Artifice and Intelligence

History has consistently demonstrated that radical technological change is as worrying as it is exciting, the emergence of AI is no different.  

In my career I have seen many innovations, and it must be said that none of them have made life simpler or easier. I remember buying our first Fax machine in 1982 it cost a fortune, (£1600), and within 15 years the fax was a more or less redundant and a soon to be forgotten technology.

Today we take instantaneous communications for granted, but mobile phones only became a practical reality about 30 years ago, at about the same time as email. We introduced CAD in the early 1990’s when we were designing a building for Siemens in Berlin. It took over an hour to plot one AO floorplan and we could not email data from our London office to our Berlin studio, so we would plot overnight, roll it up in a cardboard tube and race off the Heathrow to air freight it to Germany.

The TWA terminal at JFK airport is 70 years old, its complex parametric architecture was described with pen, pencil and tracing paper.

When these first CAD programmes emerged in the 1990s, everyone feared for their jobs as monitors replaced drawing boards. In fact, it just multiplied the amount of information required to build a project.  Today Revit and BIM, have had the same effect, a huge amount of data is generated and far from simplifying the process it has added layers of checking and complexity. 

AI is the next step in the Technological Revolution that has transformed every aspect of my generation’s lives. I am by no means qualified to talk about the impact of AI on our profession, but it seems to me that it has the potential to remove a lot of the drudgery and reduce the element of risk as we move towards self-certification.

Indeed, it could be positive, as an example, just 6% of all new UK housing is architect designed. House builders have their formulas and off-the-shelf solutions to build quickly and profitably, AI will sort out plot layouts, parking, daylight and sunlight density. What if planners and Local Authorities insisted that chartered architects and landscape architects are brought in to embellish and refine this before the consent is granted?

After all, today AI is not the whole answer, it may get you around 80% there. We still need to critically appraise its output. I firmly believe that architecture will still need human intelligence and craft. Perhaps it will help us do what architects should do, developing the brief, understanding the social and geographic context, leading the design team. Most importantly it should allow us more time to design, style and present our buildings.

The Palazzo Rucellai in Florence is one of the key moments in Renaissance architecture, it is however just a veneer that refaced a group of medieval buildings.

Which leads me to the idea of “Artifice” which is of course the root word of artificial.

In Architecture the word artifice traditionally refers to the artisanal craft, skill and design involved in the construction of buildings – selecting, manipulating and employing the materials that define its character. However artifice has a dual meaning, it also means a clever trick which intends to deceive. Architects inevitably need to have a degree of guile or artifice to do their job successfully. Whilst it is a sliding scale from guile, expediency, trickery, cunning, deception and at its worst lies, we employ artifice sometimes without realising it.

For example, embellishing the truth: the use of CGIs is a good example; how often do you see a CGI with a top floor that merges with the cloudy sky? How rarely is the same view recreated at night with all the lights on?  Similarly, we are selective about the views, sections and elevations we show the planners and stakeholders, we choose the drawings that show the proposal in its best light.

Materially we often seek authenticity and use materials as veneers, both meanings of the word here. The art of architecture is as much about creating a beautiful building as it is getting them built, for that we need both artifice and intelligence.

Based on a talk delivered at Ravensbourne School of Architecture October 2025.