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When OpenAI launched ChatGPT-3.5 two years ago, there was a rush of speculation about the impact the new technology would have on the building professions. A collective sigh of relief soon followed as architects everywhere realised that prompting text-to-image tools produced far less convincing results than they could possibly have hoped for. For the time being, at least, human participation in the practice of architecture seemed assured.

Nevertheless, various other strands of AI-based technology will inevitably bear upon the way in which architects approach their work. This article suggests how a few of these advances are likely to influence the practice of the profession in the near, intermediate, and longer terms.

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The near term: less tedium

As things stand, according to findings published earlier this year by the RIBA and elsewhere, AI is already starting to make its mark on everyday architectural practice. Text-based large language models like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini – easily accessible to anyone with a laptop and an internet connection – are already being employed to automate tedious and repetitive tasks. PDFs and Word documents containing data relevant to routine office operations, such as planning legislation and building regulations, can be uploaded directly to an LLM and searched with impressive speed for relevant and precise information. LLMs are also being used effectively to contribute to performance specifications and equipment schedules, as well as to assist in the preparation of technical reports.

In the sphere of visualisation, the limitations of text-to-image tools like DALL·E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion, as well as Photoshop’s native AI tool, Firefly, have already been alluded to. These limitations mainly relate to the technology underpinning the generative process. Text-to-image generation is mostly performed using a technique called ‘diffusion’, where thousands, and sometimes millions, of images of existing buildings are scrutinised at the level of the individual pixel, and the data harvested from this process is then recombined to create a plausible representation of a building that does not actually exist (Fig. 2). The resulting image may, at first glance, appear to depict an architect-designed building but, as the technology that produces the image does not correspond to any of the human processes involved in architectural design, the resemblance is little more than superficial (at least, at the time of writing).

Much work in this area has been carried out by the French architect and machine learning engineer Stanislas Chaillou. For a fuller explanation of how text-to-image technology works, as well as a more favourable opinion of its capabilities, his book Artificial Intelligence and Architecture: From Research to Practice is a good place to start.

While text-to-image technology has a long way to go, image-to-image tools can sometimes prove useful. The elegant line drawing to the left in Fig. 1, by Shay Cleary Architects, appeared quite recently on a cover of Architecture Ireland. A phone picture of this image was uploaded to an app called LookX, which very quickly translated it into something approaching a conventional 3D rendering. The text prompt used to generate the rendering was: ‘create a contemporary living room in a carefully restored Georgian house’. The image that appears on the right was a second iteration. It is easy to see how such a tool might come in handy in the tense few minutes before a client meeting.

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The medium term: agents and advanced CAD

If we characterise near-term AI as something akin to an office assistant, medium-term AI is more likely to resemble an office administrator.

For about a year now, the tech press has been heralding the arrival of what it refers to as AI’s ‘agentic era’, a phase that roughly corresponds to stage three of the framework for AI adoption famously hypothesised by OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman. In this approaching phase, we can expect AI tools to be specifically tailored to the ways in which architects, as individuals as well as in teams, actually work. A company called Anthropic recently gave us a flavour of how agentic AI might work. They have developed a feature where an AI app can be trained to, in a sense, take control of a computer and independently perform complex tasks such as booking flights, arranging project team meetings, or filing documents into rationally organised directories.

Over the coming months, we are also likely to see medium and larger practices migrate to increasingly sophisticated AI-enhanced CAD and BIM applications. Although officially launched in May 2023, Autodesk’s Forma is continuing to evolve in interesting ways. Forma allows architects to quickly model complex site conditions and then immediately simulate the impact that the local environment will have on a variety of site proposals.

An application called ARCHITEChTURES covers similar ground to Forma. However, in addition to providing massing solutions for complicated, multiple-use developments, ARCHITEChTURES does a credible job of proposing apartment plans from preliminary site layouts. The apartment plans it suggests are updated in real time as different site options are examined.

While Forma, ARCHITEChTURES, and a host of other very impressive apps are not purely AI-based, they combine advanced machine learning techniques with long-established parametric design approaches to simplify the most laborious and least rewarding aspects of the design process. Development in this area is advancing at pace, and we can expect a wide range of applications of this type to become part of the working environment in the coming months.

