Artificial Intelligence and Architecture

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a territory under construction at a planetary scale. AI is zoned, controlled, and unevenly serviced. In this new territory, the building materials are energy, attention, andlabor, and they are reassembled as predictions and recommendations. The interfaces of AI are smooth, but the ground conditions are not: bias, unfair labor, uneven global benefits, among others. Efficiency has become a new form of justification. AI is a territory where spatial decisions are made elsewhere, at high speed, and ona global scale. This book examines the impact of AI on societies, the environment, and architecture from diverse critical perspectives. The different chapters in this book are explorations in this new territory, discussing how AI shapes everyday choices and political beliefs, how it reproduces gendered norms, and how it rewires our relationship to one another, architecture and the environment. Architects are often trained to think from asystems perspective, at different scales, and on the social, environmental, and political consequences. AI promises to help us, architects hold more parameters in our hands at once for more foresight, more capacity to understand climate, mobility, biodiversity,and human needs. AI is already in the architectural studio, generating sketches, façades, layouts, and photorealistic futures in seconds. For architecture, AI produces a new genre of knowledge: hyperreal and instantaneous. Because architecture is interdisciplinary, this book builds bridges into wider AI conversations. If AI is redesigning the conditions of life, architects should learn to work with it critically and with care.