GENERATION OF THIS IMAGE via Midjourney took multiple tries, parsing every word we could manage to get into the prompt. We still only got an approximation of what we were after and we never did get a brick wall in the background (and why did “person of color” give us a Black man?).
A few years ago, Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator were the new computer based graphic design tools. My nephew, 10 or 12 at the time, learned to use them enough to illustrate what new dormer windows on the roof of his parents’ house would look like to which his mother responded by wondering out loud if my nephew could do that, what does that spell for the future of his uncle’s profession? A concern one would have if you thought of an architect as a drafter— meaning the tool not the agent of design.
STABLE DIFFUSION’S FOUNDER, Emad Mostaque, was previously a hedge fund manager and before that educated as a mathematician and computer scientist. He now claims to have invented a computer program that “understands” how to make art. One wonders why or why him. It feels like a solution in search of a problem. (Clip art found on Google Images above; an image generated by Stable Diffusion, below)
DOES THIS SPELL THE END OF ARTISTS? Uh no, at most it will become a tool for illustrators and graphic designers and maybe an opportunity for artists to exploit for some yet unknown outcome. (In-house Disney Imagineering animators’ illustration above; an image generated by Stable Diffusion, below)
Another graphic tool, this one claiming to be a “generative artificial intelligence” (GAI) has emerged over the last year or so. By typing in a prompt such as “realistic purple unicorn digitally rendered” the program (simplistically put) cranks through billions of images it gathers from the internet “searching” for patterns of correlation among words and images, then diffuses or disassembles images into bits to then re-assemble those bits into a “new” image. There are now three graphic generating applications competing for world dominance-- DALL-E-2, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion. Stable Diffusion is, in Silicon Valley terminology, a “unicorn” -- meaning a start-up worth $1 billion.
OH YEAH? Well, we’ve seen your work of art a thousand times before.
ROMANTICISM PAINTINGS OF THE 19TH CENTURY delivered some of the most awesome and sublime scenes ever seen before or since. (Turner and Canaletto above and below left, Lawrence Alma Tadema, right)
21st CENTURY MOVIES of the historical fantasy and sci-fi genres have been mimicking scenes from 19th century Romanticism paintings for years. (Lord of the Rings, above; Game of Thrones, below)
As architects we already use tools such as Google Images and Arch Daily for research and presentations to find images with which we might illustrate a design intent or idea before having completed a design—because, well, a picture is worth a thousand words. Without having practiced much yet with image GAI it is probably safe to say that it may have additional utility for architects but for what exactly it’s too early to tell—probably presentations.
ABY WARBURG the early 20th century art historian spent a lifetime studying both the persistence and plasticity of imagery over place and time. He was interested in discovering what he called the “pathos” or the foundations of human experience that transcend time and place. He would have loved Google Images and would have thought Stable Diffusion was silly. (Aby Warburg and excerpts from his work and travels, Bilderatlas Mnemosyne and others)
CHRISTOPHER ALEXANDER seemed to think our brains operate solely on algorithms like computers, and that all we had to do going forward was to systematically take inventory of patterns from the architecture of our past (who’s past?) and like GAI synthesize them into “new” architecture.
And yet despite the achievement’s modesty we already witness the usual fanfare about how yet another new digital technology will change everything we have ever known about everything everywhere since the beginning of time. We endure breathless proclamations that image GAI will democratize, displace, or even replace the “creative class”—that it spells the end of artists and art.
JOHN MCWHORTER a linguist at Columbia University like I.A. Richards at Harvard University before him reminds us of the ambiguity of words, their reliance on convention and context for meaning and our insatiable appetite to transgress convention and context to lend words new meanings.
JARON LANIER the computer scientist and virtual reality consultant at Microsoft reminds us that someone writes algorithms that drive computer programs like GAI and that someone makes choices that get baked into those programs therefore compromising their flexibility and utility for others.
There are reasons to feel both skeptical and déjà vu all over again. We have heard this once before when in the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century we automated manufacturing and mass-produced stuff—images and objects—and in response the art world fabricated a self-defeating crisis over what constituted the authenticity of Art, or Craft, or how will we ever build Architecture that’s legitimate for Our Time? It was a disruption, one from which we are still recovering, but an unnecessary one, from which we will recover.
TOOLS SUCH AS CRANES enhance what our bodies and minds can already do by extending those capabilities beyond what our bodies and minds can do, such as in the case of cranes -- which have been with us for millennia -- lifting heavy weights.
