Physical, not only an Olivia Newton-John song, but the "new" tech wave for the built environment

During the last year, I think I wrote about 4 or 5 articles about AI and the built environment that I have not published. The reason is the noise about this subject and my lack of good time management for this blog/website.

But in the last two months, I have been pondering a lot about something that I am struggling to even articulate, so hence I thought it was useful to share these thoughts, very unstructured and very undefined. Also, I think that Olivia Newton-John's physical song is underrated.

All this is how AI might change forms of creation and representation of the built environment radically. Now here comes my brain drop.

As any reader of this blog knows, I was, and a part of me still feels, an art historian. Art history is useful because it makes studying inevitable, the past of time and how that affects humans, and today we go too fast to reflect on anything really. But if you take the arts and technological advancements, you can see that these two are always hand in hand. Technology has always impacted the forms of representation and, inevitably, the creation of the tangible.

I am going to give you some examples that anyone who has visited Tate Modern or a good contemporary museum can relate to. The technological advancement is photography, and the impact of the arts is the birth of contemporary art. Let me explain this in a very simple way, before photography the art world was obsessed with “realism” the goal was the representation of reality through painting, but once photography appeared then this impacted artist in a way where the representation of reality switch from “realism” to a lenses of “what the human eye” and by this I mean really human of feeling and perception is. Examples of this impact were the obsession of Turner for capturing the feeling of the warm lights, the representation of 3D and emotions of Picasso, or the attempt to create movement in the paintings of Italian Futurism. Technology impacted our representation of the world.

This is also applicable to architecture and generally the built environment. We have moved from paper and pen and cardboard models, to digital CAD, to digital 3D to now even showing clients how it will look more from a realistic view on AR/VR. Now of course generative AI brings countless design options of better or worse quality, with more or less wasteful generations of designs, but why I cannot articulate just yet but I think there is something there is, how AI at a point can help a challenge that architecture, generally construction and the built environment as a whole has that is the disconnection between designing something tangible in such a digital environment without the opportunity to really break the tangible barrier. I guess what I am scratching my head with is, can AI impact our way of designing buildings in such a way that the accuracy towards the physical output is breached, where the concepts of risk that we have today on design and construction, based on that transition from digital intangible design to a real tangible building, are forever gone?

Maybe I am too deep into the obsession of creating “digital twins” that break boundaries of digital and physical that I do not make sense anymore.

It's probably just a rambling of a professional over-thinker that has a brain that never stops and too much time or a big obsession with buildings and physical spaces. Anyway, have a nice day, and message me on LinkedIn if you want to chat about this over a coffee.

Note: Since I wrote this article weeks ago, I listened to two different podcasts and read a few articles where some tech bros are calling this physical AI, as digital twins incorporate AI, which seems to be the upcoming term, and that informed the title. I will follow up on this soon because, careful there, tech bros have discovered 3D and sensors.