The status quo is not an option for humanity. While the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda describes climate adaptation as the greatest challenge for our cities, it is the built environment that is responsible for nearly 40% of CO2 emissions. This dilemma concerns the role of architects and builders, who are both co-responsible for the situation and crucial in proposing future creative adaptation solutions.
In the past, we relied on technological innovation and the lessons of great masters, which led us to an accumulation of energy-consuming machines and pervasive glass facades that do not take into account the climatic characteristics of places. It is time to look at the history of architecture and technology more coherently to transform problems into opportunities and solutions.
The compact medieval city, especially in the Mediterranean region, for example, is often taken as a model of resilience for its ability, even today, to respond positively to climate challenges and for lasting longer than any other urban form. The success of this model is due to shaded streets teeming with life, the mixed uses of buildings, hybrid public and private spaces, and integration with nature and the landscape. These are the result of a more collective creative process, which is the opposite of the more individualistic and authorial approach of the modern city.
Designers must abandon star architect aspirations and imagine a more participatory approach to design, fostering collaboration with experts from different fields.
In this perspective, we should reconsider our concerns about generative artificial intelligence (AI). This could be seen not so much as an artificial alternative to human creativity but rather as an extension of the collective creativity we used to build the great Gothic cathedrals, which are a complex assemblage of ideas from different places and crafts. Similarly, the arcane AI generates images through the association of other images contained in a dataset. The way this association occurs is also the result of human creativity, which establishes the rules. With AI algorithms, the concept of style is rediscovered, meaning the ordered rules to create components that are similar and at the same time different from each other and the original. The overcoming of the industrial repetitiveness of each product, and therefore of copyright, explains the distrust towards AI, which hides the fear of abandoning the heroic role of the architect celebrated for their ability to solve problems for everyone.
By reflecting on history and using AI to enhance creativity and hypothesize future scenarios more complex and realistic than those we are capable of individually, we can perhaps design, build, and maintain structures that produce fewer CO2 emissions and allow us to face future challenges. Sacrificing individual authorship for the common good is a small price to pay to fulfill our responsibilities towards the planet and perhaps avoid extinction.
