MYTH: 'Architects Won't Have a Role in an A.I. Future'
Actually, They May Have a More Important Role Than Ever
In this post:
The Changing Nature of Space
The Importance of Physical Space
Architects as Weavers of Hybrid Experience
Concluding Thoughts
I wanted to write this post because I was recently challenged by a colleague with a blunt criticism ‘Eric, from your writing, it sounds like you don’t think architects will be doing anything in the future.’
Not so! I just don’t think they’ll be doing what they’re doing now. The onset of A.I., and especially Natural Language, Generative AI, should give us all pause, and inspire deep questions about what it is, exactly, that architects do, and how they create value. I stand stridently against the idea that we should look to A.I. for a means to just do what we’re already doing, just faster and cheaper, mostly because I don’t think that’ll it’ll be possible to win a better, faster, cheaper arms race against A.I. We have to focus on doing the things that only humans can do and carve a defensible perimeter around that.
I have a few ideas on that, but at the moment, what interests me most is the metaverse. Not the ‘Metaverse’ as a branded product by the company Meta, but the general concept of a digital world which we will all increasingly inhabit. Meta’s early experiments in the metaverse were resoundingly awful, and universally panned, for good reason:
Most people found the idea of inhabiting a cartoon world while having your legs chopped off unappealing. It didn’t help that Zuckerberg’s avatar was somehow more dead-eyed and creepy than the man himself:
Zucko may have recently silenced his critics, though, when he was a guest on ‘The First Interview Hosted in the Metaverse’ on the Lex Fridman Show.
The images shown in the middle above, to be clear, are not video. They are a digital reconstruction of each man’s face, in real time. Each speaker’s face, skin tone, blemishes, etc., were scanned into a digital model. The headset monitors the face for changes and transmits them digitally to the other person’s visor, whereupon it is reconstructed into a 3D reality in real time.
Technological triumph notwithstanding, I believe the podcast was an important transition point in the history of the metaverse still being written. We are currently moving beyond our understanding of the metaverse as a cool toy, where we can visit and see a cartoon Eiffel tower or play games with our friends. Instead, we’re coming to see the limitless social, economic, and cultural possibilities embodied in a novel, digital world.
What are the implications for architecture, and architects? That depends on what you think the core function of architects actually is. I don’t think any two architects have ever shared the exact same opinion on that.
To my mind, architects function principally as the organizers of space and designers of experience.
How we organize the space effectively designs the experience. Therefore, how architecture evolves might begin with a question of how space itself is going to evolve.
The Changing Nature of Space
Two Kinds of Space, Spaced Very Far Apart
In the future, assuming the human population continues to grow, we’ll see an increased demand for physical spaces, but a vastly greater increase in the demand for digital spaces. Moreover, there’ll be an increasing imperative to keep the two aligned, but separate.
At present, most of our digital space isn’t just misaligned with our physical space, it’s completely invisible. The ‘Deep Web’ is estimated to be about 400 to 500 times larger than the Surface Web (what you can access through Bing or Google). We prefer some organization in the digital spaces we access, though this hasn't resonated with an architect's skill set. We navigate websites with clicks and buildings with our feet, experiencing the former visually and the latter with all senses
The creation of ‘UX Designer’ as a profession should have surprised no one. People want their online experiences designed, but websites and buildings are made of different things, and experienced in different ways.
While physical and digital design will being to meld, there are ways in which they’ll be held apart. People will be able to commute to their office or their family reunion via AR and VR. But they will not want their metaverse experience in the office to be the same as their metaverse experience going to a family reunion. Offices and homes look different, but that’s not just because they have different programmatic requirements. They look different because we want them to be different experiences. We want to feel a change when we move from our homes to our offices, and from our offices to our churches.
Different spaces speak to different values, different priorities - they embody a story of who we are, and what we think.
We have to imagine that it wasn’t always this way - paleolithic homes, offices and churches were likely just huts of different sizes. But as civilization progressed, different kinds of programs yielded different buildings that were spatially separate, and tectonically different. Those differences are now encoded in our social understanding of what those spaces are (i.e. what a church is supposed to look like).
