The first AI-designed buildings are coming

On an unremarkable vacant lot in Atlanta’s West End, a proposed rowhouse construction project could soon become a milestone of modern design. The building itself is not particularly special; its 17 units have attractive geometrical facades, large picture windows, and will be affordably priced. More notable than the design of the project itself is how it was designed.  

To an uncommon degree, artificial intelligence was used extensively throughout the design process, from market analysis and conceptual design to regulatory compliance and material selection. The building, which is going up for zoning approvals this week, could be one of the first projects designed largely through AI to actually get constructed.

The project was designed—or, perhaps more accurately, codesigned—by Cove Architecture, an arm of the technology services firm Cove, which offers AI consulting to architects and designers. Founded by two trained architects, Cove uses AI to optimize project planning, design, engineering, and bidding for architecture and developer clients around the world. Through Cove Architecture, the company is now using the AI tools it’s been building since 2017 to pursue AI-designed building projects in-house.

Cofounders Sandeep Ahuja and Patrick Chopson say AI was used to greatly accelerate the Atlanta project, achieving a 60% reduction in design timelines, early-stage cost estimates that hit 95% accuracy, and a 40% cut in design iteration expenses. “Instead of it taking six months, we’re doing it in a month,” Ahuja says. “Speed is the superpower.”

[Image: Cove Architecture]

The little details

While many architects were quick to embrace the visualization powers of generative AI, using it to pump out conceptual designs and lightning-fast renderings, a recent report showed that only 6% of architects are actually using AI regularly. Chopson says Cove Architecture is using AI for all the tasks that underlie the design.

[Image: Cove Architecture]

Complying with zoning codes is one major use case. “The city of Atlanta’s zoning code is very complex. It has a lot of tables and different regulations. You’ve got to go to different spots to understand what you really can do, and then you also have to look at what the city has approved in the last year,” says Chopson, who’s been a practicing architect for more than 20 years. “All that analysis can take a few weeks, but we can do that in a few days.”

[Image: Cove Architecture]

The company does this through several specialized AI agents that analyze site conditions, cost parameters, local regulations, structural approaches, floor plans, and exterior designs. “We have all of these agents talking to each other,” Ahuja says.

That creates a set of guidelines that Cove Architecture’s team then uses to fine-tune a design. “We get to spend more of our time as artists working on the art of it and less time chasing down all the little details,” Chopson says.

[Image: Studio Tim Fu]

A technological push and pull

Those little details can make or break a project. When London-based architecture firm Studio Tim Fu was hired to design a series of luxury villas in a historical area on Lake Bled in Slovenia, the client had already had a few previous proposals denied by the local heritage agency. The firm’s founder, Tim Fu, who previously worked at Zara Hadid Architects, used several AI agents, a large language model, and consultations with local designers to navigate the specifics that would help the project meet the heritage agency’s requirements. He says the AI tools helped define the constraints of the site, allowing the design to comply with regulations about the height and slope of the villa roofs, as well as maximizing daylight through window and building orientation.

[Image: Studio Tim Fu]

“We have an extensive list that we tick, and every time you tick those boxes that are conceived together with the local architect and the large language model and our research, the heritage agency is happier,” Fu says. “There are very strict things that helped us to develop a project of such heightened luxury at such a controlled site, which is nearly impossible.”

[Image: Studio Tim Fu]

Fu says the designers and the client (an undisclosed Slovenian philanthropist) are confident that the AI-designed building will meet the heritage agency’s approval and begin construction in the next year or so.

Fu says AI is being used for more than just checking regulatory boxes. His firm has integrated bespoke and commercial AI tools to shape design concepts that are then refined by human designers. For example, they will train an AI model to perform a task like designing around specific roof requirements. Those design concepts will then be fed into a generative AI tool to create renderings that are adjusted by architects using Photoshop and the studio’s own built-in AI tools. Those drawings then go through more rounds of revisions using data sets specific to the site, the local market conditions, and the client’s requests.

As specifics are narrowed down, AI-generated concepts are further refined by human architects. “We remain a critical eye on this whole process to make sure that the machine doesn’t go haywire,” Fu says. “We obviously have to fact-check and double-check everything to make sure that we are making the best decisions and there are no hallucinations from any part of the process.”

[Image: Studio Tim Fu]

A freethinking co-creator

The end result is a mixture of human and AI design. Fu calls AI a “freethinking co-creator” that feeds into a complex, almost conversational design process. “It’s so intertwined that it’s like another member of the team. And we’re at a point where it’s hard to distinguish between what we did and what the AI did,” he says. “We don’t see it as a distinct tool.”

This blurry line means that it’s not really accurate to say Fu’s project is an AI-designed building, or that it’s fully designed by humans. Cove Architecture sees this blended approach as the future mode of architecture. “We’re going to scale up thousands and thousands and thousands of buildings in this new methodology,” Ahuja says.

Chopson sees the integration of AI as simply allowing software tools to do the tasks that take humans too long to do—and which aren’t very enjoyable parts of the process anyway. “You spend all your time trying to figure out, is the thing that I want to do going to work? The AI allows us to leap forward by weeks to get to the part that’s fun, where you get to think about how am I going to make this look beautiful?”

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