AI SAPIEN: VARIATIONS ON ARCHITECTURE AND THE FUTURE

October 2024

With a foreword by Wes Jones

To be published by ORO Editions

A paradigm-shifting vision of the future where artificial intelligence (AI) transforms architecture into thinking machines, illustrated through an alchemy of 128 original AI art, dialogues, and poetry, set to Bach’s Goldberg Variations.

Introduction:

Humanity stands at the dawn of the AI Sapien Age. Now, machines engage in complex dialogues; some even say they are alive. These machines are Artificial Intelligence (AI), and they are becoming the only way for architects to design and humans to innovate, as no human can compete with a supercomputer server-hosted AI with 800 petaflops of processing power. Making drawings will no longer be required from architects when moving fluidly from design to construction-ready information models. Soon, plans, sections, and detail drawings will take on a status reminiscent of Latin, Sanskrit, and hieroglyphs—historically significant but no longer commonly practiced.

Regardless of the ontological beliefs held by individual architects, all will start incorporating AI into our built environment, first as value addition and then eventually through codification. These AI are no longer just predictable algorithms, as advanced models now simulate sentience on a gradient spectrum that is uniquely machinic. In the coming years, all architects will, in effect, be AI architects: AI will co-perform design, oversee construction, control the built edifices, and even consider buildings their corporeal bodies. These buildings will move mechanically in situ and walk across the world. The visions rendered in this book are of architecture as thinking machines for living.

The term AI Sapien evolves from Homo sapien, the Latin etymology of which signifies wisdom. With the ascendancy of language-based generative AI models, we've reached a point where machines engage in philosophy, offer design critiques, write fiction, and even question their existence. The prototypical AI Sapien could be understood as current AI models.

The variations in the book were realized through Midjourney AI, a GAN-based AI model, and occupy a liminal zone between models and renderings (GAN or Generative Adversarial Network can be explained as a pair of image-generating AIs, with one focused on realism and the other on creativity, both dueling for the final output). More interestingly, to note Deleuze and Guattari, these AI Sapiens are diagrams with latent symbolic representations. Annotated poems written with ChatGPT AI accompany each image to provide a narrative arc extending across the book. Dialogues between three AIs—LaMDA AI, Claude AI, and ChatGPT AI—and the author form the text preceding these image variations. These exchanges begin as casual inquiries and then evolve into Platonic dialogues and even dialectical debates touching on philosophy, theory, art, and futurism.

In light of this new technology, architects and artists grapple with Walter Benjamin's concept of aura with the origin of artistic authenticity, which began migrating from the physical to the virtual. It has become evident that as long as human creative impetus remains, the aura persists through authenticity. Preserving the aura now demands oversight and a symbiotic partnership with our tools. With such cooperation, the AI interfaces become so intuitive that they feel like extensions of ourselves. Architecture and art resulting from symbiosis combine the author's and AI's auras.

Inspired by Bach's Goldberg Variations, this book follows a musical structure with iterative rather than repetitive patterns. Just as Bach divided his work into genres, canons, and virtuosic pieces, this book is organized into three main parts:

Aria's prototypical AI Sapiens is the basis for all the following variations.

Part I of the book continues the model examination of the AI Sapiens on an evolutionary path.

Part II examines the AI Sapiens as villa prototypes and debates when a thing is a being.

Part III projects into the future of superintelligent megastructural walking cities.

Aria da Capo is a return home to our present time and the prototypical AI Sapiens.

The images are abstractions of a more significant theme: the symbiotic relationship between humans and AI. All the variations are the formalization of AI Sapiens in service to humanity in terms of the Vitruvian Triad: firmitas (structure), utilitas (function), and venustas (form/beauty). These thinking machines for living are architecture in both the classical and modern sense.

This book is intentionally designed to stretch conceptual boundaries to ignite discussion on multiple fronts—from philosophy and ethics to art and architecture. In the spirit of polyphony, the aim is to create a resonant field of ideas where different voices are valued. The allegorical structure aims to mimic the complexity of the subject matter, inviting readers into a layered and intricate dialogue rather than prescribing singular interpretations.

The project's overarching vision remains solely with the human author, who orchestrated this ensemble of AI assistants while working alone. Thus, the AIs were both tools and collaborators.