AI for architectural design, mastering Midjourney with Tim Fu | BIM Pure Live #064

[Music] [Music] hello everybody and welcome to a new episode of bimp your life I am your host Nik I am an architect a Bim specialist and the founder of B pure and Revit pure uh today we're going to talk about generative AI using tools such as M Journey but before moving on with the guest couple of things to mention and to talk about first as always thanks to everyone watching live in the chat uh we've got fost from Fort BR California Pedro from Porto in Portugal got Steven from Brattleboro Vermont we've got Luke from San Francisco Austin from Pennsylvania so thank you for everyone watching live uh and thanks for tuning in week after week and if it's your first time on the show welcome and please subscribe it helps us a lot let's move on to thanks the sponsor uh andscape is sponsoring this season of B Pure Life andscape is a visualization tool that you can use with rivet but also with SketchUp and rhino and Arad and for this sponsorship I've decided to have a feature of the week a feature of the day uh let's move on to that so uh today's feature with inscape it is uh the sample files if you Google sample andscape you can see multiple sample files uh that can give you a preview of what andscape can do you have a list of materials you have a sample rivet project you can download either the Standalone exe file or the rivet project itself and this is the material sample and this is pretty helpful if you want to have a look an overview of all the materials that are available with andscape library and see them in action uh not only in the image but once their place what they actually look like uh I do use this this is pretty helpful if you want to have a quick preview you can see all the material kinds including carpets and bricks and uh even perforated Metals as you can see here and then a whole collection of grass uh dirt floor concrete and Vary of metals and and this is a school Standalone file at Point exe file that you can run without having an escape license you can just download them download this file of the website and just have an overview what you can do instead inside of andscape and have and see the assets and actions you can see this is some sort of high school can walk around uh enter scho and this is a nice nice within building but it's showcasing uh the power of endcap and what it can do and this is the rivet project uh this is kind of a brick Corner building and it's nice to see this rivet file in action before you open it in endcap and now we're inside of it and we can walk around the file you can see multiple assets you can see the green roof uh nice looking threes and Street assets uh let's walk around and see what's up in this file so I think this is actually some sort of Cafe if you press space bar you can go through the window uh and here yeah it's a nice looking Cafe with the the green wall and there's some kind of delicious looking strawberry cake out there and in the cafe so the the point here is that there's a lot of simple files and you can have a look and see what can actually be done and it can give you inspiration for the kind of assets you're using in uh in Revit for andscape visualization so thank you Escape for sponsoring uh this season of P pure live and something else we've just released pamphlet number 30 since uh 2016 we've been releasing four pamphlets a year pamphlets are free pdf guide about a specific Revit topic and this is just fresh out of the oven at least if you're watching live and you can download this new pamplet at Revit pure.com excl and this one is just how to take Excel data and bring it into Revit and I give a few different examples s and one of them that I really enjoy is by using the Dynamo multiplayer plugin what you can do with that is you can batch multiple models to go through one or multiple Dynamo script and you can also schedule uh using the Windows task uh the setter which means that for example you could have batch run multiple Dynamo script to run in the middle of the night uh while you're sleeping instead of having to do it manually one by one a pretty amazing uh free tool Dynamo multiplayer by bird tools anyway all of that is mentioned in the in this pamphlet it's all free and you can download it at Revit pure.com excl uh all right uh so today's guest is Tim Fu Tim is currently based in London UK uh previously Tim used to work as a designer at zahid Architects and now he's just started his own firm called Studio Tim F so I'm welcoming to the show uh Tim how are you doing Tim hey Nas I'm doing all right thanks for the invitation how are you I'm doing great so well first congrats on starting uh your own firm at Studio Tim Fu so I guess I know you have some slides about it but I'll just ask in discussion how did he get interested in AI uh well I started uh a while ago when uh actually not even a while ago I mean it's been a year you know so it's pretty recent in that sense but I started when I start seeing a lot of AI um images being outputed digitally online and so I wanted to give it a go myself um if you want I can showcase the um the images related to this topic yeah sure uh it'd be good to know but uh just finishing this point I know I I've tried by myself it was was it Deli or Deli Mei and it at first it was almost like jokes or memes that you could do with it it was these ridiculous images and people were T typing like the most absurd prompts you could and the result was pretty funny and then we went from that it seems like couple of months later it turned into amazing images that that I was seeing with mid Journey so it's pretty wild how fast everything went but yeah let's switch so we can uh see your screen just give me a moment here yeah there you go we can see your screen now yeah okay great so I mean you know really started with just um looking at what's available uh on for example Instagram we started seeing a lot of these um uh images taged designed by zah haded and at the time working in zah Hadid I was quite curious to see ai's interpretation of those things so like these are example of like images that you would find um at the very early stages so from there I wanted to see how I at least who someone working inside would interpret um the results so I started on my side to experiment with the AI and early on I produced you know really Whimsical more so chaotic results which I thought was very fun and artistically sort of satisfying if you will but uh after a while the goal really changed for me and that's when I started to take things onto another um level this is when I started to find ways to control the geometries and produce results that can actually help um you know um contribute to the conversation of what AI can do in buildable construction so from this series of um results I started to gradually um understand how to work the AI towards feasible results control it and then produce things that you can you know eventually bring into the um concept design phas of any project so those were like the experiments I started early on and you know from on Instagram this is where I showcased a lot of these results and from there eventually I got to start teaching at parametric architecture Academy and so it was a more