Architects using AI to design :Tim Fu from Zaha Hadid Architects

you know a lot of people argue that AI is the end of creativity that you know if you're using AI to create you are not using your own skills and Imagination but using a computer generated algorithm is defining your art and your design different Theory office can only do Frank Gary s design can only do zaha hadid's style design that would be kind of a very dystopian world where only big officers take ownership of their own style uh the possible contribution virtual review that I have is that machines don't need permission to train from the

image data set because I feel it's the same way how photographers don't really need permission from every architect to take a photo of a city so hey Tim welcome back to bless dark welcome back to the channel the last time you were here we discussed so much about AI and was just five months ago but I feel like the world has changed completely in just the last five months so welcome back and today we're gonna discuss everything related to AI that has evolved thank you super excited too there's so much stuff to uncover at this

point yeah and even I mean I see you time and time again just posting different things going to different conferences and also posting about how AI is is evolving using different techniques and I want to tell the viewers today like in this video we'll not only discuss AI we will not only discuss uh theoretically what it means and how what it would mean for the future how we can use it but we're actually going to see how Tim uses it in his design and he's gonna show us a few things that can help us get

started on the AI Journey as well Tim I want to start with discussing AI and you know it has developed so much in the last few months today it is like everywhere especially big Tech is completely going after it in the architecture industry do you see more and more designers start to use AI in their art or in their design yeah I mean it's quite prominent at this point I mean um in terms of the practice our office Architects you know we've all been encouraged since last year to do some thorough Explorations with this technology

so on the research side we have a lot of exploratory papers that we collate and we collect for the office to test out methodologies and understand certain Logics but then we also have certain competitions that uh you know we utilize AI to Aid in the concept design process so I would say we are trying to be early adopters and we are incorporating as much as possible to the benefit of the career process although obviously it's more on the front end I later have this when you rationalize geometries and the manufacturing and production and construction drawings

that side is still at the moment not touched by AI quite as much yet so we're at missed a shift right now potentially and we're just seeing how much this technology is continuing to grow you know a lot of people argue that AI is the end of creativity that you know if you're using AI to create you are not using your own skills and Imagination but using a computer generated algorithm is defining your art and your design what are your thoughts on that yeah I mean there's some points to that and it's quite nuanced uh

for one I think it depends on how much you leave the task for the machine right so the first argument is I think there's a effort level case so for example low effort uh prompting you have some ideas quickly you put a bunch of text in and then you generate the results and you just take things as is so those are certain conditions that have been presented and a lot of people are obviously uh quite you know put off by seeing low effort results but then you can't dismiss the entirety of what I call this

art form of prompt crafting because there are those that put High efforts so high effort meaning you spend a lot of time from crafting understanding the logic and of the algorithm but also to um use your visual Acumen to curate the results and much like a photographer would when he's taking a photo and finally there are as designers we have design ethos that we collected over the course of our study and career so those things are less tangible assets that we have that we actually use when we are designing so those things guide us in

the criteria that we're trying to seek so we do incorporate those things and that has been the human element has been inputted when we are iteratively trying to find a solution in the you know vast space of possibilities that is AI diffusion in this discussion there's also the question that comes up about the ownership of the design is it really yours if it's made by Ai and also AI learns through other people's work so is it just copying designs why do you stand on this ownership argument right I mean this is a quite a Hot

