Pedagogy 2025
Abstract
Artificial intelligence transforms how architecture is taught, imagined, and critiqued. Within a graduate program at an HBCU, where limited resources restrict travel and visiting critics, AI has become both an equalizer and a catalyst for rethinking authorship and pedagogy. This paper examines AI not simply as a representational aid but as an epistemological agent that reconfigures dialogue between student, educator, and knowledge. Anchored in a philosophy, the studio adopts ontology, taxonomy, and phenomenology as the framework through which AI’s influence is mediated. AI functions as a collaborator in a triadic consultancy—students, faculty, and AI—governed by the parti, which acts as an arbitration device, returning the project’s governance to ideas rather than ownership. Operationally, AI augments text, expands research, and reads drawings for conceptual coherence. Philosophically it provokes questions of being, classification, and experience that reposition design as an act of inquiry rather than imitation. A Monteverde, Costa Rica-based research outpost studio exemplifies this approach: students employ AI to generate and analyze morphological studies of flora, fauna, and geology, using these to extract design principles from behavior rather than image. The pedagogy aims to liberate students from imitation toward assimilation, an exploration of thingness, and becoming informed by Hegelian thought. The result is a reflective model of teaching in which AI and philosophy co-constitute the learning environment: AI expands the field of exploration, while philosophy mediates the relation between technology, authorship, and cultural agency.
Bill Prices’ career has spanned three decades, during which time he has practiced and produced work in eleven different countries. He has practiced professionally in Switzerland and the Netherlands, where he spent four years with OMA/Rem Koolhaas. There he acted as Research and Development Director and saw the Villa Bordeaux (Time Magazine called this house “the most important private residence of the twentieth century”) through to completion. Bill collaborated with Ai Weiwei in China, after which Ai Weiwei picked Bill’s work to include in Phaidon’s 10 x 10-3 Monograph.