Spatial Separation
Spatial separation between home, work, school, church, etc. occurs first at a literal, physical level. They cannot occupy the same space, in a pure physical sense. But beyond that, we at some point decided to invent zoning, to ensure that the different regions of our life would occur in different regions of the city. Could you hold a church service in your office? Sure. I’m sure lots of people do. But even where different spaces aren’t held spatially apart, they contend with entrenched tectonic differences as well.
Tectonic Differentiation
Offices and homes are made out of different things. Offices might be made with steel beams, because the size of an office tower demands it. We still stick build homes with lumber, because we can. It’s driven by culture and economics, but has tectonic implications. We grow to expect that a house will be made of certain things, and thus have a corresponding aesthetic. If you hired a high-priced lawyer and were invited to their office for an initial meeting, and their office turned out to be a suburban tract home, it would certainly change your opinion of the lawyer. You want your lawyer to be in an office. Not just any office, but a law office - with shelves full of legal books that no one reads, and dripping with mahogany.
How the Metaverse Changes both Spatial Separation and Tectonic Differentiation
The metaverse challenges traditional spatial separation and tectonic differentiation. Here, every space is composed of bits and essentially exists in the same space, like a visor or glasses. This prompts the question of governing spatial and tectonic qualities in varied spaces. Current office designs, bounded by structural and real estate realities, may have a specified floor area. Yet in the metaverse, such constraints vanish. Should our digital spaces mirror traditional built environment norms, or could an office have a 60’ cathedral ceiling?
Presently, offices follow a standardized design centered around core services for economical and functional reasons. However, in the metaverse, such services become irrelevant, inviting a rethinking of spatial or tectonic character for digital offices.
The conventional locational and structural requirements for 'offices' or 'churches' dissolve in the metaverse. Design is now free, in ways that probably haven’t existed since the primitive hut. We’re not only free in the moment, but will face a challenge of ongoing freedom, engendered by the fluidity inherent in the metaverse.
Fluid Spaces.
Part of what makes an architect’s job challenging is that we have to make decisions today that will be right twenty years from now, or more. This has good and bad effects. On the good side, we find the architectural marvels that we know so well - buildings that were so well done, that even hundreds of years later, they inspire awe and joy. On the bad side, it inspires homogeneity; if you’re going to design an office building that will still be functional as an office building twenty years from now, there’s a strong motive to make it generic, so that it will suit whatever purposes future owners and occupants might have for it.
In the metaverse, there will be no such permanence. Space is freely transformed, and customized.
Customizable spaces
The metaverse opens the possibility for individual users of a space to shape the space around their own preferences. You may share a metaverse office with 25 colleagues, and each of you may prefer a different color scheme. While you may all work in and share the same virtual space every day, it may appear different to each of you. To me, the office is purple. To you, the office is green. How much time should an architect spend determining the color & lighting scheme of an interior, if every entrant to the building is merely going to change it to suit their own preferences?
This, in itself, has five mind-blowing ramifications:
1) Will Circulation Still be a Thing?
I’ve always thought of circulation as one of those architect skills that’s vastly underrated. It’s damn hard to make a building that had good circulation and isn’t just a generic, double-loaded corridor or something. A building with good circulation looks good in plan view, but it’s largely unnoticeable to the non-designer, as they move throughout the building. Circulation only really becomes noticeably bad when it becomes noticeable.
Now imagine your ‘building’ has no circulation at all. The entries and exits to your space function more like a phone. I dial a number, and I am connected to another person, wherever they are. The temporal dimension of connection remains important (are they there to pick up?) but the spatial dimension is completely meaningless. They could be down the hall or across the country. I could use the same door to visit the Cleveland office, as I do to visit the Austin office. I just open it and walk through.
It follows that people will start to organize their spaces to their own liking (assuming that the digital space allows for that kind of control). If I’m an executive with offices in Cleveland, Austin and London, my ‘portals’ will go there. The executive down the ‘hall’ manages clients in Wichita, Seattle and Boston, so her ‘portals’ will go there. To speak to each other, we don’t even need a hallway. We can just open a portal between our two offices.
And yet, who governs where these portals go?
