Architect Piers Taylor: AI Exposes a Profession Defined Too Narrowly

By Marcus Bennett

Architect Piers Taylor has issued a blunt verdict on his profession's existential anxiety over AI: defensiveness is "absolutely the wrong response." In an opinion piece published by Dezeen, Taylor, founder of Invisible Studio, argues that if AI can do most of what the profession thinks an architect does, "maybe we have defined the profession too narrowly."

AI can already produce images, generate endless options, manipulate form, draft text, analyse information and absorb growing amounts of technical production. The predictable reaction, Taylor writes, has been for architects to identify the tasks machines cannot yet do, protect them, regulate them and insist on the architect's special status.

Architecture has retreated before, he argues. As its actual control over building production has diminished, the profession has clung to authorship and professional territory. "AI merely makes the weakness of that position more visible."

What does the argument say about the 'hero architect'?

Taylor targets the profession's long-cultivated self-image. "We are still, to an astonishing degree, trained to imagine ourselves as mini Corbusiers," he writes. A back extension, given an enigmatic name, careful photography and enough rhetoric, gets talked up as if it were Ronchamp, Le Corbusier's celebrated chapel in France.

The age of the hero is exhausted, in his view. The profession no longer holds the cultural authority, economic power or public attention to sustain that fantasy, and AI may accelerate the reckoning: if machines generate endless formal novelty and beautiful images, the architect's claim cannot rest on being the singular creative intelligence behind the special object.

The economics behind that fantasy are broken too, Taylor writes. Architecture remains notoriously poorly paid relative to the length and cost of its education, its responsibilities and its hours. Architects have tolerated low pay, long hours, insecure employment and unpaid competitions because the profession traded recognition — awards, publications, lectures, peer approval — as a substitute currency. That bargain, he argues, now looks absurd, and if AI makes production work faster and cheaper, defending the same model will drive fees and salaries down further.

His prescription: "We need to expand what clients understand architectural value to be, and therefore what they are prepared to pay architects to do."

What does this change for practice and fees?

The most interesting projects rarely arrive as neatly defined problems, Taylor writes. They involve conflicting needs, uncertain briefs, difficult sites, volatile markets, limited resources, political constraints and people who want different things. Architectural intelligence is most useful where there is no simple answer.

He calls for a different model of authorship — "less author and more host" — and a different fee structure. At present, fees follow a linear journey from brief to concept to construction, yet the most valuable work sits at the edges: diagnosis and briefing, working seriously with communities, testing at full scale, post-occupancy evaluation, adaptation and long-term stewardship.

Taylor points to Studio in the Woods, the educational initiative he has convened for 20 years, as a working laboratory. Its significance lies not in the timber structures built over days of co-production, but in what happens when people design and make together under conditions where the answer is not known beforehand.

He notes the irony that architects have spent years making themselves more machine-like — eliminating uncertainty, standardising processes — and now find machines beating them at that game. Human intelligence is richest when it is situated, relational and embodied, he writes; drawings, technical knowledge and aesthetic judgement still matter enormously, but they are parts of architectural intelligence, not its definition.

"AI may make the old version of the architect less necessary," Taylor concludes, "but I'm not sure that is something we should mourn."

Taylor is professor of knowledge exchange in architecture at the University of the West of England and author of Learning from the Local, published in 2025.