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Sea levels will rise as much in 30 years as in the last century, endangering global urban areas significantly.
Many cities aren’t prepared for rising sea levels and climate effects like floods and storms due to insufficient infrastructure. And while we need new infrastructure in order to adapt, construction is a major polluter. Today’s built environment is responsible for close to 40% of energy-related carbon emissions.
Architects need to embrace generative AI to navigate challenges, a step many have resisted, essential for overcoming current limitations. To fight climate change, architects need to reimagine their role and abandon their long-held obsession with individual authorship.
AI, feared by some, holds potential to combat climate change, offering our best chance for mitigation and adaptation. “Old AI focuses narrowly, while new generative AI synthesizes diverse sources to create original content effectively.”
To date, architects have mainly used AI to visualize their designs. AI swiftly discovers innovative sustainable building concepts beyond human imagination, revolutionizing design with unprecedented solutions.
For example, generative AI can help architects pinpoint the best building locations and develop the most sustainable materials. Satellite images create land-use maps for testing future climate scenarios like extreme heat or flooding in specific areas. Architects have already used AI to develop a ceramic surface that defends against viruses and pollution. Soon, they might use it to drastically cut time and energy in building design and construction.
In all likelihood, the collective creativity of generative AI heralds the end of sole authorship and the celebrity architect. For my colleagues, this may be a tough pill to swallow, but this is not the moment for ego. Architects must unite against climate change, abandoning individual viewpoints to confront this existential threat collaboratively. Generative AI isn’t a danger, but a means of expanding our capacity in response to an urgent global crisis.
In many ways, the aversion to AI among architects is a symptom of the very problem we’re attempting to solve, that is, the habit of putting individual advantage ahead of the collective good. But architects’ obsession with seeking personal credit is making our world less habitable.
The end of the celebrity architect is actually a return to older understandings of authorship. Sole credit for a single designer has never been as central to great architecture as some would like to think. Long before Frank Lloyd Wright designed Fallingwater, unknown designers created what is now the world’s longest-standing temple, 11,000-year-old Göbekli Tepe in modern-day Turkey.
Similarly, we mostly don’t know who designed and built medieval cathedrals, yet they remain some of the world’s most enduring architectural achievements. So do many of the towns and cities of the same era. Designed and built by an abundance of now-anonymous minds, they were also highly sustainable.
In designing sustainable places for tomorrow, the layout of medieval cities could serve as key source material for generative AI tools tasked with creating climate-conscious municipalities. Back then, cities were typically mixed-use, dense, and connected to the surrounding environment — the same principles informing sustainable urban development today. The flexibility and adaptability of medieval towns has helped them survive far longer than many cities built in later periods.
Architects, and those of us who teach future architects, have a major role to play in saving our environment. With the help of AI, we can design, construct, and maintain structures that emit little or no carbon and also protect us from what’s ahead. Sacrificing claims to authorship to fulfill our duties to the planet is a small price to pay.
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