Image: Anni Albers, Intersecting, 1962

ARC3710H
Instructor: Vivian Lee

This course investigates how artificial intelligence is reshaping architectural education, practice, and the very act of design thinking. As new AI tools and workflows emerge, architectural design faces both profound opportunities and unsettling uncertainties. Through experimentation, reflection, and discussion, students will explore how AI challenges the discipline to reconsider what is most valuable in design.

Students will discover and test a range of AI-driven tools relevant to design generation, visualization, and analysis, while also engaging in critical discussions on authorship, ethics, creativity, and disciplinary identity. Weekly readings and discussions will frame these explorations within broader questions of pedagogy and the evolving role of the architect in an AI-augmented world.

A key assignment will ask students to imagine how the foundations of design teaching and the cultivation of conceptual and creative reasoning might evolve in the age of intelligent systems. The assignment will consider how AI can skillfully generate narratives and stylistic variations, while prompting students to reflect on what remains uniquely human and central to architectural pedagogy.