School of Architecture Wins AI and Technology Award

Florida Atlantic  received the Tambellini Future Campus Award Category Winner for Innovation in AI and Technology Integration. The award recognized the School of Architecture’s unique approach to integrate AI into a professional architecture program, from curriculum to facilities.

As a School of Architecture, we believe there is an ethical responsibility to prepare students to help shape the future of professional practice. It is quite obvious that AI will become a ubiquitous tool within the foreseeable future. Therefore, it is in our opinion, that AI should be learned as a requirement to complete a professional degree in architecture.

The vision of the School of Architecture at FAU is to combine innovative research with professional practice constraints. As part of that vision, the school has transformed traditional design studio spaces into new research labs, which are also teaching labs. These include the Creative AI Lab, Environmental Design and Natural Materials Lab, and the Foldable Structures and Materials Lab. These labs quite literally become spatial instruments-to-think-with. For example, the Creative AI Lab includes an immersive 180-degree floor to ceiling screen, eight 3D scanners mounted to the ceiling, AR/VR equipment, and a powerful server to compute large datasets instantaneously. This lab allows for human machine collaboration as well as a seamless physical to digital workflow.   

Additionally, the School of Architecture at Florida Atlantic University is one of the first schools of architecture to require all undergraduate architecture students within their professional program to learn artificial intelligence at an advanced level. Students learn how to create three-dimensional datasets, they use self-organizing maps to interpolate that data, and then they design workflows to objectively evaluate the range of possibilities.

In general, we perceive a fundamental shift in the profession from designing buildings to designing workflows to help tackle wicked problems associated with the built environment. This could include reducing the carbon footprint of how we build or designing for climate adaptation and hydro-generated urbanism. As a school, students and faculty embrace pragmatic constraints as poetic design opportunities, while tackling the most challenging problems of our time.

What is the future of AI?

Assistant Professor Daniel Bolojan, who is a leading expert in the creative applications of artificial intelligence, believes that there will not be one super AI but that there will be thousands of AI’s. He believes that the role of the architect will be to design the workflow to interconnect and string different neural networks together as a means to tackle some of the most challenging problems of our time. Similar to the industrial revolution with mass customization, AI will fundamentally transform how we identify opportunities.

Additional Awards within the School of Architecture

In 2023-24, faculty within the School of Architecture have received other prestigious international awards. In all instances, it is the first time the award recipient was from the state of Florida. These include the 2023 ACADIA Innovative Research Award of Excellence (Director Joseph Choma), the 2024 Tau Sigma Delta Gold Medal (Professor Jeffrey Huber), and the 2024 Digital Futures World Young Award (Assistant Professor Daniel Bolojan). In addition to these international career awards, Associate Professor Jean Martin Caldieron has been selected as a Fulbright U.S. Scholar for 2024-2025 for Cote d'Ivoire. Lastly, four faculty members within the School of Architecture received a total of 12 design awards at the 2024 AIA Florida Convention in Palm Beach, Florida. As a school, FAU faculty members received more design awards than current faculty members at all of the other schools of architecture within the state of Florida.