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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Open Space is supported by the Arts Council through the Arts Grant Funding Award 2025.
All images by the author, unless otherwise indicated.
Open House Europe has chosen Future Heritage as its theme for this year.[i] This reframing of “heritage” urges us to consider not only what we have inherited from past generations, but what we would like to pass down to future generations. We are custodians of what we have inherited but we cannot preserve our cities to the point of stagnation. While building for the present, we must also negotiate a relationship to the past and to the future.
In considering the importance of the past and the future in the built environment, it is helpful to first consider the nature of the human relationship to time. This was explored by the philosopher Augustine of Hippo (354–430). In his reflections on the nature of time, Augustine speculates that where the past and the future actually exist is in the mind. The past and the future are present in the mind through memory and expectation, respectively. Augustine refers to this as the distention of the mind.[ii] In the human experience of time, then, the mind is always stretched towards the past through memory, and towards the future through expectation.
In this account, the past only exists through memory. However, memory also extends beyond our minds through the act of inscription. Inscription is described by the philosopher Paul Ricoeur as “external marks adopted as a basis and intermediary for the work of memory”.[iii] These “external marks” are what make up our written and visual histories and cultural narratives; crucially, they also make up our built environment. Our cities act as an intermediary for the work of memory. This is captured by Italo Calvino in his book Invisible Cities:
The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the bannisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.[iv]
Layers of past inhabiting are inscribed in the buildings, streets, and squares of our cities. In our built heritage, we encounter the values and cultural narratives that previously guided the building of our cities. We reinterpret these through the lens of current sociocultural values in a perpetual renegotiation with the past. This is the work of memory.
The relationship to the past, cultivated through this work of memory, is an important aspect of the collective identity of any community. This is the case whether the place is one we have inhabited all our lives or is one that is inscribed with an unfamiliar past. For this reason, built heritage has a powerful role in the sense of identity of the inhabitants of the city. Its loss through war, natural disaster, decay, or development is often met with grief and even outrage.
In this regard, developing a city is a question of considering what memories we consider worth preserving and what future memories we would like to inscribe. The tricky balance of negotiating the relationship between the past and the future in a city can be seen in two late twentieth-century transport-infrastructure-led development projects: one in Amsterdam and one in Dublin.
In the 1970s, the city of Amsterdam’s development plan included the demolition of a large part of the central historic neighbourhood of Nieuwmarkt to make way for the city’s metro. The project proposed to replace the demolished buildings with New-York-style skyscrapers. At around the same time, the Irish transport authority planned to demolish much of the Temple Bar area in Dublin to develop a central bus station and underground rail tunnel. The historic neighbourhoods proposed for the sites of these projects were both in decline and in need of regeneration. The city authorities saw the opportunity this provided for introducing transport infrastructure for the future. A key difference in the circumstances of these projects was that Amsterdam’s had project funding readily available from government and commercial backers; Dublin’s did not.
In Amsterdam, many Nieuwmarkt buildings that had been cleared of their residents in preparation for demolition were occupied by artists and conservationists in an effort to preserve them. However, this local opposition to the demolition did not prevent it from going ahead. Instead, it culminated in some of the city’s worst ever riots, with violent clashes between those who had taken up residence in the district and the police and army sent to forcibly remove them.
Like Nieuwmarkt, Dublin’s Temple Bar area was in need of regeneration as a result of years of decline. However, in this case, funding delays led to the state transport authority letting out the properties it had acquired and earmarked for demolition. The cheap short-term rents attracted artists and small businesses. This brought new life to the area and revealed its potential as a cultural quarter. With intensifying local resistance to the plan and a new civic consciousness of the area’s potential, plans for the bus station were abandoned.
In Dublin, as in Amsterdam, there was a dissonance between the values of those altering the city and the values of those inhabiting the city. However, the delays to the Dublin project sowed the seeds of an alternative approach to the area’s development. Eventually, as part of Dublin’s tenure as European City of Culture in 1991, a competition for the rehabilitative Temple Bar Framework Plan was launched. This was won by Group 91[v] with their plan that proposed preserving much of the existing network of streets, with a handful of interventions including squares, streets, and a few key buildings.