It has become a fixture in corporate architecture to design circulation around the imperative to get people to interact and intersect with one another. You put the office kitchen here, and the conference there, because you know that in the comings and goings, people are going to run into one another, and in all those little spontaneous interactions, cooperation and creativity are unleashed.
Can the same be designed into a ‘portal’ based circulation system? Perhaps when I leave my office to go through the portal to the Austin office, I first have to go through a ‘lobby’ where others are similarly in traffic. I sacrifice a few moments of expediency in order to recover the spontaneity of the ole’ office water cooler. I wonder whether anyone in Silicon Valley is currently considering how important that is.
2) Who are the Clients?
If it becomes the case that spaces are infinitely customizable, that suggests that in many ways, the individual users of a space become the client (as well as the architect, and the contractor). If they don’t like the position of a window, they can just move it. To do so, they would need to inhabit a digital environment where that level of control has been designed into the system. That design action comes at the behest of someone - is that someone the client? Someone, somewhere, will be paying for the creation of all these digital spaces, but who are they, and what are they paying for?
Every architect does a dance between doing what the client wants, and designing what they know the user will need. Blurring the line between client and user will make an architect’s job more challenging, but potentially more rewarding as well.
3) Will Space Branding still be a Thing?
You could lose 90% of your vision and still recognize a Home Depot. The familiar orange safety color, along with white text, and the big box form, is probably recognizable from 50 miles away, although I’ve never tried that. But what if you’re the sort of person that hates big box stores. You’re like myself - I prefer the old fashioned, neighborhood hardware stores that sometimes seem like one big junk drawer, and yet you always seem to be able to find what you need? You can’t buy a pallet of Monster Energy drinks, but you can buy that little screw that you need for your project. Will a company like Home Depot hold onto its branding, knowing that they can easily reconfigure the virtual store to respond to every customer’s needs and preferences? Branding is only important because of the psychological effects it produces - principally reliability and consistency. When you see the orange and white, you know what’s inside the store. You know how wide the aisles are, and the color of the flooring, and everything else. And you know that you’re going to be able to find just about anything you need (although it may take a while, since the associates never seem to be around).
The psychological comfort created by branding seems redundant in the metaverse. In a metaversal Home Depot, of course you’re going to find what you need - it’s an infinite virtual store with every widget and tool ever produced. And you can find it much easier without having to wait in line, or navigate aisles the length of a football field. Home Depot’s signature warehouse layout - the wide aisles, the high shelves, etc. - is done to facilitate the moving and shelving of products. But why would that be necessary in a metaversal store? In truth, a metaversal Home Depot could be purple and yellow, and the size of a Wendy’s, and it wouldn’t matter to the consumer because they would still end up with what they need.
Home Depot may decide that their visual brand is something they want to preserve in the metaverse. Or they may not. That will be a choice faced by all businesses, and an important issue on which architects will need to help their clients.
4) Will Buildings Still Collocate?
A city is defined by a bunch of strangers all wanting to co-locate, because they wish to benefit from the resources that their cohabitation creates. If I have an architectural office on the 21st floor of a building, and there’s a print shop across the street, that’s good for me. It’s also good for the print shop. We collocate buildings to create such symbioses.
But why, in a world devoid of Euclidean spatial dimensions, would people do that? For that matter, why do popular depictions of the metaverse always look like cities:
There doesn’t seem to be any reason why people would collocate buildings, digitally. There remain plenty of reasons why people would want to collocate in the physical world. Humans are fundamentally social animals, and I don’t think we’ll ever shed our need for in-person interaction at some level. But why, in the metaverse, would you have any two buildings adjacent to one another? What would be the point?
5) Who Controls Space?
Amid all these questions about the new nature of space in the metaverse, the most important question might be: who controls it? No one controls my phone - I can call anyone I want, at any time. If I’m an executive at a company, does that company have the right to restrict where my portals go, and don’t go? And if so, does the architect of the metaverse then become an agent of that control?
Architects tell people where to go, and not go, in very real ways. We put a wall there, a planter there, and we define the spaces that people are allowed to inhabit. Will that still be the case?