Topic that's been debated especially art community and we're in the design community so there are some nuanced differences but I think we have to unpack this into two separate questions first of all is your design similar to existing designs so I think that logic applies to same as traditional design whereas how much do you create and transform your design as opposed to how much of the design actually represents another design so if you were to design a Frank Gehry building that's so similar to you know the Guggenheim you know that will cause some problems people

wouldn't be happy to see that but if you take certain elements of that as inspiration and you develop something new then that's called transformative right so you're creating something new out of it so that's the logic that applies not just to AI design applies to every sort of design right how much we create have our own uniqueness in our design and second point is does the act of using AI constitute copying right because that's the act of using AI is what's debated some people say that it's like splicing different elements and putting it together like

stealing it but I think that's kind of like an oversimplification of the logic um as we know you know the algorithm learns patterns and styles and that's really not something you can copyright because imagine a world if you did if Frank Gary office can only do Frank Gary as design or our office I Hadid can only do zaha hadid style design that would be kind of a very dystopian world where only big offices take ownership of their own Styles so I'm really afraid of that you know lawmakers will ever make that to be the case

one day so I always speak against that the the analogy that I like to use is um and our students in a mango Museum if they are students I told the art students to just study the different paintings and then create something new out of it like maybe paint a helicopter for example uh so in that case is the creation the the helicopter painting and the style of Van Gogh uh copyrightable by Van Gogh Where's the copyrightable by the art student now replace the art students with the machine and replace a year with a few

seconds everything else stays the same the machine is learning like an art student it's taking the styles the only problem is is doing it a lot more efficient than humans and so we have a problem when machines are more efficient than us and therefore now we're worried and certain laws may not be one to one you know so I hope the lawmakers can continue to think about this and make sure that we still have the artistic and creative freedom and we're not going to start copywriting everything all over the place uh the possible contribution virtual

view that I have is that machines don't need permission to train from the image data set because I feel it's the same way how photographers don't really need permission from every architect to take a photo of a city because the results is clearly transformative you're taking things from one medium and then is setting it into another medium same thing with AI art if you take even artwork from other people and then you're creating something new out of it it's going to be disassociated with it yeah so same with design as well even more complex with

design because it's a different field and we have design considerations you know what when people also bring up the discussion to me I I sort of my view is that uh I mean I understand the larger point because AI is learning through people's uh designs and data sets and that is where it is taking its its primary Knowledge from it and sort of creating new stuff but I also say that is how also isn't it how human beings also work is your your mind is basically a data set of everything that you've seen throughout your

life it's it's a heap of impression and then using that heap of impression you're sort of creating whatever you create um I genuinely I mean it's a belief that I have that whatever you create in this world is not anything new is not completely like brand new yeah yeah I mean that's why I say kind of like human culture is a Continuum of yeah one of each other's uh influence you know you cannot have post-modernism without modernism and without Renaissance or whatever Rogue everything is a Continuum that has influenced each other for us to reach

the current point in time and if you just say I'm gonna cut it off here because machines started to do what humans can do I'm gonna disallow the culture from continuing for for us to be for this culture to be taken by machines but sadly machines can do it better than us at certain tasks now and so the only thing a lot of lawmakers want to do is try to do restrictive actions which I think uh might be missing the bigger picture alright now let's come to like your work specifically so how are you incorporating

AI into your design and at what stage do you think AI is the most beneficial in your work currently I just started to because I also a lot of people do a lot of really um crazy AI architecture so I wanted to see how I can control it and do something more calm and realistic so that's been my Approach from the beginning to try to control the chaos so after a while just putting independent buildings together exploring the forms uh eventually things picked up and I started teaching at PA and at that point I started

to really refine the tools that I use and at some point I started to work on Interiors a lot more explore spatial qualities and then products as well this is when I also started to collaborate with certain brands so for example I also collaborated with the fashion brands Sprayground and you know I'm very much inspired by how zaha deed goes from architecture to Fashion product to furniture and I think the AI has really empowered me to do these collaborations with both fashion companies as well as Furniture companies so like this one is with the Italian

handcrafted furniture company mavimat and this will be made now right so right now we're in the process of trying to to um both projects were in the process of trying to rationalize the geometry and then make it for mass production so it's a lot of a lot of work actually involved in the second half I think I got the easiest part just by generating what I think is the best imagery and the best design but then trying to rationalize that is what I always say is the is the Crux of the problem um same thing