Similarly, in Nieuwmarkt, even though a large number of buildings were demolished and the metro was built, plans for a motorway and tall office buildings were abandoned and Nieuwmarkt was ultimately rebuilt on its original street layout. This is notable as memory is not only inscribed in the materiality of the city, but also in its layout and design. In his book The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard points out that “over and beyond our memories [our formative space] is physically inscribed in us. It is a group of organic habits”.[vi] Memory is inscribed in our cities, and the space of our cities is in turn inscribed in us through choreographing our habits of use.[vii]
Learning from past instances is valuable in deciding how to develop our future heritage and recognising what values are driving our decisions. It is evident from the above examples that changes to a city should be approached with care and follow the “principles of cooperation, equity, and democracy”[viii] that underpin much of Europe’s recent history. A good guiding principle to making interventions in the city that create inclusive socially responsible future heritage is perhaps the generosity of spirit invoked by Grafton Architects' concept of “freespace”.[ix] This includes generosity to current inhabitants through collaboration and the promotion of agency and belonging, and generosity to future inhabitants, particularly by taking measures to mitigate climate change and to make our cities inhabitable in the future.
Like the mind in Augustine’s account of time, the city is stretched towards both the past and the future. Our own values determine how we approach our relationship to the past and what we desire for current and future inhabitants. Where the future exists as expectation in the mind, it exists as possibility in the built environment. The past is present in the built heritage of a site and the future is present in the possibilities that the site presents. In deciding how to alter our urban spaces we are renegotiating our relationship to our past and drawing out the city we want future generations to inherit.
In this article, Dr Sally J. Faulder, referencing this year's Open House Europe theme of "Future Heritage", considers how we ascribe value to our inherited and inhabited built fabric, and to the built heritage we seek to pass on.
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OUTSIDE: IN, which ran from 29 May to 20 June, was a display of the work from the UCD School of Architecture Planning and Environmental Planning. This year, the summer exhibition wanted to invite the public into our studio spaces at Richview, continuing an important conversation between architectural education and the wider professional community, sparked by the Building Change project and highlighted at the RDS Architecture and Building Expo last October. The exhibition aimed to invite the outside into our world of Richview architecture and exhibit how the next generation of UCD architects are being prepared to shape the built environment.
The exhibition draws on the ideals of the new Building Change curriculum that has been introduced into the B.Arch over the past three years, and aims to comment on the environmental, social, and economic challenges and opportunities arising in current architectural discourse. OUTSIDE:IN sought to bridge the gap between academia, industry, practice, and policy. It represented a space where the values of architectural education intersect with the realities of contemporary practice.
Featuring the work of seventy-five Master of Architecture students, the work was curated around four forward-looking Design-Research Studios, each tackling real-world challenges through the lens of climate action:
• Housing & the City – rethinking urban living and community development.
• Material Embodiment & Resources – exploring sustainable materials, construction, and structure.
• Landscape Economy & Town – investigating settlement and production through social and economic perspectives.
• Past, Future & Reuse – advancing circularity and adaptive reuse in architecture.
As well as a celebration of the students work, the opening evening began with an insightful panel discussion with panellists Ana Betancour (Urban + Architecture Agency), Lucy Jones (Antipas Jones Architects), Sarah Jane Pisciotti (Sisk Group), Emmett Scanlon (Irish Architecture Foundation) and Conor Sreenan (State Architect, Office of Public Works). The panellists were carefully selected to reflect the diverse paths which are open to us as we leave the four walls of our institution. Although panellists share a common foundation in education and practice, each has pursued different and inspiring trajectories across the architectural realm.
The panel discussion allowed us to consider and reflect on our five years of education and growth, within and outside of the studios in Richview. The overall message was of encouragement, to have confidence, be brave, be unforgiving, unrealistic, and open-minded. The variation in the panellists showed the diverse and varied opportunities and interests that can stem from an architectural education. Our education is about the fundamental ability to evaluate things, understanding our own morals, social values, interests and to ask what can architecture be? Lucy Jones described architecture as a connective tissue that sits between art, policy, developers, education, the city, and people. The field mitigates between the pragmatism of society and the desire to evoke creativity and feeling within the urban environment. As Sarah Jane Piscotti said it is “a desire to know how others think and understand their perspective”. Having seen the process from within, we know there is so much more thought, passion, values, morals, and ideas in a project that can ever be represented on two grey boards. In Richview, we create a culture of curiosity and aim to understand others and we hope to bring this forward in whatever form it may manifest.
