The Frankenstein Workflow: The Architecture Industry Is Having the Wrong Argument With Itself
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Everyone seems to be asking: What is AI going to do to us? Or: How should I be using AI? However, I spent two days at the ATN Summit in London and found myself asking a different question: What if AI isn’t actually the protagonist of contemporary architecture’s story?
For those unfamiliar: Archi-Tech Network is a platform founded by Oliver Thomas, former Design Technology Manager at BIG, who has spent five years developing new conversations around the intersection of architecture and technology by running courses, podcasts and in-person events (they’re held in pubs — perhaps it’s unsurprising that they sell out in thirty minutes?). The Summit was his most ambitious undertaking yet: two days, one stage, leading practitioners from BIG, Foster + Partners, Zaha Hadid Architects, MVRDV, Herzog & de Meuron, OMA, Hassell, Heatherwick Studio, and a constellation of startups building the next generation of AEC tools.
What I came away with was not a clearer picture of what AI can and cannot do for design. Nor was it a hunch for which of these new tools is coming out on top. Rather, it was a growing conviction that the industry has been so preoccupied with questions that are inherently technical in nature that we are largely overlooking the human nature of the changes that are actually afoot.
How Collaboration is Mediated
Photos courtesy of the ATN Summit
While Heatherwick Studio is widely associated with the concept of Humanizing architecture, fewer people may know that the firm doesn’t just talk the talk — its hands-on workshop remains central to their London office. This is the methodological backbone of their design approach; a way of ensuring that the conversation between digital design and physical making. At the ATN Summit, Pablo Zamorano’s presentation framed this dialogue as a fundamental architectural value. When it comes to new technology, this risk is not that it replaces architects, he suggested, but that it obviates the human interactions at the heart of the process: arguments over details, for example, or those moments when someone says that something isn’t working, forcing everyone to think again.
Architecture happens in conversation. Yet, in most contemporary offices, human collaboration is increasingly mediated by a bevy of external forces — by software licenses, expanding and contracting workforces, and more. These factors are palpable in a studio’s social fabric: Architects might jump from computer to computer, depending on which one has a different software package installed. Or, knowledge may be siloed, with one team focusing on BIM, and another specializing in the visuals. The list goes on and on.
Pablo Zamorano of Heatherwick Studio | Photos courtesy of the ATN Summit
Meanwhile, projects routinely span from several years to a decade (or, in extreme cases, more), during which time, knowledge continues accumulating, embedded in individuals and their undocumented decisions. This type of intelligence rarely survives the projects that produce it, let alone transfers to the next ones. In these cases, as Amar Hanspal of Motif put it, “When someone leaves a firm, their judgment walks out the door.”
Harlan Miller of UNStudio described the delivery end of this same challenge. When a design changes hands — to a contractor, to a new team, to a delivery architect, etc. — what gets transmitted should not simply be a set of technical instructions. Instead, ot should encompass a set of intentions; a history of decisions and their reasons. Ensuring that a design’s narrative survives the extended timelines and shifting rosters of a major project requires something that technology has barely begun to address: a way of embedding architectural intent so that it persists even when the people who made the decisions are long gone. A digital message in a bottle, as Miller put it.
What strikes me about these observations is that they describe a problem of communication and continuity rather than idea generation. The industry’s creative output — the drawings, the renderings, the designs — has arguably never been more impressive or more easily produced. What remains a continuous challenge is the transmission of the thinking behind them: between collaborators and various project stages; between the people who conceive a building and those who construct it. And there are real, material implications.
Architect 3.0: Unity Over Fragmentation
The Innovation Pub featured high-top bar tables, open conversation with architectural tech brands and a beer tap in the afternoon | Photos courtesy of the ATN Summit
This is, I think, what Architect 3.0 actually means in practice. Oliver Thomas has been using the framework to describe the shift from computer-aided design to AI-assisted design, but what I heard at the ATN Summit suggested something more specific: that the genuinely transformative change isn’t in what any single tool can generate, but in how tools are now beginning to carry knowledge between the people who use them.
From workflows to data structures to institutional memory, fragmentation runs rampant across contemporary studios. The software legacies of the 2.0 era made architecture into a Frankenstein patchwork of specializations and silos. What a new generation of platforms is beginning to offer is something practices have always struggled to maintain: a way of holding the thinking behind a project together, across teams, stages and handovers — and making it available at the moment of decision, rather than after the fact. And there are major reverberations.
From left: Martha of Foster + Partners; Shajay of Zaha Hadid Architects; Sanne van der Burgh of MVRDV | Photos courtesy of the ATN Summit | Photos courtesy of the ATN Summit
MVRDV’s Sanne van der Burgh really brought this point home. The carbon conversation, she argues, is being had at the wrong level — by bringing in sustainability experts who focus on transportation of materials and operational energy and soil health. Meanwhile, 40 percent of a typical project’s embodied carbon sits entirely in its basement or carpark and is largely invisible to the standard conversation. To change that, she has been building a new tool that will centralize embedded carbon calculating, making it readily available in a single place throughout every moment of the design process, allowing for constant comparison and monitoring. It is free to all architects. (CarbonSpace is now being used by the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH) and will actually influence building policy.)
None of this is to dismiss AI. The tools are genuinely remarkable, and some of the most interesting work being done with them — Mollie Claypool’s robotic timber micro-factories at AUAR, Arthur Mamou-Mani’s circular fabrication work at Fab.Pub, Xavier De Kestelier’s pro-bono performing arts center in the world’s second-largest refugee settlement at Hassell — couldn’t exist without a particular kind of computational intelligence embedded in the design and delivery process. But in every case, the technology is in service of a set of human decisions, human values and human relationships that remain irreducibly prior to it.
Architects Should Own Their Influence
Interaction between architects — human connection between professionals — was at the heart of the ATN Summit, which featured after parties both nights. | Photos courtesy of the ATN Summit
What the ATN Summit made me feel, more than anything, is that the industry is having the wrong argument with itself. The question is not what AI will do to architecture (you know, there’s a problem when we’re framing questions passively…). The question is what architects want architecture to be — and whether the tools, the workflows and the institutional structures that we’re all perpetuating are capable of carrying that ambition intact, all the way from the first sketch to the finished building.
In short, the rearrangement happening in architecture isn’t technological, not really; it’s about how architects understand and present their value. Indeed, the fact that ATN introduced a third day of talks, this one about “Influence,” speaks volumes. As Allister Lewis put it (in his insightful newsletter), “Influence is becoming a new layer of practice. Not separate from architecture, but embedded within it.”
Bentley Systems hosted a dedicated exhibition showcasing work and experiments from their Innovation iLab, closing the ATN Summit with beer, pizza and collegial conversation. | Photos courtesy of the ATN Summit
Whether designers like it or not, architecture has become part of the attention economy in the past 15 years. The story of a building is no longer a byproduct of making it — it is part of the making itself. Architects who treat it that way will shape not just what gets built, but what gets valued, funded and built next. “Influence is part of the job,” Sanne van der Burgh said. “Claim it.”
Architecture’s most underleveraged resource isn’t an emerging software; it’s the brains and voices of the humans behind the buildings, and, for the first time, the conditions exist to use it at scale. The fact that a global community of architects is increasingly clamoring for in-person events — from Pecha Kucha at the pub to two-day-long conversations such as the ATN Summit — is a positive sign that we’re all moving in the right direction.
The ATN Summit took place on 18–19 March 2026 at Protein Studios, Shoreditch, London. Further information is available at atn-summit.com.
Learn more about ATN social media:
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@architech.network
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/architech.network/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/architech-network/
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