Instead of hiring an architect, artificial intelligence software may one day be able to design your new home or office.

AI is already influencing architecture. New technologies ranging from smart speakers to smart thermostats are changing the way architects think about living and workspace. But the architecture of the future that’s designed by AI may be unique, according to the authors of a new paper in the International Journal of Architectural Computing.

“The result is something new, different, alien, strange, and wonderfully beautiful—maybe the first genuine 21st-century architecture,” Matias del Campo, an associate professor of architecture at the University of Michigan, and one of the researchers who carried out the study, said in an email interview.

Teaching an AI to Build

In their recent study, del Campo and his colleagues used algorithms to create imagined designs. They worked with DeepDream, a neural network-based model that simulates the brain processes that allow humans to have psychedelic dreams, and fed it architecture plans from the Baroque and Modern eras.

“When you train a neural network to learn features from a database of Baroque plans and apply those features to a Modern plan, you would expect to see a Modern plan that maybe has some Baroque traits,” del Campo explained. “The machine learning process creates a strange restructuring of the features—it understands things like poches, folds, mass, and void and fuses them with modern features to produce an architecture that is surprising, different, defamiliarized, and speculative.”

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