Artificial Intelligence for Architectural Discourse White Paper

This paper presents a work in progress on a new research topic for artificial intelligence. It presents the first stages in a research that investigates the capacities of AI to understand the architectural rules that define historic architecture, more precisely Gothic cathedrals. Gothic architecture has its own logic. It follows rules that are defined by physical and structural constraints as well as by the style of the architecture. This project started with the analysis of specialized descriptions of Gothic architecture and with the translation of these visual narratives into computer code. On the long run this will result in an intelligent computational model, a program that can understand the structure of a Gothic cathedral and reason about its architecture. While earlier research has pointed towards the importance of architecture as a future domain of application for AI, for different reasons, little has been achieved in recent years. This paper introduces the background of this project, sketches a small knowledge base illustrating the approach, and describes the impacts that this research can have on the relation between architecture and computers.