with architecture all of these things it's easy to create but it will be really interesting when I go in through the the parametric design aspect of trying to to generate the actual 3D geometry so I mean what I also understand is AI especially at this point where it is today can really help you in the initial processes of imagining newer spaces or let's say products or whatever designs you want to and sort of playing with that and then of course later the the same work of a designer of an architect to actually uh you know

when you want to actually build things all of that training that you have had as an architect as a designer would come into picture it would be the initial step using AI to sort of explore yeah yeah exactly even the initial steps you're starting to think about what's feasible as a design so even at the initial step I think true Architects and designers they know what to pick not just the pretty things you can't do crazy crazy cantilevers if it's not going to work so I think that background that we have as our tech deck

and designers is uh what's going to help us Excel controlling AI as opposed to people who are not Architects controlling AI for example so it's really super powering us we're the one that's really reaping the benefits but we will continue to use our expertise to better make use of this technology okay so could you give us specific tools and and maybe show us and give us a brief masterclass on how how one can incorporate AI into their design workflow like you are doing all right so um we divided into things like prom crafting and iterative

Design so with prompt grafting it's also something that is very simple but can be quite complex if you want to have a finer control at it so for example what I always showcase to students is don't just type in the text you type in the text and you start Imagining the results the local clusters of text what they will prompt as images and imagining those images merging for example here the text is a beautiful bam flake HD photography glamping floating house and all these texts generate it all together is hard to imagine in your head

but individually in local clusters like such such you would imagine what type of images comes out out of Google images for example so I just tell people you got to place the similar text together so that um you prompt in exactly the things you're looking for and you also want to go for more specific texts so that way it's um the results are more controlled if you go with more General text for example like the word architecture that I always discourage people to use it just generates too much uh craziness because it's going to mix

interior exterior facades all sorts of things photography renders so it's good to understand like what you can do um with the more specific texts and uh of course uh in parametric architecture Studio I also teach how to think in the workflow in a more methodical way uh with prom crafting you also have image crafting sorry image prompting as well as text and image prompting and even just choosing the differences of your input have drastic results that are different so therefore every single decision I think has such an effect that you do have to take into

consideration because it's such a simple process linearly but there are so many choices that's given to us in the process so for example a simple project like this as you see in the final is quite different from the starting point uh when you go through that process of prom crafting you just add a text at a time and try to understand the behavior so it is kind of like a step-by-step process to find the right prompts to generate the final images so here the final images here is a final I'll settle problems that I've did

a lot of tests to basically try to see what are the best text to generate exactly what I was looking for so for example this project I showcase how I go through with the starting point being a bit uncontrolled kind of like a restaurant uh hotel that has zahadeep style interior and I wanted to have very well-controlled curvature that I believe is you know aesthetic to me and it's not the case initially so it takes time to try to craft it towards what you're looking for and this is just to Showcase uh how it ended

as a result so yeah this is the entire process laid out of where I started and where I ended starting from bottom right ending at the very top left so you can see the the sort of amount of iterative work that is necessary to get to where you want and it can get quite time consuming if you are really trying to push the boundaries depending on your level of you know the the visual quality and the design quality you're looking for I always wanted to ask if you want to go from like one iteration to

the next do you are there tools to help you just use that particular image itself and then transform it or do you just start from scratch again and okay yeah yeah so there's actually two things right there's prom crafting which is what I'm showcasing here which means I'm literally seeking the correct prompt to generate the results so everything you just saw here is just all new generations and so that actually is a good segue to the next point which is the iterative design because error design is using um The Prompt that you've already selected but

then evolving it and remixing it so that's also a different approach and has its own sets of uh techniques that I've developed over time this is the old mid journey test P version but it's interesting to show because this particular one I didn't change the text prompt at all and with the test P you were only given two results but even with two results I'm able to just select the result that I want and then shift uh the design towards what I'm looking for so I'm showcasing this because even with such a limitation in decision