TOOLS SUCH AS BICYCLES have been with us for not much more than 200 hundred years and are probably one of the simplest and most effective tools for enhanced mobility that we have ever invented.
BAD TOOLS like hot air balloons and mechanical fat trimming belts capture the imagination momentarily until they devolve into entertaining curiosities or just fade away.
Artists will somehow benefit from image GAI especially when used in combination with other tools. But in the 21st century as in the 19th century it’s a stretch to claim that it will replace artists. It's not even clear that it will be a good tool. In our practice we know that digital tools, as helpful as they can be on certain prescribed tasks associated with design, can also have numbing effects on design. In the face of the cognitive load required to run them they subjugate the mind to the complexities of the tools at the expense of design. They impose passivity and diminish our psychological agency rendering us uncritical and inert, all too ready to accept the generic nature of their output (“Revit made me do it”).
DIGITAL GRAPHIC TOOLS such as the Adobe computer applications, In-Design, Illustrator and Photoshop enhance graphic capabilities but as tools they are cumbersome to use—as difficult to learn as a foreign language— and more visual manipulation and recording devices than generative ones.
DIGITAL DRAFTING TOOLS unlike cranes and bicycles extend the body and mind in unnatural ways (fingers tapping on a keyboard, clicking and sliding a mouse to create imagery with eye-hand movements that have nothing to do with the shape of the imagery) but are nevertheless useful for some circumscribed tasks related to the refinement and documentation of design.
As a graphic tool this one is a little less cumbersome than others. You type in words (or rather the right words) and out comes an image (albeit a somewhat arbitrary one). But words and images are slippery. As voices as disparate as Aby Warburg and Erwin Panofsky, the patriarchs of 20th century art history, I.A. Richards, the 20th century philosopher of rhetoric and John McWhorter the 21st century linguist (not to mention our own life experiences and common sense) have consistently reminded us: images and words mean different things to different people in different contexts at different times. Context matters, it’s constantly in flux, past is never prologue.
JUST BECAUSE YOU CAN DOESN’T MEAN YOU SHOULD Ok, sure make George Lucas’ museum in Los Angeles look like a space ship, but it will, in short order like the digital tools that generated it and the hot air balloons before it, live on as a relic—an entertaining curiosity of the 21st century.
HOCKNEY’S IPAD PAINTINGS are a beautiful example of an artist’s mastery of a digital tool whose use does not require the rewiring of the brain to employ.
A machine that gathers and rehashes relationships of words and images from the past found on the internet can only generate statistical averages of pre-existing relationships and meanings. It doesn’t “learn from”, “understand” or even “imitate” anything from which it could profoundly generate new meaning or anything that, let’s be real, we haven’t already seen. It instead generates hodgepodge —unthoughtful, indiscriminate maybe momentarily novel, funny, pretty, heart-warming, cute, sad, scary but ultimately with repetition, boring mash up.
OUR DREAM FOR AI (and we’re sure someone somewhere is working on it) is a larger version of the iPad upon which the eye can scan and the hand can move to develop imagery which can then be easily converted to measurable line drawings and 3D models, and in turn modified by the hand, in an iterative mind-eye-hand, thought-action driven virtuous cycle (not that this all that original: see “Minority Report,” the 2002 Tom Cruise film).
Jaron Lanier, a Silicon Valley pioneer and it’s perennial skeptic has referred to image GAI as “image synthesizing”—a term suspiciously like the title of architectural theorist Christopher Alexander’s 1964 reductionist manifesto THE SYNTHESIS OF FORM. In it Alexander posits that we could (and should) gather formal prototypes (shapes and functions) from the history of architecture and by recognizing patterns in that history generate through their systematic synthesis “authentic” architectures independent of what he called the architectural “priesthood” (meaning egotistical modernists)—thus eliminating the agency of the architect (the algorithm replacing the practitioner as the high priest).
It is easy to see how claims for generative AI and especially the graphic and drafting tools that emerge from it could be mistaken for that same outcome even as architects (and human beings) we know that this will never come to pass.
THE PAPERLESS OFFICE is a mirage and whether that paper is used for drawings or models it will, like digital tools, forever remain a tool at the architect’s disposal.
PHYSICAL MODELS AND DIGITAL MODELS are our friends—friends who support one another in the project of making something bigger than either of them could accomplish on their own.