OUTSIDE:IN has allowed Richview to open its doors and studios to friends, family and the general public. Emmet Scanlon spoke about a need to de-silo architecture and its educational institutions, making it more accessible to people not within the field. There were certainly moments throughout our education where this sort of ‘wall’ was obvious to us. There was a continuous use of inaccessible language to communicate something that may have seemed relatively simple. At times it felt as if the words were being used to throw us off intentionally. But looking back these moments also taught us to question how and why we communicate our designs in a certain way and, in particular, who we are communicating it to. Despite the challenges and hurdles, our education pushed us to critically think, to find clarity among complex situations, and to constantly strive for inclusivity within our work. It’s a reminder that architecture is not just about what’s built, but about the people, language, and connections we are creating. As we move forward, we now have the opportunity to carry these lessons with us, to make the field more transparent and approachable and to always design with intention and accessibility at the centre.
The Building Change initiative aims to bring climate literacy and sustainability into practice through developing the undergraduate curriculum. A three-year project across all architectural schools in Ireland, it encourages students to engage with and consider the climate emergency, and their impact and responsibility as architects in relation to this. To celebrate the end of the three-year programme in UCD, the Building Change Student Curators held a competition titled, ‘Making Visible the invisible’. The aim of the competition was to submit a piece of work that communicates the often unseen factors that inform design. We cannot always see air, sound, force, energy, waste, biodiversity, environmental impacts etc., yet being able to understand and visualise these systems is a vital part of architectural practice. Similarly, Building Change was often an unseen system, changing and informing education in Richview over the past three years. To celebrate this and bring light to all the innovative and positive impacts the initiative had, a collaged mural was erected in the front foyer representing Building Change’s timeline within the school, plotted in relation to wider environmental changes on a global scale. The timeline is a visual representation indicating how our education is adapting and responding to the climate emergency.
OUTSIDE: IN opened Richview’s studio doors to the public, showcasing how UCD’s architecture students are responding to today’s environmental, social, and economic challenges. This article explores how the exhibition, grounded in the Building Change initiative, reflects a shift in architectural education connecting academia, industry, and community through design, dialogue, and climate action.
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The discussion around the likely impact of artificial intelligence on architectural practice is beginning to get genuinely interesting. In the period following the release of ChatGPT, much of the focus centred on image-generation tools such as DALL·E and Midjourney. More recently, however, attention has turned to the broader potential of emerging AI technologies in areas such as project scheduling, staffing, technical specification, performance evaluation and tendering.
One particularly intriguing development emerging from these discussions is the role AI might play in the process of planning and development. While early, high-profile experiments—such as Sidewalk Labs’ controversial plan for Toronto – attracted considerable media attention [1], this piece focuses on a more routine aspect of the planning process: the basic application for planning permission.
Before we get started, it is important to recognise that no two planning systems are exactly the same. In some municipalities, applications are assessed ‘in-the-round’ – characteristic of the “British/Irish planning family”, according to Newman and Thornley [2] – taking everything into account, including the architectural quality of the proposed design. Other systems (the Napoleonic, Germanic, Nordic and North American planning families) are more concerned with adherence to performance criteria and zoning regulations. So, when we speculate on the possible impact of AI on planning-application processes, we are not comparing like with like.
That being said, popular opinion would have it that planning systems worldwide struggle with bureaucratic delays, inconsistent decision-making and difficult administrative procedures. To address these issues, jurisdictions in various locations have begun exploring AI-powered tools to accelerate and improve development approvals.
One tool increasingly being adopted is ‘computer vision’, a powerful AI technology which interprets the information included in a planning application. Computer-vision tools are becoming highly sophisticated, capable of identifying where missing information in a drawing may be preventing either the AI model or the human planner from making a decision.
