Near Genius

I was recently invited to attend a portfolio review event at my local university’s School of Architecture, as a guest critic. One student’s “hero image” had me flipping the pages back to it again and again. I’d initially breezed past it, saying something pat like, “nice rendering,” before moving on to floor plans, which were colored in a similar style. But I kept looking back to the first image; my brain was trying to un-puzzle something. It took me a minute to untangle that there was a colonnade of M.C. Escher-style “impossible columns”—columns with bases that didn’t land quite right on the ground plane—on the front façade of the building they’d designed for their studio course.

This is really interesting, I thought, thinking it genius design trickery. So I asked the student to explain how the columns resolved in floor plan, because I couldn’t work it out. I didn’t have the possibility that this might A.I.-assisted imagery on my mind since all their project imagery appeared to be drawn in a similar hand. It turned out that they hadn’t noticed the glitch in the A.I. matrix before I’d questioned it—they didn’t know they’d presented impossible columns in their portfolio, and had Photoshopped their floor plans and architectural elevations to have a similar aesthetic to complement what turned out to be A.I. concept renderings.

A.I. is amazing now and will only get better, but the lack of scrutiny is what worries me as it gets too good too fast. How quickly will architects relax close review of our digital underlings once it’s right 99.9% of the time? Humans are lazy beasts. Machine tools will soon be better at putting architectural building code permit plans together than the average human, who is of course prone to failings of a by-definition human sort. It will be interesting to see A.I.’s mistakes, which like the student’s impossible columns may be subtle in ways our brains don’t quickly recognize.

Perhaps a career pivot away from “conventional Architect” is in my cards for the future: how fun would it be to be an expert court witness, critiquing near-genius but impossible roof parapet flashing detail that led to million dollars in water damage…