AI Is Becoming Architecture’s New Room for Rehearsal
The most radical shift in architecture may not be a new material, a new silhouette, or a new urban typology. It may be the ability to rehearse a building before it exists. To watch light move through a corridor, to test the sound of an office, to understand how bodies gather, pause, disperse, and return. As Business Insider reports, Gensler is now using artificial intelligence across much of its design practice, not as a replacement for architects, but as a tool for seeing more clearly before concrete, glass, steel, and timber are committed to the world.
This is where AI becomes especially interesting for design-minded observers. Its value is not simply speed, although speed matters in a studio working on thousands of projects each year. Its deeper promise lies in spatial imagination. Architecture has always depended on projection: drawings, models, renderings, samples, mock-ups. AI adds another layer to that tradition, allowing designers to test atmosphere, movement, and performance while a project is still fluid.
Gensler’s early internal experimentation, described by co-CEO Jordan Goldstein as an “AI sandbox,” suggests a cultural shift inside large design firms. The sandbox is an apt phrase. It implies play, but also boundaries. In architecture, play without discipline becomes fantasy. Discipline without play becomes repetition. AI seems most valuable when it sits between the two, expanding the number of concepts a team can examine while leaving judgment, restraint, and responsibility in human hands.
Consider the design of Under Armour’s new headquarters in Baltimore, where Gensler used AI to simulate how employees might use the building throughout the day. This is not decoration. It is choreography. Occupancy, ventilation, daylight, energy consumption, and circulation all become part of the design language. A workplace is no longer judged only by the drama of its lobby or the polish of its finishes, but by how intelligently it breathes, adapts, and supports the rhythms of those inside it.
Architecture is learning to test atmosphere before it becomes permanent.
The same applies to storytelling. Goldstein told Business Insider that one of the largest breakthroughs has been turning AI-generated design concepts into cinematic narratives. This matters because architecture is often approved long before it is truly understood. A drawing can be precise and still feel distant. A cinematic sequence can show scale, mood, procession, and anticipation. It can help a client sense the emotional character of a district, a headquarters, or a public space before construction begins.
Yet the beauty of these tools requires caution. Professors and practitioners cited by Business Insider raise concerns around authorship, accuracy, security, and the environmental costs of computation. These are not peripheral issues. Architecture is a social contract as much as an aesthetic act. If AI can generate endless forms, the architect’s role becomes even more important, not less. Someone must decide which forms deserve to become buildings, which atmospheres serve people, and which efficiencies are worth pursuing.
For interiors and buildings alike, the lesson is clear: the future of design will be less about choosing between technology and touch, and more about integrating intelligence with sensitivity. A home, office, hotel, or cultural space still needs proportion, material honesty, acoustic comfort, tactility, and light. AI may help designers arrive there with more options and fewer blind spots. But the final measure of a space remains deeply human: how it feels when we enter, and whether it continues to feel considered after we stay.
Source: Business Insider