of a systematic approach later on where I you know had observations I started to um understand all the workflows of the type of work that's required to get to what you where you wanted so you can just say that all in all it's like a very simple process to type in a bunch of words but once you have the words um how you then proceed to enhance your resulting design and resulting Aesthetics of your image that became sort of like a fine-tuning art form in its own sense so that's the type of work that I try to produce and teach as well and uh yeah a lot of nuan is involved going from last year to now since the technology has improved so much much I'm Cur I'm curious what is what was your role role at zaha before um you started exploring AI you were a designer so what tools were you using on a daily basis I'm just wondering how natural it was for you to move from what you were using to uh going through these AI tools yeah so contrary to popular belief I'm not the AI guy of the office yeah yeah so actually I would showcase here I worked most mostly on um the Unicorn Island project in China and this is a huge master plan with a lot of um towers and um Urban Landscapes and so I was the kind of like the parametric facade specialist doing the facade rationalization of all these complex geometries and that use did you use Rhino and grasshopper a lot where these yes that's principally my tool yeah so I mean there's folks that focus on using um Maya there is the Bim team focusing on using Revit and then there's us who is kind of like linking the two where you have a lot of people who is creating Concepts and US who's like rationalizing it making sure it's uh buildable there's repeating modules and it's more oriented on budget and uh finally you then bring it to the Bim team and the other folks so it's like a different compartments of Specialists and each working on their own sort of fields yeah yeah so um that's pretty much where um I stopped doing mostly that type of work on my own time I started to look into Ai and so last year was like you know a great time for me to Showcase a lot of work get a lot of traction online but eventually the technology improved so much astoundingly and for me I was you know flower gasted at the sort of um trajectory of our technology like this is where we are more recently you can see the the sort of the visual quality and the design as well as you can see the for example things that Mak sense like the the formwork patterns how it works with the geometry like everything seems to be so fine-tuned these days and of course there's still a lot of things to improve but uh where we're heading to is uh is quite uncertain just because it's uh quite revolutionary you can see the Improvement that it's uh taking yeah I'm curious how did you end up using mostly um Mid journey and how does it compare to other AI rendering tool out there like what are the other options stable diffusion and there is a Del as well so yes yes yeah why the why are using mostly M Journey so this is like you know where you judge you are good at mostly I use M Journey because it's just visually Superior this designs are more resolves and it's creating geometries that are uh realizable because a lot of other AI kind of make sense on a local level but then when you look at it is this like a concave or convex like things don't make sense except from afar so I don't know how they did it but the maoury team really created its own own sort of you know proprietary machine algorithm that surpasses all the competitors right now and I've also just tested D 3 recently and you know it's improved a lot since it's old dially version but it's also not Superior to mouri as of yet so yeah yeah that that was going to be another question I've played a little bit with it and that much Deli tree just for context there's open AI who are doing chat GPT which we talked about in last week's episode um but they also have this image rendering model d d e and they've just released Del tree I think the big difference is the prompting with M Journey you have this very specific way of prompting which is the text you need to type to get the image and with Del you can be more natural language describe in a few sentence what you need instead of having to learn these quirks and use a lot of commas so uh what do you think about this do you think that you prefer the way of prompting of mid Journey or do you think more natural language is uh is going to be the way in the future well yeah I mean that's an interesting question because on one hand the English language is kind of like kind of you know optimized for our everyday conversations but not as well controllable as for example mid Journey's lack of large language model and what I teach is for example you know your set of words I don't I tell students not to be grammatically correct because you're wasting like word real estate if you will a set of words I say imagine every local cluster of these words the type of results it produces for example beautiful bam flake HT photography you're from uh Canada so you can imagine already visually how beautiful that type of place would be and then I tell them to imagine every local cluster like floating house and low poly triangle if these words were to interact locally for example if you search it on Google what it would look like and so you have to have this sort of practice where you are not just typing out what you want like you're talking to a person but you are Imagining the quering results that you get as you would with Googling an image so because it works as query you know so then you're able to understand what type of search results is going to be predominant for the algorithm to learn and from there you have to imagine all those local cluster of words if it cohes together what type of image it would result and then it comes to a point where when the words slightly change when you change when you add a word or subtract a word that's when you start to find tune and prompt craft because you can control it it's fine-tuning and you can control the direction you can nudge it to a certain space so instead of like how I feel how I work with di where you describe what you want and just hope for the best here with the mid journey is a process of fine-tuning and controlling which is something that I cannot find with d 3 because you're still being forced to create something completely new every single time you prompt something whereas here with mid Journey it's really for the advanced users and beyond that what mid Journey can also do is correct local areas like you can select the certain areas that needs to be refined for example you can see like there's like a lack of um finesse with the stair as well as the corner and then you can just ask it to fix those certain areas and so that's a degree of control that di does not have and only M Journey has so yeah I'm curious how what what do you type like do you clean a corner like that oh it's like you know you know how you have Photoshop like Smart Fill generative fill yes yeah okay so you're using that to complement uh no no I'm saying you can it's like equivalent of that in M Journey itself okay yeah like you're literally able here you know what if I showcase um if I showcase my PDF this