Imagine: you write a single sentence. "A single-storey house, three bedrooms, windows facing the forest, and in the morning the sun should fall on the kitchen." A few seconds later, dozens of floor plans appear on the screen. And a few weeks later, on your plot, a robot squeezes out walls of concrete layer by layer, like a pastry chef piping cream from a bag.
This is not the year 2040. All of this already exists separately, and the pieces are beginning to come together into a single picture.
The architect who fits into a single line
The Texas company ICON, known for 3D-printing houses, has unveiled Vitruvius — an AI system for designing and building homes. Its goal sounds almost audacious: to take a person's wishes and project data, and output architecture, plans, permit-ready designs, budgets and work schedules. That is, the entire chain that used to take months and a whole team of specialists.
The company itself no longer calls itself a construction company. Its founder declared that ICON is now an AI and robotics company that is changing the very way we build.
Walls that are printed
The word "print" here is not a metaphor. ICON's robot, called Phoenix, can print the entire shell of a building, including the foundation and the roof. The company also has a digital "home catalogue" CODEX: more than 60 designs in five collections, from affordable housing to the avant-garde, including homes resistant to fires and storms. Three of the collections were designed by Bjarke Ingels' firm (BIG), one of the most talked-about architecture studios in the world.
Try it yourself, this evening
Start with a sentence. A wooden house on the edge of a pine forest, where the veranda opens onto a path and in the mornings it smells of pine needles. Or a house of concrete and glass above the ocean, where the entire eastern wall is a window, and the sound of the waves can be heard from the kitchen. Describe the material, the light, the time of day, the view from the window: the more details, the more precise the answer. Even better — photograph the place where you would like to live, your plot or the clearing you go to in summer, and ask for the house to be fitted in there. A minute later you will see a house that does not exist, on land that does.
But the picture is only the entrance. What comes next is what it was all for. The picture can be turned into a floor plan, the floor plan into drawings, the drawings into a set of documents with which one applies for a building permit, complete with an estimate and a work schedule. That is exactly what ICON's Vitruvius system promises.
Only yesterday this cost money, time and an architect you knew. Today it is an evening with a cup of tea.
And now for the twist no one expected
If everything is so magical, architects must be delighted? The numbers say otherwise. In the United Kingdom, the share of firms using AI grew from 59% to 74% in a year, but fewer than one in six (17%) believe their projects have become better as a result.
The machine knows where the sun will fall at seven in the morning. But it does not know that at that very moment you are drinking coffee and remembering your mother's kitchen. It will draw a thousand houses. But it will not tell you which one you will be happy in.
If AI were given a manager's office
06:00. Generated 4 000 houses. All flawless. All identical.
09:00. A client asks for a "warm home". The AI suggests 212 heating systems. She meant something entirely different.
11:00. The old oak on the plot "reduces insolation by 14%". The AI suggests cutting it down.
17:00. The client weeps over the sketch: the veranda looks like her grandmother's country house. The AI is perplexed — there was not a word about grandmother in the brief.
18:00. The AI writes to the architect: "Come back. Something is happening here that is not in the data."
18:01. The architect comes back. The oak stays.
The oak stays
Now anyone can design a house, in an evening. But a house is not a floor plan or a render. It is the oak you did not let them cut down, and the kitchen where the sun comes in the morning because someone remembered what time you drink your coffee. The machine builds fast. The human builds the thing worth coming home for.
