… every architecture firm in the future will have to respond to technological changes that are rocking the profession. Over the past two decades, new tools have transformed ateliers into veritable computer labs. But soon the continuing digital revolution may have even more dramatic consequences…
One technology that could be particularly disruptive to the profession is machine learning. An approach to achieving artificial intelligence, machine learning is a way for computers to discern patterns in vast quantities of data. But several experts say it could also be used to generate designs. According to Kat Park, the firm-wide emerging-technology leader for Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), machine learning is different from parametric modeling, in which you “wrote a script to produce a design outcome. That’s the old school way of using computers.” With machine learning, however, “there is no script. The computer is a black box.”