From Paper to Building with Artificial Intelligence

by Rene Reiter

How did architect Frank O. Gehry come up with the design for the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao?

Students delved into this question to subsequently design a building themselves, inspired by Frank O. Gehry's creative process. A crumpled piece of paper was enough to make various sketches and develop a preliminary draft. Using artificial image generation, the students created a building model based on these drafts.

The challenge was to create a precise prompt list and to explain to the AI exactly how the building should look. Initial results resembled more of a doghouse, but the students continuously improved the prompts, eventually generating very interesting building models.

The students discovered that while image generation stimulates creativity, it often only imprecates the ideas and visions one has in mind inaccurately. They enhanced their skills in image description to generate a building from sketches and broadened their media literacy by learning to use AI assistance for image generation.