The Importance of Physical Space
I would like it to be clear that I don’t believe that people will want to inhabit or retain physical spaces just out of nostalgia. We need physical space. We need the feeling of security that comes from having a home. We need the feeling of community that comes from attending a church.
Moreover, we already have the space. There’s a finite amount of land mass on Planet Earth. I predict that as more and more of our interactions move into the metaverse, it will heighten our desire for physical spaces with real people. People have always found the rapid acceleration of technology disorienting, and arguably that has been the main psychological effect of modernism writ large.
Architects as Weavers of Hybrid Experience
Although it’s always been the nerds’ fantasy, and a staple of most sci-fi, I doubt we’ll come to a point where we entirely inhabit a digital world. Your ‘portal’ might take you to some digital restaurant, but it can’t serve you digital hot dogs - you have to go to a real restaurant for that.
For that reason, it seems logical that another one of the central roles of architects will be in navigating the interplay between physical and digital space. Maybe you want to go to a digital restaurant, so you can watch digital chefs making your food, or explore the menu, or some damn thing. But at some point, you need the food. The food will need to be made in a physical kitchen, and that physical kitchen needs to be in some physical proximity to wherever it is that you are.
That may ultimately be the most important role of the future architect: as a mediator between our digital, metaversal experiences and our ongoing experiences in the built environment. How do we ‘sync up’ the design of the metaverse with the design of the built environment such that human wellbeing and happiness is maximized?
A Thought Experiment:
Suppose I want to go out to dinner and take advantage of the metaverse to virtually visit a few restaurants in order to check out the menu, and see what the vibe is. This presents challenges, depending on how far away the actual restaurant might be. It would do me no good to find a restaurant that I really like, only to find out that it’s 200 miles away. Whomever designs my virtual environment needs to take care to organize my virtual restaurant visits in such a fashion that I am only exposed to the ones that are physically within some preset distance. It would also make sense to confine my visits to only restaurants which have available seating or reservations for that evening. Furthermore, it makes sense to have some kind of adaptive intelligence built into the virtual environment. Rather than proceeding through restaurants randomly, like Yelp, I could speak into my virtual environment ‘This is too crowded’ and the next restaurant I visit would be constrained to only those restaurants that are less crowded than the one I was just in. From there, a portal might open up to a restaurant that is similar, but less crowded.
In a physical environment I would walk to (or drive to) restaurant after restaurant, in an order governed by their physical location, more than anything. In a web-based environment, a la Yelp, I can peruse restaurants based on some kind of filtering criteria: price, whether they’re dog-friendly, etc. But there is little connecting the two.
The ‘weaving’ will be a complex design challenge. Perhaps I’m interested in the neighborhood vibe of a restaurant. I would need to be able to virtually visit that restaurant, and then virtually exit the restaurant and see a digital twin of the surrounding neighborhood. Or, as in the prior example, I might just want to move on to a different restaurant in a different part of town. It merely depends on what kind of experience I wish to have.
Architects are really good at, and have always been good at, curating experiences.
An architect’s design demands that you proceed from the narthex, to the nave, to the crossing, to the choir, to the apse. More than a mere spatial arrangement, it is an arrangement of experience, designed to evoke particular feelings and emotions.
Until now, architects have benefited from the fact that that arrangement is set in stone, metaphorically and literally. UX designers, by contrast, contend with an environment (the web) where the visitor is allowed to go where they want, within a range of specified choices. You do not have to proceed from the narthex, to the nave, to the crossing, to the choir, to the apse - you are given links to each, and you can click on whatever you want. The metaverse will be somewhere in between.
Concluding Thoughts
The metaverse would be useless if it were only a large, continuous, immersive website. We already have the internet, and most of it is hot garbage. To be useful, the metaverse will have to parallel the lives that we’ll still be living in the physical world. It should enhance our experience of life, not substitute for it. To do that, the metaverse will have to be designed as a complement to our existing built environment, while simultaneously prompting us to think about which traditions in the built environment we’re prepared to let go of. We no longer have to design offices on an orthogonal structural grid. But maybe we want to? Maybe our clients want to? Architects, if they want it, will have a big role to play in helping clients ask and answer the questions demanded by the creation of the metaverse.