Designing Time: Architecture’s Time-Traveling Journey in the age of AI

It is interesting to observe how, little by little, architecture is evolving into something more. A static discipline by nature (due to the importance of keeping buildings still) has gained another dimension in recent years, thanks to the dissemination of video content featuring it. I have been curious about this phenomenon in recent months, thanks to the fast pace at which AI tools that animate images are developing. Furthermore, the widespread adoption of short video content types on social media, thanks to TikTok and Instagram Reels, has revealed a deep desire from the public to see more artistic animations than we thought were possible. If an image is worth a thousand words, then videos these days are worth a million. Big tech leaders are aware of that, and they're pouring Herculean efforts into making them as widespread as possible.

For that reason, a growing part of architectural production is becoming some kind of performance that includes motion or sentient-like features, whether in the form of video, augmented reality, or perhaps, one day, in the form of virtual reality sensing that will link human beings to the Metaverse and will allow humans to experience constructions with tactile feedback, being able to feel textures and, why not, even sense the smell of fresh paint.

We’ll find ourselves inside Leonardo DiCaprio’s dreams in the movie “Inception”, where with only the power of the mind, the subject will be capable of bending reality to their own taste and changing their surroundings at will. These are exciting news because we will be able to expand our understanding of architecture in ways we didn’t think were possible before.

For all of this, Professor Bruno Zevi would be proud. In his 1948 book “Architecture as Space: How to Look at Architecture,” he talked about what he thought architecture really was. He thought it was the space inside the buildings we inhabit. Nothing could make us experience architecture more than its own spatial features. They were, in fact, its sole purpose. For that reason, he even went on to claim that the Parthenon was not architecture due to the fact that you couldn’t be “inside” of it! I know.

And the only way we could perceive space, he said, was by walking around it, and that implied that architecture had to have a temporal dimension that aided in the perception of its three classical dimensions. In those days, adding a fourth dimension to architecture meant, like it does today, walking around an Italian village, entering a church, or visiting a 16th-century Baroque palace to understand what the architect had intended for their work. However, most architectural creations, also like today, are confined to a geographical location with little to no access for the common person. For that reason, whoever wanted to study a famous work by a foreign architect had to resort to black and white pictures, some plans and sections, and a description of what the building was all about. Zevi thought this to be an inefficient way of perceiving such a wonderful discipline. He thought that technological advances in video capture could aid the perception of architecture. He thought that one could only have a deeper understanding of what an architectural work was all about if they saw a movie or watched a documentary about it. A movie, Zevi said, was the most straightforward way of getting to know an architectural work that you couldn’t be at.

Things have not changed much since then. Most of us haven’t been inside the masterpieces of our civilization and, therefore, haven’t been impressed by them firsthand. But we resort nowadays, however, to better depictions and more widespread availability of videos of the architecture we like. That has led to more ways of understanding our built world. But with the advance of virtual reality technologies, greater computer processing and storage, and affordability of personal devices, Zevi’s worries have been wittingly addressed. In future years, virtual and mixed-reality headsets will allow us to confront face-to-face the works of the great masters, from Classical Antiquity to the latest Pritzker Prizes, and will help us test, prototype, and share our creations in a virtual world with other people.

But today, we dream about that reality while living in a parallel one in which you can produce and consume architecture in ways no one thought were possible. The latest image-to-video AI tools show us new forms of creating and interpreting what a building actually is and challenge us to think about what our profession will be all about. In a competitive world where laying a brick in a building site is getting increasingly harder, architects’ ingenuity will find ways to soothe their creative impulses and prevent all of us from going insane. I don’t see why that should be a problem.

However, it's only fair to acknowledge that architecture has always possessed a temporal dimension. It simply works at a different pace from our biological ways of perceiving it. Buildings grow, age, and die just like anything else, and if they did it in real-time, they would be of no use to us.

At times, a building's aging process imparts a character it lacked upon its initial completion. Plants may flourish on its facade, well-treated wood can gracefully mature, and architectural styles once considered too avant-garde may now be deemed chic or "vintage." However, with the aid of AI tools like Kaiber AI, you can dramatically alter the style of such avant-garde architecture, transporting it staright into the past or projecting it into the future, reshaping its form entirely in a matter of seconds. This allows you to witness, in real time, the evolution of a building—a process that would have previously taken years—and even plan its obsolescence by observing how materials react over time.

That is crazy! A modernist masterpiece can now be, humorously, turned into a Venetian Palace, with gondolas instead of cars surrounding it. You can predict, coarsely, how your building will age and if you’re happy about it. You can choose a material and ask an AI model to fast forward 40 years and see what happens. And that opens up a lot of opportunities. Concepts such as style could disappear - or mutate - as architectural production moves into Metaverses of different time speeds or into more widespread forms of video content where you share with your community your creations. You can simulate, bend, distort, test, and blend different forms of architecture in ways you couldn’t do before. What that means, I’m not entirely sure, as we’re still living in the early days of AI. But one thing is true: it will be very, very entertaining to watch.