The Bioarchitect: how the dawn of AI gave birth to a new profession

(Disclaimer: This is not a research paper and has not been peer reviewed. Always check your soures when looking for claims of original content.)

Ever since the beginning of the Agricultural Revolution, some 12,000 years ago, human beings have dramatically altered their living environment. What started as an innocent process of selecting the best seeds to plant became the most peculiar change to our planet’s surface. From erratic creatures, we became sedentary ones, accumulating wealth and allowing the development of complex societal structures that changed the character of our relations. We built cities and ingenious infrastructures such as roads and levees with the intention of taming our surroundings and satisfying our needs for comfort.

The story, indeed, has been told with both pride and shame, as different authors drew conclusions that best suited their narratives. 19th- and 20th-century societies built factories and open-sky mines while proclaiming the triumph of man above nature. Resources, they said, were ours to take, and natural laws were an obstacle to the progress of man. Romantics and post-1970s environmentalists, on the other hand, cried for regulations intended to preserve the beauty of our planet and advocated for the return to a pre-industrial society.

The truth is that, no matter which side you’re on, the overwhelming evidence of human-induced climate change, pollution, and biodiversity destruction shown in recent years has given us plenty of reasons to change course and reset our relationship with Mother Earth.

The Agricultural Revolution, so the story goes, brought civilization. And with it came all the problems humanity didn’t have before: inequality, conflict, and resource hoarding. Yuval Harari, the author of the influential book “Sapiens: a brief history of humankind,” even labeled it “our biggest mistake,” questioning the decision that traded a life of freedom for a life chained to the plough.

But it’s pretty hard to argue in favor of our old days as hunter-gatherers. Humans are too innovative (and perhaps even too lazy) not to try to find the shortest path towards their ambitions. It’s simply coded in our DNA. No one can deny that our cities, buildings, and infrastructures are absolute marvels, outstanding testimonies to our intelligence and ambition. They’re engineered environments designed to free us from the distractions that prevent us from reaching greater goals. Inside them, we feel warm and dry; we can play without the fear of lions, and we can spend time thinking, reading, or writing long before the sun goes down. If the limits of other creatures are carved in stone, then ours are certainly carved in silicon. And we are teenagers in control of the engravers.

But it's right to ask what greater goals our artificial environments help us pursue. Sometimes, it seems that humanity has totally forgotten about its flatmates, keeping around only the bad companies it cares about. Partying seems to be all we do, and Mother Nature’s demand for more responsibility is growing louder every night.

The progress architects, engineers, and other professionals of the construction industry have so enthusiastically cheered in the last century was rooted in the idea that buildings were our third skin, intended to keep us safe from the dangers outside. And they were not totally wrong. That’s what got us here anyway. But the further we shielded ourselves from the outside world, the more we forgot how vulnerable we are when things don’t go our way. Buildings thought by architects, calculated by engineers, and built by contractors whose sole purpose was to serve humanity and no one else have failed in the very same mission they were trying to accomplish.

Neglecting the environment has proven to be a bad strategy. We’ve seen floods wiping out buildings erected in wrong locations (such as riverbeds) and heavy rains dragging houses when there were no trees around to hold the earth. Foundations subsiding when not enough water permeated the soil, strong winds and hurricanes lifting entire neighborhoods from the ground, and wildfires fueled by rising temperatures carbonizing entire islands. Soon, we’ll face other effects of climate change, such as sea-level rises that will swallow valuable coastline real estate and intense heat waves that will force us to spend vast sums of money updating our building envelopes.

But modern times and modern technology have humbled us and pointed towards some alternatives. An increasing portion of decision-makers seem to be gradually shifting from an anthropocentric view of the world to a broader, more naturalistic one that reinforces our place among other living organisms, not only for the sake of our survival but also as a genuine reflection of our purpose on earth. If there is any, of course.

It is no coincidence, then, that such enlightenment comes with the rise of Artificial Intelligence. The existential crisis it sparked in a proud species like ours gives us the incredible opportunity to reconnect with our natural selves. If we assume that high-end computers - with high-end deep learning algorithms - will soon have the capacity to inform us better than any other human, government, or institution about the consequences of our decisions, then our intelligence will seem much more like that of other great apes than those of modern computers. And if we’ll no longer be the most artificial “beings” on the planet, then perhaps we should align our interests with those of other living creatures.

In the case of our built environment, that means bridging the gap between the organic and the synthetic. Many architects and urbanists have written about that relationship in the past. Ebenezer Howard, perhaps the most famous example, wrote about the so-called “Garden Cities”: a low-density, well-connected group of towns that blended nature with the living environment seamlessly. Its concepts would then be picked with more or less success by well-known folks such as Bruno Taut (with the Stadtkrone), FLW (with its Broadacre City), and Le Corbusier (with its infamous Villa Radieuse).