is probably a little more um a little more straightforward so you see for example down here like these are just me selecting the area on the top of the Tower of this Plaza that I want to change and you can see it's able to just immediately reproduce so many different iterations that they all seem to fit the context and seem to fit the surrounding uh architecture so you see that's the power of of this particular aspects um you're able to just generate you know additive results and correct places that you it needs to be corrected and when you select the area to correct it you can also type in the prompt to describe how you want it to be corrected so that degree of control is is something that you don't see in any other software and on top of that you can see for example the top this is like the um form finding process that I go through with um using AI it's like meticulous and people see the final image I produce but they don't know the type of um process you go through but really it's you can see a lot of work has been done to push in different directions nudging pushing um typically you see much more crazier images and results with the form is incredibly unrefined and so when you just fine-tune it to a certain extent you end up then with a result that you would deem as um refined uh and modular and constructible so as long as you have that as an architect in your head to know what to look for then you can um push the AI towards um the direction you already have in your head so it's quite a fine amount of control you can have with ma joury yeah so earlier you you showed that the corner that was fixed I'm curious in M Journey can you like pinpoint part of the image and say rework this specific part or it is true like very precise prompt that you're able to do something like that yeah yeah sometimes you know it doesn't even need to listen to your prompt exactly so for example again with this one all I did was take the first image and I selected this region that I wanted to correct right just this region and once I selected that region It produced all the other results for me and sometimes I don't even have to change prompt I just roll the dice multiple times until I get what I want and with Corners is the same thing you can find uh rolling the dice a few times you'll eventually find one that is what you're looking for okay I didn't know that is this a new feature I've played with M Journey maybe last time a couple months ago and I don't remember seeing this feature but but I'm not totally up to date months already yeah it's called very region once you upscale you'll find it uh we we have a comment from uh Andreas in the chat saying but the image are not associated with any architectural floor plan so so no just for well I don't think so but for context these are uh image generation for the first part of a project yeah so I face this type of um concerns a lot so they I think people have to kind of shift the way they think about um what this tool is providing because when the traditional Paradigm of looking at a well produced image is a human expectation that everything is resolved but what it actually is is more like a concept sketch except this concept sketch is taking in form of such a detail so when you're looking at a napkin sketch by Frank Gary you're not not expecting a floor plan detail bin model or resolved Solutions on a local level you're given a overall concept right that's the thing that I want people to understand is like a lot of these sort of conceptual architectural Generations that you can do with AI is here to Aid your concept design process there will eventually be a AI potentially that can take in bin models and produce all of those results that you seek but uh that's a different type of AI and we have to talk about them at different aspects of it because um what is powerful right now about these conceptual AI is that it jogs your creative um process is here to a in the concept phase so I think people have to really shift away from the traditional point of understanding of what um uh the computational design process is because it's it's every phase that the AI can help you with it's not just detailing things or refining things or giving Technical Solutions it's also giving qual qualitative Solutions so in many aspects for example you know I would crumble a piece of paper and then let it just produce um architectural expressions from different other Architects but this is merely the same way Frank Gary would crumble a piece of paper to generate some sort of idea it's not supposed to be refined you're not supposed to sort of look at a sketch and ask for did you resolve this or that because different phases have different processes and uh we have to talk about the different processes that exist in architecture so AI absolutely helpful in the concept phase but we're not there yet in the Bim phase and in the detailing phase but it's getting there yeah where where at least they're not connected yet I've I saw I had an episode a few weeks ago with Martin day that uh I think you spoke at one of his conference right an xdev in London am I right yeah I was there but I I have to see the face there's a lot of people I might just uh yeah but but Martin talk about uh multiple AI solutions for Bim one of them can take a rivet model and generate a set of drawings but that's kind of separate and last week we had Chad GPT to help help create formulas and custom toolbar and Revit also kind of separate so we have these Solutions but they're each involved in different phases of the project and what we're seeing here here is more the early phase before Bim is even involved I would say yes yes right yeah uh I'm seeing in the chat couple of question uh people uh a man is asking have you tried Varys how does it compare with M Journey are you familiar with verus from uh yes Labs uh it's the one that's um is taking your drawings and then producing realistic renders it's taking it's yeah it's starting from a 3D view instead of starting from uh from scratch or just a prompt okay so and it yeah I don't use it I've I've seen it I know what it's capable of but the fact I don't use it is actually because I have uh been using another program called um called look X so for example I can show you what look X does is very much the same thing you are producing either 3D model physical model whatever in the sense of it's a visual input and then when you prompt uh something it automatically converts it into something detailed and that ALS works with either sketch plans or cat plans you could generate floor plans out of it for example and some of you seen this one you can take things from nature and even all ow it to become something realistic so that's why I've been using look X because it's um it's a relatively new um way of thinking but uh the office the company has been for a while in the AI domain and uh they're really good at taking massing models and then producing relatively good um render quality images and right now I'm working on a real life project that is um pretty large scale project with multiple parcels and we have massing models so I put that right away into look X to generate realistic output and I change materials we show the clients you know they're also happy to see a lot