The very simplicity of the technology which drives computer vision means that it is likely to find wide adoption. The technology has four key features:
1. Neural Networks: These systems are trained on vast datasets of previously approved architectural drawings, allowing them to recognise patterns, standards, and recurring elements. This depth of training allows for planning reviews that are both accurate and consistent.
2. Object Recognition and Classification: Modern computer vision can distinguish between architectural components—walls, doors, windows, mechanical systems—and assess issues such as corridor width or travel distances to escape routes.
3. Semantic Segmentation: AI can now understand the spatial context of elements in relation to each other. For example, it can flag a bedroom placed beside a fire hazard as an error.
4. Multimodal Communication: Advanced models can cross-reference written annotations with elements contained within a drawing, enabling checks for consistency between plans, sections, and specifications.
In recent years, the City of Gainesville, Florida, reported that its proprietary AI review system reduced planning-review times from several weeks to just a few days [3, 4]. Similarly, Australian-based AI firm Archistar is gaining attention for its work with the cities of Austin and Vancouver [5, 6]. Most recently, the Department of Municipalities and Transport in Abu Dhabi claimed its AI-assisted system can deliver almost instant decisions for single-family home applications [7].
As a measure of how quickly things are moving, the ‘Object Recognition and Classification’ technology cited in item no. 2 above is now being replicated in small academic environments, including the Department of Architecture at South East Technological University in Waterford. In recent months, fifth-year students at SETU examined the different ways AI is likely to affect architectural practice. One student, Conor Nolan, trained a basic computer-vision model to identify symbols and other information on architectural drawings. The experiment was limited in scope, but it clearly demonstrated how easy it would be to create an AI model capable of reading planning drawings and identifying missing information. (To get a sense of how Conor’s experiment works, scan the QR code below and, once the app is running, point your camera at the drawing beneath the code).
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It seems inevitable, then, that AI will become a standard feature of planning processes everywhere, including here in Ireland. This raises a number of challenges, both social and technical. On the social side, planning holds a particular place in the Irish public consciousness and the idea of streamlining the process – potentially reducing the time available for public discourse – may require careful consideration.
On the technical side, the variety of AI approaches already available may have a more profound impact on planning systems like Ireland’s than on those found in North America or other parts of Europe. In planning systems where outcomes are determined by strong mathematical parameters and performance metrics – such as those found in Gainesville, Austin and Vancouver – many of the outcomes can often be determined by conventional computing approaches. The addition of AI, while useful in many regards, represents more of an incremental improvement than a fundamental change.
But in a system such as the one practised in Ireland, where applications are judged on a variety of sometimes very subtle metrics including quality of design, AI models trained on deep sets of historic data could prove transformative. These models have the capacity to examine previous applications in forensic detail, learning to recognise the complex factors that contribute to successful applications. This capability could enable more satisfactory outcomes on difficult planning applications while simultaneously guaranteeing fairness and consistency.
The success of such a development naturally depends on the quality and consistency of the planning decisions that will form the training data for these new AI models. The consistency of the Irish planning system has been questioned over the years, which could limit the effectiveness of a heavily AI-informed planning regime. However, this challenge also presents an opportunity: the process of preparing data for AI training could, in itself, drive improvements in planning consistency and transparency.
The integration of AI into architectural and planning practice represents more than just an advance in technology – it marks a fundamental shift in how we approach building design as well as how we plan our urban areas. As the tools evolve, their role will likely expand from basic compliance checks to assisting in achieving the optimum design response to any given set of conditions [8, 9].
AI may also help us get beyond traditional divisions between planning families. Rather than maintaining the current distinction between Irish/British systems focused on ‘in the round’ assessment and Germanic/American systems emphasising adherence to preferred geometric arrangements or performance criteria, AI could enable all jurisdictions to implement planning systems that offer sophisticated solutions to complex urban problems. The technology's capacity to handle multiple variables simultaneously – from technical compliance to aesthetic considerations – suggests a future where planning systems can be both rigorous as well as satisfying.
Artificial Intelligence is set to transform the planning processes. This article explores how emerging AI tools can streamline approvals, improve consistency, and reshape diverse planning systems, offering both technical potential and social challenges for design and planning practices in Ireland and internationally.
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