Written By:

Keith Griffiths
Chair and Founder
Aedas

 

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International architect and owner of The Retreats Group of hotels in west Wales, Keith Griffiths is chair and founder of the globally renowned Aedas architectural firm. A visionary leader in his field, Keith has championed integrating technology and design and talks about redefining the possibilities of architectural practice through the use of artificial intelligence.

Before 1990 architects used hand drawn, two-dimensional technical drawings to describe and document their buildings.

They were artistically skilled in drawing and sketching quickly and realistically. Even a small building requires over 100 drawings to describe it adequately for a contractor to build. Changes to these drawings were time consuming and expensive.

Around 1990 architects began using computers to draw two-dimensional building plans and details, which were then printed onto paper. Changes were much faster but the process of drawing by computer is complicated and not intuitive involving the use of a mouse and keyboard in a series of learned commands.

From 2000 architects began to draw their buildings in three-dimensional computer models and now most buildings are fully documented and described in this way for use by designers and contractors both during and after construction.

Three-dimensional computer models are also used to describe the aesthetics of the building and to create realistic renders and videos of the designs.

However, the method of inputting the design data into the computer remains slow and complex taking up to a week and requiring a high degree of training and expertise. Another week is necessary to render that design into a realistic image. Much of the modern architectural student’s time is spent learning the skills of various specialist drawing software.

At the conceptual design stage of a project many options must be studied and the computer process becomes a major impediment to the speed of design progress as well as using considerable architectural resources. Architects therefore still use hand drawn sketches to communicate their ideas.

AI image creating programmes such as Mid-journey and Stable Diffusion are highly intuitive and allow anyone with a little experience to prompt the programme to create realistic images.

In a matter of minutes architects can use the internet to find roughly similar images to their ideas and use descriptive text prompts to step-by-step guide the AI programme towards a highly accurate and realistic image of the design, which is in the architect’s mind or free hand sketch.

However, AI is not yet capable of being used to design the building or to create technical drawings and three-dimensional computer models. Currently AI can only be used at the very initial stages of building design and construction to show quick images of the designer’s intent. The programmes also only show still images but will soon be able to create videos.

These initial stages of the design represent less than 5% of the professional man hours and effort necessary to create a building.

AI is developing very quickly and we can expect it to revolutionise the architectural and construction industry in the next five years as new software and applications are developed to extend the use of AI into describing the entire building design.