of these selections very quickly to at least be able to uh get an idea a very rough idea of the of the massing studies that you do so I think l x does very much what um vars does and the difference is lookx is also like specifically trained on architectural data is entire database is architecture so um I think it has that advantage over others yeah I'm looking is it look x. a yeah lx. a okay I'll just space it in the chat I I haven't heard of it before so it's interesting to learn about this there you go so it's in the chat I put the link for people interested in this tool yeah I wish I have more stuff to show for looka well there's this one so uh this is me using uh multi-objective evolutionary algorithm to create multiple iterations where the AI well the genetic algorithm is optimizing the um massing for optimal Behavior so while that is happening I um got these images and then I inserted that into look X to produce a more realistic output so here we can see kind of like two AIS working simultaneously where um the genetic algorithm is optimizing the massing while look X is giving you a idea of what it looks like in real life each of those massings and this is happens in in seconds you know and then here for example is me confirming the optimal massing and then just changing materiality so you can see how look X is able to keep your massing your all your Dimensions as it was and this is in London and it's just producing various um resulting material choices and Architectural Expressions so you can get a lot of you know quick ideas out of um this process and okay what what was the first tool that you use for this one when we saw the the thing moving that was a different kind of AI or is just yeah this is a a type of AI called genetic algorithm and for this particular one I used octopus uh which is uh a plugin for third party plugin for grasshopper in Rhino okay so that's that's a rhino model we're seeing this is a rhino model see and then the image background okay and and ladybug as well for um evaluation yeah uh all right meanwhile I can this is fascinating by the way lots of to have never heard about um there there's a question from Nuna says any concerns about copyright infringement when using promps such as I you know do it in zahad style or Frank Gary style what do you think about that ownership of different artists I saw the same concerns like if in mid Journey like do a drawing in the style of you know an artist that is is currently living for example what do you think about it oh God this topic you know because I feel like I'm in the minority but I have a very strong opinion yeah and I'm extremely against the way people are perceiving what AI is what it does and what should be copyrightable first of all it's like standard US international law that Co like style is not copyrightable this exists in art in art ecture in anything if you like take a style of something and you do something completely new but imitating someone else's style doesn't matter you know the idea that style can be copyrightable is kind of ridiculous and if we live in a world where that will actually be uh persecuted then you are never going to have any continuation of culture because every you know element of culture is a continuation of the past everything we do as creators and designers is inspired by the things that we are taught the things that we've learned the predecessors the people that came before us as I say there's no post-modernism without modernism one thing came after another so you get into this great area of of what the hell you can even uh take ownership of because yeah you can take ownership of the object but if you take ownership of the style that's you know a can of worm that you don't want to open so yeah yeah that's a pretty good point it's like what is a style you know it's pretty hard to Define can you patent a style probably not you can in specific projects I mean there's so many Architects that base their style of other Architects you know yeah I don't want to point any fingers but just for an example uh mad architects who um you know kind of got a lot of sort of work carried on from zahad style and then zahad she herself was heavily influenced our early phases by uh malvik style malovic the suprematist uh movement you know the Russian superst movement and everything carried on to one another so it's hard to say um you know how much influence one influence to the other but it doesn't matter yeah are you still there Tim uh it it seems seems that uh Tim is Frozen the moment I guess he'll be reconnecting all right meanwhile can I still see a screen all right we'll leave a couple of minutes for for tin uh to come back it seems like he's Frozen I I hope everything is fine for for you guys in the chat meanwhile so okay all right a small glitch folks it's happening so Tim should be coming back this again there he is wow lost my internet I think uh had a problem there yeah no problem can can you uh share your screen again yeah or back yeah I think it was the uh the artist Alliance for copyright that attacked you hacked your computer could be yeah this type of argument I think has more um grounds in the art world and even less grounds in the design world because yeah the things that we design are supposed to work in real life you know whatever style we adapt into a new massing a new building the bulk of the work is not the the concept images not the AI it's how you you know actually implement it how you fix how you measure all the doors and the windows and the handrails and how they work at such a minuscule scale how you panelize the flooring tiles and all these things which is really the bulk of the work and requires a whole team of people to do any concept is just a concept so yeah I don't think um worried about it yeah that's a great point and looking in the chat most people seem to uh to agree with you on that yeah it's true that if the culture is going to move around we're going to have to move past these kind of limitations I think I think people are really stuck in the past with regards to this uh conversation because you know um we had many tools in the past that uh work just by us using it and then doing our own thing out of it but the AI is kind of like because you're able to prompt and query another artist our traditional mentality is to think that okay that sounds like it's copying because it's it's taking data from um other people but uh I think that's a very 20th century way of thinking on a 21st century technology because we have to reframe the way we think about what what is a tool what is uh plagiarizing and what is um Ai and if you actually look at nuances what AI does is it it pattern recognizes which means it does what humans do if you ask the AI to scrape the data of whatever architect or artist what it does is it takes the data and it learns from it and then it produces something new out of it just by its correlations of pixels I mean that's literally what artists do if an if I tell an art student to go into a van go Museum and learn all the paintings of Van go and try to replicate van go style but paint something completely different would van go who is dead would van go should have copyright to the students's work who um learned from his style right the