AI Designed and Built
St. Louis, MO

As artificial intelligence, in the form of tools like ChatGPT and Midjourney, infiltrates the architecture, engineering, and construction industries, designers are generating incredible renderings of complex, organic buildings. Naturally, the question arises of whether these designs can actually be built. The answer is Yes.

Process

The building rendering above was created by computational designer Arturo Tedeschi, who is pushing the boundaries of what AI tools can accomplish in the design process. He conducted a series of design explorations using Midjourney, Stable Diffusion and Dall-E, programs that create images from textual descriptions in natural language, expanding designers’ creativity. We selected one of Arturo’s designs to build.

To construct a mockup of this complex design, we leveraged STUD-IO’s intelligent fabrication software to automate the precise modeling and detailing needed to generate the structure for the mockup. STUD-IO’s software understands fabrication and assembly constraints, and it automatically generates manufacturable solutions for a given design.

The software generated machine files for a FrameCAD steel stud roll forming machine located at Wies Offsite, an offsite construction company based in St. Louis, MO. Wies Offsite fabricated and assembled the complex frames for this mockup in a single day. This efficiency is particularly remarkable given the precision and customization required for all parts to fit together into the exact 3D shape of the design.