making just by giving you a or b you're still able to incorporate a level of control just by the meter selection of A and B kind of like um Evolution really just over time selectively breeding the correct solution the best solution until he reaches what you believe is the final so yeah that's an example of the old process that it took in the otsp version you've been talking about the workshop you take at parametric Academy as well so do you want to tell us a little bit about what happens there and what do you what

do you help students achieve in that Workshop yeah I mean it's basically the type of stuff I'm showing here but to more detail how to really control the AI with small techniques that you do here and there in order to achieve what you want there's so many things that are collated over time both like from the majority Community as well as from online and also methods I develop myself so all these things kind of as a nice package to give students idea to how to quickly get better results faster and get a more accurate result

to what you're looking for there's a lot of these students obviously try to incorporate it to their design course or there are even industry professional that takes my course as well because they want to start incorporating it for certain client needs and meet client demands so that's why I try to teach intentionality within this type of design instead of just randomly creating good results we try to take results that actually is has a specific demand for these are the example from the last parametric architecture course and you can see that these are all students works

I give them a specific client demand such as you require some sort of hexagon geometry that is a striking metal facade system and there's a programmable office space and it's basically I actually generated the prompts with chai gbt I asked them to give me a client demand so just with all these requirements I allow them to explore themselves to see what they can generate and it's really quite interesting to see the vast differences between the students right like some of my favorite ones are the ones on the top and you can just compare there's different

ways to approach the design through my journey there's different ways to approach the the materiality the space configuration so it has so much uh freedom for for personal input and just from the results of my students I can see also their skill levels vary quite differently and therefore the results can vary quite differently I have some students that constantly produce absolutely amazing results each time and so I do I will contribute that to their own talent and their abilities if they constantly produce something better it's kind of like when you're given a very powerful technology

there will still be people that are going to be better at it and worse at it so that's why I think the spectrum of human involvement and the space that allows for human creativity is absolutely present and I witness it all the time when I see my students works if anybody watching wants to check out the course by Tim you can go to PA academy.com and and you can find the course there I will also leave a link in the description alright so I recently saw on your profile you know you using a sketch to

create a final render through Ai and I've been seeing a lot of these coming up could you talk about the process how do you actually do it yeah I mean this process is really interesting but also a bit finicky so you know I always start with a lot of just hand sketches and Pen sketches is a good way to understand geometries and form I try my best to generate ideas that are like higher level concept as opposed to details and so that um you have like an overarching kind of theme so that one it kind

of you can slowly produce into architectural image so a lot of the stuff I've done that I showcased as well is just by simple lines and Contours um but at some point I started realizing that just using Messier kind of ink painting actually generates better results you kind of want the messiness that grain and the strong colors so at some point I started to realize that mid Journey actually can take ink inputs better than pencil sketch inputs and I think that's due to its understanding the light and dark pixels as areas more so than as

lines and Contours so that's why I just teach students to start sketching with Shades if not use ink sketch uh this way I think it's a lot easier to get the AI to understand it more as a as a as an image so basically you're still using mid journey to create these you're inputting your image as a prompt yeah yeah I'll actually go through the detail here I know a lot of people use diffusion sorry a lot of people use stable diffusion I know and they use uh control net and that's giving you more like

accurate Contour control but uh the issue is like the imagery is not as good as my journey at the moment so I find ways to work around using my journey even though it doesn't allow you to evolve your exact input sketch here I try to sketch a few options uh of a chair for example and you also have to try to make it similar but at the same time different so that the AI kind of knows what a repeatable patterns in your sketch and water patterns that can vary a bit so I tell students to

generate a few options and make them generally similar but not same and once you have few options you input that into the mid Journey as image prompt purely image prompts so with that you're able to start selecting the results that most resembles your style right the most resembles when you input it so here I selected this image and you still can continue to evolve the image towards closer to what you're looking for through continuing to use your sketch prompt as well as using other image problems so here I would go through the process it's a