obvious answer is no for that student but the moment you replace the student with a machine that can do what the students is doing but at a much more efficient rate then people start to have a sort of lapse in sort of the way they think about this because machine does it so much better they feel like it's a different method but it's not it's learned machine learning is learning and I think that's the point I want to try to make because sadly I think majority of the people in this argument is trying to um think about it in a traditional sense and be on the other side of the argument and I've seen so many laws right now that are being um kind of implemented I see the restrictions that dally 3 has with regards to who you can prompt you know M Journey I've been prompting for example zah style I don't care I prompt the hell out of it but then here and Dy 3 you're not allowed to do that you know you prompting zahad is going to say this is an existing architect you cannot prompt other people's style blah blah blah and um yeah in Adobe too I think right Adobe to in Adobe tools I think Adobe too especially you know someone at the AI Summit who worked for Adobe was was having a conversation with me about this where they think it was supposed to empower the artist and I told them it's completely contrary to that because yeah um you're doing is creating this sort of over commodified system in a world where free information becomes more more free flowing and I think we have to prepare for a society and a world that information proprietorship is no longer the essence of how we drive our economy it should be the idea the ideator the owner the architect the Creator the person who type in the concept the person who thought about what should be brought into into existence regardless whoever style they would like to um prompt into so I think the world is not ready to think in this way and majority of people don't think in this way so I will have to continue you know am my tiate in this particular yeah well I like it I I like that you have a strong stance on it and advocating honestly most of the arguments I saw were Pro probably much on the the side of protecting the artist but the the way you frame it it's true that you know it's it's a style it's not a specific piece of art so it's totally different and I could see the the limitation and it's not necessarily even helping the artist in that sense um so how do you think the role of the architect is going to change with with with AI especially but overall but in these early phases do you think it's just another tool in the toolbox or is you think think that AI is is such a powerful technology that it could change Way Beyond just tool in the toolbox um I mean that's uh depends on how far in the future you want me to project right yeah this is something that is going to continuously improve and um I realized we can only underestimate AI we cannot overestimate it and that's kind of a a fear that I even myself have as much people think I'm an advocate for it I am an advocate for the advancements of our you know industry from being able to take advantage of these tools but at the same time we have to face the fact that the job sectors are going to shift we're going to have to adapt to it so for example like out of what I think so far what we have ai concept exploration is a big topic and this one is already you know something that AI is really seeping into to for example showcasing you guys what I can do with these very very primitive versions of AI already and then for example here I take AI designed images and then I let another video AI called in uh called Runway ml this AI takes an image and makes a video out of it and so then all of a sudden you get like a experience you get like a a preview a sneak peek into a conceptual idea that you can take as a sort of way to progress in your design so it's kind of like um it's kind of like how you use pin interest at the very beginning of some sort of design phase to get some ideas in this way you are prompting your own Pinterest you're creating your own world that you want in terms of Aesthetics of spatial quality of materiality of color all these things are completely under your control and it's just how you want to express the spaces in three dimensions and the AI is able to produce that a mill seconds and so you're bombarded with thousands of Concepts and idea so that is going to hugely change the way we we explore Concepts first of all and then after that another part I would say is the AI rendering that the rendering industry is going to be definitely one of the uh people in the front line of the AI replacement I think renderers jobs are incredibly important how you finesse an image but I think the future is when people take the um is when renderers actually take your um Let me let me go back to the slide again is when renderers will take use of this technology because when you prompt something so basic as a massing model and you can generate something in detail um that's great that's highly efficient but then how you produce images that are well uh composited well composed well um materials I think those decisions will require the the human requirement of what it takes to be a good renderer so those guys will need to sort of really adapt this into the design process into their production process because I think rendering companies are definitely going to see a huge shift first before everyone else in the industry for us working with Bim working with construction they are going to see potentially large language models take over in the later stages but you know there's so much nuances of these little decision making that is less explicit for the AI to be able to readily produce a result that I think it's going to take a little bit longer for the large language model AIS to really catch up to replace these aspects of human task but it's getting there you know so we're seeing for example concept AI mid Journey rendering AI look X or veras as we sent and then Bim conversion and generative detailing construction documentation these are large language model potentials so we're seeing AI sort of kind of like manifest itself in all uh chain of this process and each at different rates so potentially we're waiting for them to connect but when it does we'll have a streamline of AI concept to AI Construction potentially even literally construction like robotic automation everything completely AI operated we have to believe in that world because we're heading there you know automated self-driving cars this is already very close and once we don't drive anymore we're going to be sitting in our driverless cars figuring out how do we control the automated AI for construction and those things are literally in the Horizon as well and uh it's about the human input when that time comes is about how we should incorporate what is important that humans have that that the AI doesn't that's a question we should ask like what we as humans are that are different from machines so it becomes sort of like an existential question of really what we are outside of technology and what we can do that technology cannot replace yeah these are some pretty good questions um so we we could see a future where we generate an image and