions of this workstation which comes at a much lower price point.
Check out the link in the description if you want to know more. So over the last couple of days, I've been asking our Discord community to vote on these images. I didn't give them any background on the video or the competition or who made these images.
So the vote was pretty much based on a gut feeling. But I think it's a big enough pool to get a sense for people's preferences. So here's the results.
So the winner of all three challenges the plan challenge, the render challenge and the text challenge was the AIs. And I think we expected the images to have a overwhelming majority for the AIs, but we were definitely surprised by the text challenge. You should also keep in mind that if you look really closely at the plans that MIDJOURNEY generated, it doesn't actually make sense.
And that's because Mid Journey is designed to produce pretty pictures. And the way that I ask people to vote is on a gut feeling. So they weren't spending a lot of time observing whether the plan was functional.
This was a really interesting process because I think we're at a point now where for certain tasks AI can do them better than humans. So the question is, should we be scared? Is AI going to replace us?
I don't want to sugarcoat things. Yes, I do think that AI will replace a lot of jobs, including jobs in the design and architecture field, if not now, are very near in the future. On top of what MidJourney can do, there's a lot of other apps that we didn't cover in this video, like apps for generating massing studies or apps for Generating Plan Iterations, all of which we do pretty manually right now.
This type of AI's called ANI artificial narrow intelligence, which is the type of AI that's designed to solve specific tasks really well. And they're only going to get exponentially better every single year. Maybe at some point we're also going to have AI for doing construction details or writing specs.
So I think the more specific and siloed your job is, the higher the chances are that your job will be affected by AI. I can't really get into the details of how to situate yourself in this transition right now, but I did make a video on a book that does break this down. I'll leave it right here.
But of course, AI can't replace architects. It can't take abstract constraints and turn them into functional, conceptual and feasible designs. It can't coordinate the work of other AIs and it can't take liability for its work, and it can't make clients feel safe about the millions of dollars in the investments.
There is another type of AI called general AI, or strong AI, which tries to replicate the full human cognition and we are pretty far away from that. But once we get there, we are pretty much screwed. I think my biggest concern right now is how A.
I. is going to influence the next generation of architects and designers. These tools generate what feels like the final image, and they put out what feels like the final answer.
But it's skipping a lot of steps to get to that stage. Architecture is not really a pure art. It's a creative response, but it's a response to real life constraints.
And these responses come out of a very non-linear process of manipulating the form. See how that changes the function. .
. Or maybe you can try to solve a problem with materiality or light. It's a constant back and forth and back and forth, all with the goal of hopefully benefiting humanity.
Even the very beginning of a project is a very labyrinthine process, and you can actually see how I'm doing it with one of my projects right here. Overall, don't be afraid of AI try to use it to your advantage and constantly keep thinking about how you can mix your existing skills with AI to create a whole new category for yourself. We've been having a lot of fun with A.
I. in our office. We've been using CHATGPT for research, MidJourney for generating thumbnails and storyboards.
By the way, if you're interested in getting access to all of this background material that led to this video, you can do that by becoming a Spoon or a Producer of this channel. You'll also get a step by step process and a breakdown for each of the design options that we've created for this video. I would love to hear what you guys think.
Do you think that AI is going to replace us and what do you think the future is going to look like? Let me know in the comments if you enjoyed this video. Give me thumbs up, and subscribe if you want to see more videos like this of that.
I'll see you guys in the next video. Bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum. CHATGPT But you idiot.
You don’t know what dabbing is? you are embarrassing ass in front of the humans.