And while it is difficult to build entire towns from scratch to accommodate such principles, adapting the existing ones to greener forms of urbanism has had many proven benefits. The incorporation of nature into the built environment is believed to lower stress levels on both animals and humans. Trees and plants can mitigate the effects of pollution generated by vehicles and combat heat-island effects, therefore increasing the overall health of urban populations. Urban gardens designed on rooftops, for example, provide both entertainment and food sources with simpler supply chains and fresher tastes. Some forms of therapy even prescribe them as ways of improving mental well-being: it’s said that taking responsibility for the growth of plants is related to an increase in self-esteem and higher levels of empathy towards other humans.

But rising to greener forms of living doesn’t just mean escaping the vicious net of anthropocentrism. It also means acknowledging that our innovative and unique character among other organisms gives us the responsibility to preserve our planet for future generations of humans, animals, and plants alike.

That means thinking of cities and architecture not only as the third skin of mankind but also as an extension of natural biomes, a gift from us to Mother Nature from which we should expect no counterpart. After all, cleaning up our bedroom shouldn’t be a motive for a “thank you <3” note.

Paradoxically as it may seem, the only way we can achieve that is through the next generation of the technologies that created the imbalances we are suffering from today. I’m talking, of course, about AI. If put to good use, Artificial Intelligence has the unique potential of solving some of the problems we’ve created while departing from nature during our search for material prosperity.

There’s no point lying to ourselves: the challenges we face when we’re designing our buildings have become far too demanding not to rely on supernatural forms of intelligence. Whether it is cross-referencing thousands of pages of legislation or preparing 3D models with many terabytes of data for prefabrication, making cent-detailed budgets, or precisely calculating the CO2 emitted during a building’s entire lifecycle, there are tasks that are simply too difficult to be performed even by the most experienced professionals. Our biology simply doesn’t allow us to work and think harder.

With AI, architects, urbanists, and other stakeholders responsible for the design and fabrication of our dwelling machines have the means to make informed decisions about the environmental implications of their creations. With so much computer power available, we should no longer need to choose between a building that serves our interests and a building that respects the environment. Serving both humanity and nature - without bipartisanship - should be the focus of our work from now on. A new perspective on the purpose of architecture emerges.

It is by leveraging the power of modern hardware, software, and fresh data that we inform the decisions needed to protect both ourselves and our planet. Nowadays, there is a plethora of tools, methodologies, and guidelines that aim to minimize our environmental footprint.

Among such tools are rising BIM superstars that break from previous, cumbersome platforms with siloed data stocks that use advanced generative design techniques to iterate at the speed of light on the best fits for a specific site. Such processes let us achieve previously impossible levels of optimization, whether we’re trying to use sunlight as a source of heat during winter or to correctly dimension the size of common areas given the number of expected users and their thermal output. Doing each of those things separately is challenging, but doing all of them at the same time is unfeasible. Calculators that calculate buildings instead of numbers are now more important than ever.

A great example of such a “calculator” is Spacio, a browser-based BIM platform that aims to impregnate the design process with scientific arguments. Using machine learning algorithms connected to reputable external sources of data, Spacio is able to provide a centralized design/analysis drawboard where different sources of knowledge (legal, aesthetic, economical, technical, and environmental) get together to communicate on the pros and cons of different iterations.

Recognizing the mistake architects and engineers recurrently make when they start planning a building from scratch - as if no prior knowledge has been accumulating at the top of their desks for years - its developers define it as “a platform for documenting and structuring building data and to provide tools for visualizing, comparing, and iterating these datasets”. Performing energy analysis, checking legislation, budgeting, or optimizing circulations has never been easier these days.

So, if these tools already exist, what stops us from adopting them? In my opinion, what’s lacking is an agreement on the goals we want to focus our efforts on and a steady adoption of the means required to achieve them. And, perhaps, a new mediator charged with the task of highlighting the win-win situation we’re facing. Therefore, if we are to satisfy both humanity’s material and spiritual aspirations without sacrificing nature’s generosity, we’ll need a new type of professional: the Bioarchitect.

A concept comprising the terms “bios” (from the ancient Greek “life”) and “architekton” (roughly meaning the “master builder”, thus suggesting the idea of a “master builder of life”, or to a more modest extent a “master of living buildings”), the Bioarchitect represents a working ethos and a social consensus rather than an actual job title itself. For now, of course.

But unlike previous low-tech, digital-averse environmentally conscious architects (whose service has been much, much appreciated), the newly born Bioarchitect must leverage all the tools humanity has spent its time on Earth perfecting to provide solutions at scale for our withering planet. Forward is the only way out. And that, of course, means joining efforts with Artificial Intelligence.