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The long term: area planning and design assistance

The longer-term impact of AI on the practice of architecture is, of course, far less predictable. Of the many areas where advances can be expected, two seem particularly ripe for consideration.

First, stepping momentarily outside the strict confines of the architect’s office, it is worth reflecting on the impact AI-related technologies will have on the broader building regulatory environment.

As an indication of what might be expected, the City of Los Angeles is using AI tools to speed up the process of reviewing planning applications. Its system uses algorithms to evaluate development proposals against the city’s zoning and land-use regulations. Cities like Austin, Toronto, Melbourne, and Singapore are innovating in broadly similar ways. Allowing for cultural and other differences, Irish planning authorities are likely to advance in a comparable manner, using AI technologies to assist with the preparation of development plans and design guidelines, as well as with the review of planning applications. Such a development would bring about a significant transformation in the design and construction environment; however, while it might suggest a more efficient and transparent process, it is easy to see how other complications could arise.

In the longer term, we can also realistically expect that AI will eventually start to reshape the creative process itself. As LLMs and other AI systems become more sophisticated and move beyond the diffusion technologies mentioned above towards more vector-based models, architects will be able to develop tools that examine and mimic their own personal design methodologies. In this scenario, an architect might upload drawings from previously completed projects to a specially trained AI model. This model would then scrutinise the uploaded material and assist the architect in refining and developing concepts for future projects in a manner complementary to the architect’s own design technique. It is a tantalising idea and well within the bounds of possibility.

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Concluding comments

In preparing an introductory piece about its emergence in the architectural profession, many interesting aspects of artificial intelligence, including some innovative applications to which the technology is already being applied, have, of necessity, been overlooked. Similarly, some important developments in the regulation of the technology have been ignored as well. These include what some might see as California’s emerging role as the world’s AI regulator-in-chief; recent EU legislation concerning the use of AI, as well as interesting critiques of this legislation by Stripe’s Patrick Collison, among others; the massive amounts of energy required to run LLMs, as well as the knock-on effect these requirements will have for the natural environment; the AI-related re-emergence of nuclear technology in the production of energy; and ethical issues around the training of LLMs. All these topics will have an important impact on how the practice of architecture develops in this country. We would do well to get the conversation going on these issues sooner rather than later.

Finally, while some in the profession remain fearful of the impact that AI will have on job security, others cleave to the more hopeful and, perhaps, more likely view that AI will actually put more control over the design process into the architect’s hands. The truth is that it is too early to say what the overall impact of the technology will be. All we can realistically do for now is stay ahead of developments and take advantage of their benefits.

‘Studio’ is a broad term for a place of creative work in several fields, including film, television, radio, architecture, photography, fine art, music, and dance [1]. At a time of growth in creative industries in Ireland, this article focuses on the studio as a building type, especially in film and television, where studios tend to be large. Understanding these places can improve professional practice and policy around media industries, which have distinctive architectural and urban planning needs. It may also help public understanding of an urgent issue in Irish media – the infrastructure of RTÉ, which requires significant public expenditure and good will to fulfill its mandate sustainably while keeping pace with technological change.

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Recent public debate has reminded us of the geography of publicly-funded radio and television in Ireland: the large scale of RTÉ’s studios in Donnybrook, its smaller facilities in Cork and Limerick, and the studios of TG4 in Spiddal, Co. Galway [2]. Only those in Donnybrook and Spiddal are purpose-built, having been designed to a high standard by the acclaimed Dublin-based firm of Scott Tallon Walker. Closely related is Ireland’s network of privately owned studios, originating in 1958 with Ardmore Studios in Bray, Co. Wicklow, and recently expanded by the nearby Ashford Studios and by Troy Studios in Limerick. Dominated by commercial feature film and television drama production, often for overseas clients but supported by publicly-funded tax incentives, the private sector has recently seen a growth spurt in which at least three more large facilities are in planning: Greystones Media Campus, Dublin Fields Studios in Clondalkin, and Hammerlake Studios, Mullingar [3].

