It’s hard to be aware of the limitations of human perception when we can’t quite wrap our minds around what else might be out there. For instance, there are animals and insects that perceive the world very differently than we do, navigating with an innate ability to detect the Earth’s magnetic fields and seeing as many as 99 million colors that our eyes can’t detect. Artificial intelligence offers a new way to push past those limitations and preconceived notions about what human creations like architecture should be or look like.

It’s clear that AI isn’t quite up to the task of designing buildings that are safe, practical, and realistic, and there’s no danger of it replacing architects anytime soon. For artists like Ragab, using AI programs like Midjourney is a way to push their own creative ideas to the next level and introduce elements of surprise. They input text prompts into the program — perhaps something like “Art Nouveau buildings partially consisting of smoke” in this case. That’s the extent of their own control over the results. The AI inserts its own perceptions, resulting in ideas that could actually be feasible as a source of inspiration for wildly creative new architectural forms and materials.
In previous projects, Ragab has used AI to help envision conceptual green facades inspired by nature, organic Gothic facades resembling the work of artist H.R. Giger, an interplay of glass walls and red ...