We live in an age where architects spend more energy reinventing the tools than using them.
The pen — once a modest bridge between thought and matter — has been reborn, again and again. It was reinvented as digital input through the birth of computers, hid itself behind CAAD, embedded itself within the BIM process, and now parades as AI. Each reincarnation arrives with the same promise: liberation, revolution, even salvation. Yet beneath the costume, it remains what it always was — an instrument of creation, waiting for the hand and mind of a creator who has something to say or leave behind.
The pen is the tool, and toolmakers make tools. Their profession is the instrument. Ours is the act of design. To confuse these roles is to confuse architecture itself. Is one an architect of space, or an architect of tools for other architects? In both cases one may call himself an architect — but an architect of what? Does it make sense to be the architect of a pancake? A good pancake can certainly be created by the mind of an architect, and such creation can become a business. It is, of course, possible to run a business that produces one, both, or anything and everything.
In earlier times, when architects commented on their tools, it was not because they wanted to manufacture them, but because they used them intensively — they knew the limits, the resistance, the possibilities. That feedback was valuable. But the moment an architect abandons creation to focus on building tools, he ceases to design. He crosses into the craft of being an architect of tools. Nothing wrong with that. However, a cook who designs and produces knives very successfully is not necessarily the best cook just because he uses the knives he designed. Another cook may benefit from those knives — or not.
Whether one models in clay, sketches on paper, 3D prints, or prompts an LLM is secondary. The medium is a means, not the essence. AI, no matter how astonishing, is still a recycler: a virtuoso of fragments, endlessly collaging what has already been created. Useful? Yes. Dazzling? Certainly. But Frankenstein architecture, however sophisticated, is still Frankenstein.
Architecture is not assembly. It is creation that erupts from within and crystallises into form — carries colour, smell, rhythm, resonance. It screams its own soul into space. Empty shells patched from fragments may resemble buildings, but they remain hollow.
The true danger is not the tool itself, but our obedience to it. If we surrender, the spiral narrows: efficient boxes, ecological boxes, optimised boxes, popular boxes — endlessly repeated, endlessly identical. A geometry of nothingness, disguised as progress.
AI will remain, and it should. It is an extraordinary tool, and as such it can only recombine what already exists. Without fresh creation, without minds willing to step outside the fragments, there is nothing left for it to fracture.
Our task as architects has not changed: to create what is right, not what the tool performs well. The tool does not design. We do.
Whether we call them AI today, LLMs tomorrow, or SAI the day after, the label does not matter. Without new creation to fracture and recombine, the spiral only tightens — until nothing remains but efficiency without soul.