then from that image you can generate a model and from the model you generate drawings and then maybe you don't even need drawings maybe it goes from model straight to the shop or straight to the field and it's AI driven construction some something like that this is more in the future but I can I see no reason why that wouldn't be possible yeah the the beauty of what you're saying is interesting because the beauty of it is you could do both both right because we value Human Art so potentially we value sketching something letting AI give you the details because then you have the human touch or you can just say we don't sketch anything we implicitly allow AI to generate the massing based on our sustainable requirements our occupancy requirements and so generative AI generative Design This is another domain that can definitely allow AI to self- manifest almost like nature we're almost creating a sort of like uh nature generative sort of uh world where we just program the genes in a way but the genes happen to be scripts and algorithms but the result is optimized Society yeah that was another of my question I saw an article of yours I think on disine and you were talking about about well there's this nature mimicry that AI seems to be able you you saw that um MH the the the was it the pine Kong image where that an object from nature that is turned into a building but even on on the article I saw from you you talked about how we're we're bu building a lot of boring boxes and that AI could allow a return to ornamentation and maximalism and I saw a few questions that people the chat saying well these are really free forms um kind of buildings that you're showcasing so what do you think do you think AI will change the architecture style that we could build and make it easier to build that way it could it could uh I think we have to talk about form we have to talk about the existence of rectal linearity why we had this form in the first place right like I think the Industrial Revolution and modernism took our form design and made everything rectal linear for the sake of compartmentalization ease of prefabrication repetition modularization we built our society on these forms a table is a square rectangle our building grid is a square rectangle our city is built on an iron grid and this is for the sake of you know that sort of efficiency that we look for but then nature is much more efficient than humans when a human wants for example to design a city in an iron grid like Manhattan nature want to design a city like melium allowing creation of like these complex networks that can be done much more efficiently than humans can for example I think they use melium to map out like you know the most uh efficient connectivity of a Tokyo uh Metro Transit and it turns out to be more efficient than what humans can do because you know these uh sort of emergent intelligence from these intelligence AIS or um you know natural sort of emergent U intelligence a lack of better word is that they they can find solutions that humans can't with our rigid systems that we have in place right now and so I think the idea that the retile linear idea of our city and architecture and visual and AR architectural expression is just a modernist Industrial post-industrial vestage that we should reanalyze again because we are now living in a world where things can be generative and I'm not talking just about form imitation I'm talking about the fact that the forms that you find in nature are efficient because you know so it's not um as easy to construct from our traditional perspective but if our future is riddled with 3D printing or drones layering the bricks for you or um non-traditional architectural forms then we will be able to welcome a future where uh High performing geometry will be the priority and as you see in nature why Nature has so many of these complex forms instead of everything rectal linear is because High performing geometry requires uh these organic forms like it's going to take in the form that's going to be best performing so I think because that n natural forms is Superior in many ways due to its performance we're always going to try to optimize our form based on those performances which is why zahad Architects we've done a lot of um you know these type of complex geometries not only because it looks cool but um you done a lot of sort of calculations either you know cfd or solar and you realize that parametricism as a philosophy is not about um visual it's about performance and in a world where we can produce non-repetitive structural members as efficiently there's no need to repeat and we can allow performance to be the main driver of form design and that's why nature exists in such a beautiful and astounding way when it comes to form Expressions yeah are you familiar with the work of ner axman I've been listening yeah I've been listening to an interview of of her with on on Lex Freeman just Z Freeman yeah I was surprised that she she she was a very unique uh person to be invited in that uh in that show but I'm very glad someone in the design realm especially design is representing yeah like for those interested type ner oxman Alex frean and she talks about nature versus human created and how she she's trying or hoping that in the future we can build more in inspired and connected to Nature even and one of the stats that was a bit shocking is that the total mass of human creation so roads buildings sidewalks is now superior to the mass of nature in on planet Earth on the surface which pretty crazy when you think about it really from biosphere and but yeah n is she was previously at Mi lab and she's now exploring how we can do architecture more inspired by by nature but a big step to get there is to change how the construction process not just the design process so how will we get there everything is going to be uh 3D printed what is the process to get there I mean you know when we design we think about about the construction process so I think a lot of the ways when you get to detail designing and when you're understanding how the form is made and how every single uh you know either it's Timber how many layers how it interlaces it's more so about how you understand what the construction is so for example I'm doing like this parametric form it's really based on understanding of um you know what a dome how it works how interated ing Timber structure works and it's really interesting because that's the driver of um a lot of these designs and um yeah we as Architects designers should always uh design with an understanding of how it's being built because you won't design something in a certain form unless you know it's optimized for the construction process and so our future of our construction process is going to change because we have again 3D printing um we have have uh I mean there's like curve folding there's robotic arms fabrication and there's also if I want to be daed uh potential back to manual construction manual carving so for this project I wanted to invert our expectations so you know you have like these beautiful Renaissance uh interiors and things but if you break it down into architectural elements uh we produce this idea of actually allowing AI to design this futuristic um decorative