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The AI art generator Midjourney is the favored tool in architecture. And designers are using it to conjure up their wildest dreams.

By Gaelle Faure
January 31, 2023 at 5:36 PM GMT+2

Imagine a library made from yarn. Or skyscrapers in the style of Salvador Dalí. Or simply your ideal home, as realistic or fantastical as you like. All it takes is the prompt “/imagine” followed by a few words of description — say, “a neofuturist villa made of concrete and bamboo” — in order for artificial intelligence-powered art generator Midjourney to summon images of whatever you ask for, in under a minute.
Several developers rolled out text-to-image AI programs to the public last year, including Dall-E and Stable Diffusion. These tools, which were trained on vast amounts of online images — leading to copyright lawsuits — became major hits with general audiences, who put these programs through their paces. Amateur designers are using AI assistants to realize fan art, stock “photos,” and a painting that won an arts competition.
Midjourney — a tool by an independent research lab of the same name founded by entrepreneur David Holz — quickly emerged as the architect’s favorite artificial intern. Architects all over the world have seized upon this tool to conjure their wildest dreams. Some are even starting to test out ways to use it in their real-life work. On Instagram, where many architects share their AI-fueled imagery, more than 72,000 posts have been tagged #midjourneyarchitecture.
“Midjourney is the very creative, artistic one that will essentially give you a visual aesthetic that is superior to all the rest,” says Tim Fu, an architectural designer from Zaha Hadid Architects’ computational research group (ZHACODE) in London.