An AI agent will produce a building in fifteen minutes
An AI agent will produce a building in fifteen minutes. Whether it produces architecture depends on the standard you hold it to.
I ran an experiment on one of my own designs, a chalet from 2017. The agent started from three floor plans and a single prompt.
Round one, a massing in SketchUp, was quick and plausible, and it would not have survived a design review: exposed slab edges, no eaves to speak of, and plans without line weights, dimensions or furniture.
Round two was driven through Revit, with the brief written as an architect would write it: cladding continuous past the floor zones, deep eaves, a single roof form, a glazed gable, a plinth set into the slope. Three things made the difference:
- The agent planned before it modelled. It listed its changes and raised clashes with the interior, then waited for approval.
- The drawings came from the model. Grids, dimensions, room areas and cut line weights were data in the model, not graphics added afterwards.
- Every render was checked against the model. Storeys and openings were counted against the Revit view. When the image generator added a window to a solid wall, the check rejected it, twice.
The quality of the output tracked the precision of the brief and the rigour of the checks.
The lesson I take from it is about specification, not software. The quality of the output tracked the precision of the brief and the rigour of the checks. That is the part of the job that remains ours.
The full process, from floor plans to a four-spread magazine layout, is in the video.