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Each of these is vying to be Ireland’s largest studios with an exuberant self-promotion reminiscent of the explosive growth of the Hollywood studio system in the 1920s. Meanwhile, RTÉ’s studios in Donnybrook – built in the 1960s, just a few years after Ardmore – are downsizing or threatened with closure. The discrepancy highlights the relative neglect of public service media in recent years but also an opportunity to recalibrate with joined-up thinking and greater ambition. Notwithstanding complaints about its cost, RTÉ’s underdeveloped estate shows that it has never been funded enough. In other recent publications, I have related this problem to European and American contexts, but here I want to compare it specifically to Los Angeles. That city has an urban area ten times the size of Dublin, and a population eight times as large, in which four clusters of film and television studios (Hollywood, Studio City, Culver City, and Burbank) directly employ about 100,000 people and produce over a quarter of all US film and television output [4]. There are significant differences of scale, economics, and ideology but we can still draw lessons from Los Angeles because it has shaped many international standards in studio design and construction, many studio buildings are still in use that were constructed a century ago, and the economic and cultural contribution of studios is a source of pride.

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In the 1920s, when the GPO was first occupied by 2RN, the predecessor of Radio Éireann, William Fox was building the massive studio complex called Century City; Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks were financing the new studios of United Artists on Melrose Avenue; and Jack and Harry Warner were expanding their headquarters on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood to new and bigger studios in Burbank. This expansion was driven by growing international markets for Hollywood films but also by technological change. In the 1910s, the first studios had been open-air timber frame stages protected from the California sun by retractable muslin shades [5]. These were soon replaced by glasshouses with iron or steel frames, which were more permanent but still prioritized natural light. Both early types were made for silent cinema and housed actors, crew, and sets for multiple productions side by side without concerns for noise. In the late 1920s, the coming of sound brought dramatic change, requiring heavier concrete structures whose opaque and insulated walls excluded both light and sound. That type still dominates today.

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While commissions from the Hollywood film industry helped drive the architectural innovations of Richard Neutra, Paul R. Williams, Claude Beelman, and Albert C. Martin, Los Angeles studios developed world-leading standards that governed their buildings’ layout, dimensions, materials, lighting, climate control, acoustics, communications, and electrical power. Many of those standards were developed by the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, which remains influential today in the US and worldwide [6]. Indeed, the design and construction of studios set many trends in architecture: studios built for ‘talking pictures’ in the late 1920s pioneered the use of tilt-up concrete walls; excessive heat generated by studio lights in the 1930s and ‘40s helped to popularise air conditioning; and the ramping up of television production in the 1950s and ‘60s accelerated the use of epoxy resin floors in commercial buildings, and the mainstreaming of open-plan offices, electronic systems, and digital networks.

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All of these technologies were used in the construction of Los Angeles’ most famous purpose-built television studios at CBS Television City in Los Angeles. Opened in 1952, this was designed by William Pereira and Charles Luckman in the minimalist, rectilinear style known as ‘mid-century modern’ – the closest comparison in Los Angeles to the more Miesian but equally beautiful buildings of RTÉ. As such, just as MGM, RKO and other famous studios favoured neoclassical buildings in the 1910s and art deco structures in the 1930s, CBS Television City continued a tradition of film and television companies commissioning innovative architecture [7]. As media industries, constantly in the public eye and aligned with the visual arts, they valued design excellence and sought to promote it through studio buildings that embodied their ethos. Many of these have been bought and sold, changed hands, and modernised but there has been remarkable continuity too with most of the city’s original studios still in use today.

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Feature film and television drama production is distributed more globally now than before and, ironically, Ireland’s recent success is one of the current sources of pressure on the industry in Los Angeles, along with the decline of theatrical exhibition and the rise of virtual production, AI, and streaming [8]. Signalling this, the original Warner Bros studios in the heart of Hollywood, which are well-preserved and still functioning, were recently joined by the high-rise postmodernist headquarters of Netflix, unceremoniously squeezed into a corner of the site in 2018. Meanwhile, Los Angeles also has a proud tradition in public service media, embodied in PBS SoCal, the Southern California affiliate of the national broadcaster, for whom Gensler recently refurbished studios between Disney and Warners in Burbank [9].

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Like all of these, film and television studios in Ireland are also adapting to dramatic change. Some of the private studios currently in planning have been delayed by financial caution on the part of investors, still reacting to last year’s Hollywood strikes and calculating the effects of AI. And RTÉ is seeking to modernise in response to media convergence driven by Hollywood and big tech. In my next article in this series, I will further develop the argument that the best way to address the sectoral challenges of the day is to cluster indigenous Irish media and creative industries in a diversified and densified RTÉ campus in Donnybrook. This would also bring exciting opportunities in architecture.