bit painstaking but start to incorporate photorealistic text prompts and then photorealistic image prompts so other Furniture renders or photos and then at some point I start to take away the sketch image so that it's kind of like uh you know it's like the training wheels has been taken off when it's able to take off by itself at some point Your Design is more solidified you're able to take away this sketch and it will still continue and that's where you start to evolve it into photorealistic image as you continue the process at some point it would

just all of a sudden shift to a more photorealistic result so here for example is the chair that I've done at the 14th iteration which ended up being I think the the best results as I continue evolving it it also became very different but I think that's also a good showcase uh to show you why it's also like useful to do this type of process even though it's also quite time consuming to get to what you want at the moment but the immediacy of giving you alternate design options right after you get what you want

is also very useful so that goes with product design that goes with architecture if you are able to achieve from sketch to render what you're looking for you can also easily evolve your design instantaneously and see Alternatives so I think I'm hoping that this technology will evolve to be a lot more streamlined but at the moment this is my current Uh current current process okay so I mean we saw how you incorporate you know AI into your design process and what sort of tools you use you know and you've also seen as you were saying

you were seeing people around you also zh is also moving towards using more AI at least on the research front and and seeing what you can do with it what do you think this would mean for few the future of designers and let's say offices in the future yeah I mean machines are always taking over more aspects of our tasks it has been in the past and is obviously continuing to do so so I think there's no point in denying or fighting this progression of Technology um while it's replacing some aspects of our career it's

also providing us more Avenues of new ways to progress in our career potentially to make better use of AI we have new field of study New Field of design and architecture not even within architecture any sort of career will be affected by by AI one way or another because of how powerful it has become uh I would just say like we we shouldn't fight it because there were those who fought AutoCAD when it came out right um when you look back on that you you realize that you should have been the early adopter to AutoCAD

and all these programs and during my student years there were resistance against Advanced computational tools um right now I'm very professional in it because I was a really involved with it and I have a lot of interest towards it but you know the old Academia always um a lot of the times would be more resistant towards uh new technologies and things that are a bit outside of their either their familiarity or their understanding or their expertise so you do understand their sense of doubts with the new technologies and how that will shift the discourse of

design but as a student I think as a young professional I think we have all the incentives to continue exploring new technologies especially if it's as revolutionary as CAD software as revolutionary as um AI I think it's a very important task for all of us to see where this technology goes and for us to be readily adaptable to the changes that will happen because it's only going to become more involved in our design process and after that it's going to start becoming more involved in the construction process as well um I you know firmly believe

that we will see a lot more AI in the coming years and it's only accelerating as we speak yeah thank you so much for coming in and talking about all of it or everything going on with AI right now which is a lot at the moment we also have these big debates about whether the government should stop you know uh the research on AI or not there's a big thing especially in the US going on right now and I feel like we in a few months we'll be back here doing the same interview but the

tools would have evolved so much that we would still be learning about them so but thank you so much for taking out the time today and you know showing us your work yeah thanks rishab it's always a pleasure can't wait to see what we talk about next time possibly 3D stuff that would be amazing to see like right now I know there are certain AI tools that can do 3D but like of very basic things and they're also pretty bad at the moment uh we're starting to see like the birth of these things much like

how last year my journey was like you know version one was super rough and then all of a sudden we're looking at Absolute photorealism yeah and then now with the video AI you know the text to video we were laughing at very early results and right now it's starting to uh become better and better and it's taking the same trajectory as maturity was so I'm sure that 3D applications at some point will take that trajectory as well it's like an absolute Moore's Law of exponential growth for all sectors all right but thank you so much

Tim thank you for taking everything thanks a lot see you around and that was it you guys that was my interview with Tim Foo who's one of the Architects pioneering and experimenting with the use of AI in his work what did you think about the things we discussed let me know your thoughts and opinions in the comments below I will see you guys soon with more such content until then bye bye foreign