column but then I model this thing in 3D and I work with the a German stonemason and uh he handcarved this and once he handcarved it you can compare to the original it's kind of like reversing the relationship between the human and the Machine you know because uh traditionally we thought while human is the designer the machine is the fabricator and so I think think now with AI we can actually invert that relationship for the first time allowing AI to be the sort of the the generator of ideas and allowing potentially human handicraft to reinvigorate our built world because it's such a millennia old um practice of high Arts that we have lost throughout the ages because we always rever everybody reveres how beautiful a cathedral or all these um traditional architecture is in any European city and yet we build everything in Mass fabricated concretes and boxes you know like what happened to the beauty of uh unless you you're looking at GOI uh sagr Familia which is still under construction you rarely find this type of architecture exist in the current realm even though we rever it so much so I say for this project at least I wanted to kind of posit this question to say how we can bring human labor back into the design process but reverse relationship because by the time we are so you know overtaken by um by Ai and we've been it's replaced all our our manual task we decide what we want to do and perhaps what we want to do is hand carving for one of many examples and so it's a a human artistic expression being expressed as part of the construction process as opposed to letting machines take over everything I think by then it's a choice of what humans want to do instead of uh what humans should do when uh when the machines take over and something that has been surprising for me you know in the past I thought that Ai and automation would affect the more manual labor first and it seems that in the last few years actually it's more the intellectual tasks or the kind of task that you do on a computer that has been uh automated and while like being a plumber actually seems like one of the safest job at the moment that it's going to be hardest so it's it's funny that there's my expectations have been uh hasn't been met in in this regard and well that has been everyone's expectation right since the Industrial Revolution we've got grown accustomed to the idea that machines are there to do the automated task the boring task and the fabrication while humans do all the thinking and then the AI took on a life of its own we're literally in the middle of a revolution I say in that sense because contrary to the Industrial Revolution now we're allowing machines to take over the thinking process and the intellectual task and that's why I think with AI it's not merely another technology it is heralding a new Revolution in the way humans is going to be uh operating in the future and that's why yeah as an architect um we get into this career thinking that it's the least replaceable job right or anyone in the creative field yeah yeah and first people are crying right now are the visual artists because the ones that are taking commissioned to do a design that can now be done in mid journey in 3 seconds they're the ones that are um the first to be uh concerned about this uh Revolution and then comes the certain many of us that will be doing less creative task because the AI will be taking over those and also decision-making task logical task large language models can seem to be performing very well in many of these uh parameters so yeah it's a very strange place and time that we're we're in and uh it's only going to get uh more revolutionary yeah for sure all right so we're we're close to the end so let's let's let's talk about Doom and Gloom a bit so what do you think about AI safety um you think there's a risk for humans I've seen multiple versions of it for example uh youal herrar other of says says that it's the the first one of First Technology that takes power away from human and I've seen CEOs of AI companies saying that well there's a chance between like 5 to 15% chance that humans will self-destruct because of AI are we worried about this or you think this is overblown yeah you know this this topic I have many people have already talked over this and for me I try not to think about it too much because like my contribution to this conversation is the benefit of AI and you know speaking of Harari I was um speaking in the same conference as him and many other uh leading figures at the the Cog X festival at the O2 in London and uh it's just staggering the amount of uh speakers that are all voicing fear which is Justified I'm not going to deny it but with that being said I feel our current dialogue conversation it lacks optimism towards AI on one hand I'm debating people regarding copyright issues on the other hand there's people that are um I wouldn't say fear-mongering but definitely causing more concerns than the than than showcasing the benefits and my job here for me at least I believe what I can do better is to showcase the objective positive benefits that can come out of AI if you introduce it into our built world what it can build a better Society under the control of the right people so I am hesitant to talk about my fears because it's very real because let's face it I I I think about it all the time and I know that there's a very good chance that it's going to cause some big troubles in the future but um that being said I think elong mus those guys will tell you in more detail what they are and I will I also believe it to a certain extent but on my end I just want to make sure that people can see the positives because there's uh going to be a lot of fear and it's going to continue and there's a few of us that are trying to push the technology to its most Optimal Performance and we're going to continue doing that because uh we need a more Nuance discussion and uh requires us to see what AI is capable of in contributing to our Humanity yeah yeah I love that because in the end it's not it's not your power to say what is going to happen your power is to sharing good words about uh what good it can do to architecture and improve our buildings and our built environment so that's definitely a good approach you know it's not on your hand what happens in terms of of safety or at least uh on that scale MH um all right maybe just a couple of uh question there was a question from Elizabeth saying talking about uh quantity versus quality of the work do you think there's again not to talk too much about risks but how do you see AI creating amazing buildings versus maybe just used to Qui quickly create a bunch of more standard buildings automate uh task so it can be done faster yeah I mean with any technology it's a responsibility of the user of the technology whether or not you are uh finessing your results to high quality and standards or you're just doing whatever is most efficient I think it's more of a political question than a design question um when it comes to design yes I could take these ideas and design and make it as good as possible sometimes I spend hours sometimes I spend days working on designs on AI to make sure that it produces the Aesthetics quality that I'm looking for and so with