Recent developments in urban design discourse in Ireland include an Urban Design Symposium at UCD in 2023 [1], during which proposals to pursue an accreditation for urban designers within the RIAI were discussed. While the Symposium’s published proceedings highlight Irish architecture’s broad professional commitments, any meaningful engagement with environmental or climate adaptation issues were glaringly absent.

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While it is too easy to point fingers and add to the rhetoric and calls for further expansion to the architect’s professional activities, the issue as I see it is rather that the profession of landscape architecture within Ireland remains critically underdeveloped. Elsewhere landscape architects are leading on large-scale urban adaptation projects and clearly articulating their role in the compounding climate and biodiversity crises. The urgent need for such professionals has led some of the western world’s most prized schools of architecture – the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL; ETH Zurich; Pratt Institute – to inaugurate new professional programmes in landscape architecture in the past six years. To highlight the excitement and optimism that exists amongst its practitioners, Belgian landscape architect Bas Smets recently said that he was drawn to the field because “there’s still so many things to be invented" [2]. Landscape architecture, in other words, is finally having its moment.

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In this regard I wish to discuss the disciplinary formations and practices of landscape architecture which are relevant to the development of urban design in Ireland. I frame landscape architecture here in its most ambitious form as it intersects with processes of urbanisation and as it emerges as a field uniquely equipped to take on a diverse range of issues at the intersection of living systems, public space, and social injustices. I also argue that the landscape architect has as much of a claim today to lead on urban design projects as the architect, and that ongoing considerations to accredit architects as urban designers by the RIAI may end up excluding landscape architects from their work to adapt the city to the environmental and social challenges of the twenty-first century.

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Greater cultural awareness of the climate and ecological crises alongside an emerging consciousness of spatial injustices has positioned landscape architects as primary agents in the design of the built environment. This has perhaps been best articulated by Charles Waldheim in his 2016 publication Landscape as Urbanism, where he argues that traditional urban planning and design strategies – allied with the field of architecture – are incapable of reconciling with the pace and scale of urban change caused by both deindustrialization and market-driven urbanisation. As industry recedes from urban centres it is typically met with an inflow of global capital to capture opportunities for the making of buildings as financial machines. When the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey announced the sale of Brooklyn’s abandoned waterfront piers in the 1980s, plans to occupy the 1.3-mile waterfront with fourteen-storey apartment buildings quickly emerged, but community groups challenged such developments and mobilised political and financial support for the project that would become Brooklyn Bridge Park. Over twenty years, the planning and design of the 85-acre park was led by landscape architects Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates (MVVA), and since 2021 has provided contact with the waterfront, access to an array of outdoor programming from sports fields to moments of solitude, offered open space to diverse communities, and acts as a bulwark to worsening storm surges. Brooklyn Bridge Park is a masterful choreography of expansive and intimate public space, curated views, play opportunities, and a thickening weave of volumetric plant and landscape material that is everywhere missing from cities.

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While urban design and development typically limits the biophysical world to remaining parcels of open space, at Brooklyn Bridge Park this pattern is overturned. MVVA worked with economic planners to calculate the annual maintenance costs for the landscape – providing the logic for the volume of building development along its edges that would directly finance the park through property taxes. The subversion of architecture to landscape architecture in this case of urban development is instructive in longstanding debates over which design disciplines have the authority to guide decisions on the formation of the city. Yet the moment we find ourselves in – global heating, ecosystem devastation, landscape contamination, coastal vulnerability, stormwater pollutants, spatialised social inequities – requires a new kind of design intelligence led by the logic of landscape. While disciplinary formation in the design and planning professions mean that landscape architecture enjoys little public awareness or professional authority in Ireland, across the world landscape architects are leading on infrastructural urban design projects that are absorbing the shocks of these crises at the intersection of urban and living systems.

