2022 GIA Design Competition

Architectural Design Starting with AI Drawings

INTRODUCTION

The GIA Design Competition is the annual activity at the beginning of every Fall semester for all GIA students. The competition allows students to team up with fellow colleagues of different years and programs, and work together in these intensive 10 days. It also serves as a warm-up event for the returning students and a boot camp for the incoming ones. The theme for the competition is set by the invited international Jury Chair. The Chair coordinates the jury group and determines the rules of final judgment.

THEME

Artificial intelligence (AI) is developing at an ever-increasing pace. Images are used extensively in the architectural design process for architects' own recall of architectural images, communication within the architectural design team, stakeholder engagement, decision making, and public relations.

The significant growth of AI for images can be divided into two main categories: those that identify what is contained in an image, such as object detection and segmentation, and those that automatically generate images that do not exist, such as generative adversarial networks(GAN) and diffusion models.

Regarding the latter, recently, AI image generators, which automatically create an image when a user enters a textual description (prompt), have become capable of producing excellent results with relatively simple operations.

Until now, architects have conceived of new architectural designs and communicated their ideas to others by sketching by hand, fishing for similar materials based on past experience, or searching and selecting from a large number of images stored in image databases via the internet.

AI image generation capabilities may change these traditional methods of design inspiration.