that level of care I have towards the Aesthetics I will also have towards the detailing I will also have towards the functionality and each of those segments of architecture as long as you're there to be responsible enough to understand its importance and and take care of it then you're going to be on the right side of things um that being said yeah it's a tool for efficiency and like any tools there will be people that will use it for Pure feasibility and you will create lack of better word shitty things with it right like for example when grasshopper came out um many people uh spoke against parametric design and things like that and there was a lot of uh resistance towards it because why there's all these people that do minimal effort parametric design uh if you heard of like voronoi for example one of many examples like uh script that you just plug in and automatically generate these very quick populated HS on things and those are a bit overused because it's a very quick and easy way to generate something that looks sexy and cool but in reality it's just like a one script uh thing so like any tool there will be people that take the shortcuts to do what they think is cool but then there will be Architects and real designers that have values that they are trying to incorporate in the design and that takes time with any tools so we live in the age of abundance now with a I it's going to produce us more results than we're capable of digesting so the responsibility the onus is on the user on the designer to produce a good result so like any tool don't blame the tool blame the user so yeah that's all I have to say for that I like it so we're getting toward uh the close of the show so how can people get started I know you have a course or else maybe someone who haven't really used mid Journey or AI tools that much what is the first step to get started I mean first step I think is just to uh get a subscription and type it in type in your prompts and see where it goes because we have to realize that we're at the infancy of a technology and everybody is a just a lonely fish swimming in the new deep blue ocean nobody has explored nobody understands where it's going I am like anybody else we're just here to figure out its potential and if you follow your own path you will find something new and exciting you can take some of the courses that we do people who are using AI for a while and get it uh you know get a bit of a head start you can go on to parametric architecture.com and find workshops of many uh tutors including me teaching AI but uh that being said uh the bottom line is um we are constantly exploring ourselves as technology improves and uh there is no standard way of practice at all it is not like Revit it's not like AutoCat like it's so new and so you should be excited about the fact so just go out there try it out yourself and uh let your artistic Instinct guide you I think that's really the the only thing that can really be of uh substance in the world of and in terms of prompting what what how did you learn how to best prompt was it just trial and error or did you get error but be methodical about your approach right I think a lot of what I learned in zaha the code is we learn to document our observations come up with hypothesis and create methodologies and when you can you know repeat certain experiments you understand the observations and the rules then that becomes your Bible in a way you just document all those things and it becomes quantifiable and then after that it becomes like a manual a rule book that you created yourself and you only add on to the rule book as you keep exploring all right I like that so we can find your courses at PA Academy can can you show that on the screen maybe for people interested sure sure um so if honestly I just go to my website yeah yeah we didn't talk about your own practice what do you spend the most time doing in since you're sted your own firm yeah it's interesting because right now I've been more busy than I've ever been multiple projects as well as exhibitions and um teaching on the side and also just giving talks uh all these things take a lot of time and um it's quite fun for me no complaints so yeah the course itself is uh right now in development for the next one but I don't know I think these links you can just go to how does this work maybe I need to update my website because I don't even know how it works copy link past okay so parametric architecture.com I think they are one of the best platforms when it comes to uh the most new technologies and tools because they have a huge um database of workshops and tutors that teach these things and so you can see um they have creative challenges that you can also participate and see how yourself compare compared to other AI creators and then there's like architecture related things there's AI related so these are all kind of like some of them are ongoing some of them have been done in the past that you can get the recording like this one that's mine is done in the past but I do a new uh lecture a new workshop every two months or so so you guys can stay tune on my website on my Instagram um I will definitely announce the next course when it is available yeah so it's like 30 students and you can interact directly with you to help you yes that's the beauty of it we can work on it together you guys can produce whatever you want to produce and I will show you how to do it better in what direction and things like that yeah uh all right so let me just mention a couple of things before we're closing the show uh so thank thanks again to NCAP for sponsoring this episode of B pure live and don't forget to check out the rivit pure new pamphlet number 30 at rivit pure.com Exel to link bring Excel data into Rivet and next week episode is going to be with Josh rattle uh third time on the show to talk about the new features in andscape 3.5 and this is the season finale of the season of B pure live and will be taking a break but this episode is next week same day on Wednesday 300 p.m. Eastern as well so stay tuned for that uh back to you Tim so is there anything else that you wanted to to mention or showcase before we live for good I think I'm good yeah all right perfect so people can find you find you at uh just type in studio INF with Google or find your course yeah yeah just Google me easiest all right yeah that was a fascinating talk to me thanks a lot for accepting the invitation and I I agree with you I share your optimism regarding AI I mean the safety concerns are valid con concerns are legit but I I think we it's also our duty to be optimistic and see that we use the tool for the best and improve design and improve architecture and try to see the the tool for the good it can do so thanks for sharing these ideas yeah thanks Nicholas it's been a pleasure sharing my U perspective on things and to be part of your show had a lot of fun and uh hopefully we'll do some more things in the future absolutely well thank you everybody and see you again next week thanks Tim bye thanks bye [Music] bye [Music] oh

Channel: Revit Pure

Views: 5,847

Keywords: Revit, Revit Pure Live, Architecture

Id: qrLNc3frzcU

Length: 70min 8sec (4208 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 18 2023