Compositional Intelligence

Generative AI has changed what a type is. A large model does not store buildings; it stores compressions of millions of them, and every image it produces is a composition drawn from those compressions. Compositional Intelligence takes this seriously as a question for architecture: if the discipline’s oldest instrument, typology, now lives inside a model, how do architects read it, and how do they compose with it?

The book moves from the datasets I built to measure the models, through the languages and scales at which they organise the built world, to the design consequences: types that are induced rather than inherited, cities composed from the features of cities, and a criticality that works by superposition rather than by dialectics. Its argument is not that the image generator replaces the architect, but that composition, the architect’s own intelligence, is what makes a model’s compressions answerable to buildings.

Published by Routledge with a foreword by Mario Carpo. ISBN 978-1-041-03053-9 (paperback), 978-1-041-03056-0 (hardback); DOI 10.4324/9781003622055.