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An unspoken premise within urban design discourse is often that the work of landscape architects is responsible for unmooring architectural quality from urban space. To be sure, there are endless examples of poorly executed work by landscape architects, just as there are from architects. Yet for prominent architect and urban designer Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani, the emergence of landscape architecture in recent decades from within parks and gardens – at least where he is looking – into streets and the rest of the urban fabric has resulted in his call for a total abandonment of landscape in the city: “If we want to respect and preserve nature, we must not confuse it or mix it up with the city … The city must withdraw into its own space, develop distinct boundaries and concentrate on itself, becoming dense, solid and as hard as stone" [3]. Lampugnani’s admiration for the historic Italianate urban fabric and the writings of Aldo Rossi have caused conceptual upset and led to the reasoning that denser and harder cities mean more space for nature in the hinterlands. But cities are not closed systems. 

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Landscape urbanism is being internationally embraced in the discourse of urban design to organise the urban fabric around biophysical systems. Yet discursive formations of urban design in Ireland, at least as suggested by the recent Research, Discipline, and Practice: UCD Urban Design Symposium 2023 seem to consider landscape only in its pictorial dimension. For example, in the symposium’s published proceedings the only engagement with a landscape framework is by Finola O’Kane. Here it is engaged as a “landscape perspective” (or viewshed) comparison of Irish town squares using late nineteenth century photography with more recent equivalents. O’Kane’s lesson is that both incidental developments that have taken place in town squares – such as at Moville, Co. Donegal – and deliberate design attempts – such as at Eyre Square in Galway – are both responsible for “the loss of significance in urban space" [4]. The historical photographs certainly attest to the existence of a kind of character which Irish architects are perennially preoccupied with. Yet these historical examples show either acres of sealed ground or lawn with trees as framing mechanisms. In other words, these spaces are highly impoverished biophysically, and while this may seem to be less of a concern in very small rural towns where opportunities may be more widely available to slow down and remediate surface water pollutants and capture airborne particulates through green infrastructure – these areas are increasingly inundated with water from more frequent storm surges and fewer opportunities to slow and absorb water upstream. These examples may be even less appropriate as visions for our urban future in Ireland’s larger towns and expanding cities.

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The project of the city in the twenty-first century will need to reformulate urban conceptions of character and aesthetics to grapple with compounding environmental and social pressures. Core to this project will require engaging plant and landscape material as figures in the urban fabric as they encounter and mobilize landscapes’ logic. Such a reorientation however is likely to prove challenging as they have historically featured as backdrop, framing, or embellishment to architectural logic and form. Compounding this challenge is the identification in recent decades of the complex phenomenon of “plant blindness” in Western society - that is the failure to notice or account for plants in daily life [5]. Although there are many theories that aim to account for landscape architecture’s inferior position in the design and planning fields, perhaps its association with plants which evolved to “avoid recognition” is perhaps one of the more compelling versions. Yet the collaborative endeavour with plants, soils, and water, mark landscape architects as the primary design experts working at the intersection of the built environment and living systems and such professional commitments are a critical contribution to leading the development of the twenty-first century city.

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I am sometimes asked whether architects can also do landscape architecture. Can landscape architects also make buildings? Prominent American landscape architect James Rose did design both gardens and houses for his clients. And if trained architects seek to become landscape architects through practice, then more power to them. But as design professionals operate in increasingly complex global conditions, I think we need to clarify the core knowledge of our fields and the relative value of those contributions to the built and unbuilt environment. Current discussions to provide an urban design accreditation for architects calls for broader conversations about what constitutes expertise in urban design, and how such accreditation would affect other built environment professionals who have as much of a claim to this work as architects. While the proceedings to the UCD Urban Design Symposium showed balanced views on who should be involved in urban design projects, some fervently advocated for this role to be led by architects. From where I stand, urban design constitutes a broadly interdisciplinary domain – it is hubris to suggest that the range of challenges which emerge here could only be uniquely led by architects. If the end goal is to design environmentally resilient, socially just, and beautiful Irish towns and cities – rather than to, as Matthew Carmona argues in the Symposium’s proceedings, “grab the territory professionally and define its limits through accreditation” [6] – then interdisciplinary venues to advance this project should be pursued. As landscape architecture slowly emerges as a profession and area of intellectual enquiry in Ireland, architects should embrace its possibilities for Irish cities, work to include landscape architects in urban design’s discursive developments, and support its emergence in the academy.