Architecture’s Kodak Moment: Why the Next Two Years Will Define the Next Fifty

When Kodak invented the digital camera in 1975, it buried the idea to protect its film business. Two decades later, it was bankrupt. The lesson wasn’t about technology — it was about denial.

Architecture risks the same fate. We know AI is coming, but we don’t quite want to look at what it might do. We tell ourselves that buildings are too complex, too human, too nuanced for automation. But that’s exactly what every disrupted industry says — right before it’s disrupted.

And yet, for something so transformative, there’s been remarkably little conversation about what AI really means for our profession. Many architects quietly park it in the “too hard” basket, assuming it’s years away or outside our control. But that assumption is already out of date.

Why We’re Worried

In 2018, image-generation tools couldn’t draw a believable chair. By 2025, they can generate photorealistic video of any chair you like — moving through sunlight, rendered from any angle, inside a space that looks like it was shot by a human.

The point isn’t what AI can do today, but how fast it’s learning. Every few months, the boundary of the possible shifts again — and yet the profession’s response has barely moved. We still talk about AI as if it were an experiment, not a market force. That mismatch between technical progress and professional awareness is the real danger.

This acceleration isn’t theoretical. It’s happening now, in front of us, and it exposes some uncomfortable vulnerabilities.

Take the residential sector. Builders can already sign off on drawings for a building permit — no architect required. Imagine a near-future version of that process:

You open an app and scan your house with your phone.

The app generates an existing floor plan.

It asks what changes you’d like — a new kitchen, another bedroom, a bigger deck.

It models your renovation, produces the drawings, and sends PDFs straight to your builder.

There are no regulatory roadblocks to this workflow today. Only a few technical ones. And those are disappearing fast.

Once this becomes reliable — and it soon will be — large chunks of small-scale residential work could happen entirely without architects. Not because clients dislike good design, but because the process has been automated, simplified, and priced to move.

The Ownership Problem

Beyond economics lies an even more complex issue: ownership.
If a generative-AI system designs a building based on millions of images of other architects’ work, who actually owns the result? The algorithm? The software company? The user who typed the prompt? Or the countless unnamed architects whose buildings trained the model in the first place?

We haven’t begun to answer these questions. The arts and music industries, however, are already in the thick of it. Musicians and visual artists are mounting high-profile legal battles to stop their work from being scraped, copied, and repackaged by AI systems without permission or payment. They’ve realised that once their creative output becomes training data, it effectively stops being theirs.

What’s striking is that it was once assumed these professions would be safe — that human creativity was the one thing computers couldn’t replicate. Yet songwriting and visual art, supposedly the most human of endeavours, have been hit first. Architecture has been spared only because of its technical complexity, not because its creativity is immune. Our turn is coming.

Architecture isn’t immune from that risk — in fact, our public visibility makes it almost inevitable. Every rendered elevation, every published photograph, every project online is potential fodder for the next generation of generative tools.

Do we draw a line and declare that using such systems is unprofessional because of the high likelihood of breaching copyright? Do we fight to enforce our rights? Or do we accept that this “creative borrowing” is simply the price of progress?

The danger isn’t just that AI blurs authorship — it’s that it dissolves it. If we can’t agree on where human creativity ends and machine generation begins, we risk losing both ownership and accountability for the built environment.

What’s at Stake

What’s really at stake isn’t whether AI can draw faster — it’s whether architects will still control the act of design itself.

For centuries, architects have owned the translation between human need and built form. But if AI systems start generating plans, specifications, and cost data in one seamless workflow, the power to define what gets built could shift elsewhere — to those who own the software, the data, and the pipeline.

Design intelligence, material judgment, and spatial thinking are what define our value. Yet if we hand over the process, those qualities risk becoming background noise, absorbed into an automated system that treats design as a technical service rather than a cultural act.

What We Should Do

At Spec Rep Help Desk, we stepped into the AI space precisely because we’ve seen what happens when architects surrender their tools to others. The BIM era was supposed to empower design. Instead, a virtual duopoly now strips millions from architectural revenues each year while locking firms into ecosystems designed for software profitability, not professional sustainability.

If we let AI follow that same path — led entirely by global tech giants — architects will once again be forced to rent their own expertise back from someone else. Our mission is to create AI systems built for and by architects: tools that respect our standards, our ethics, and our value to the community.

That’s the real opportunity here — to shape this technology before it shapes us. AI can’t replace design judgment, contextual understanding, or civic responsibility. But it can amplify them, freeing us from the drudgery of documentation and specification so we can focus on the creative and human aspects of design.

Drawing the Line

No single architect, firm, or organisation has all the answers to these challenges — and pretending otherwise would be naive. What’s needed now is a profession-wide response.

First, we need to pause and think deeply about what role we want AI to play in design. That means debate, disagreement, and ultimately consensus — a collective position on the ethical use of AI in architectural practice.

Second, we need to lobby for regulatory guardrails. The technology is moving far faster than the rules that govern it. If AI tools can generate permit-ready drawings, then we need consumer protections to ensure quality, safety, and accountability. It may be time to insist that architects remain involved in every project, precisely because AI companies will never accept liability for the buildings their systems help create.

And third, we need to define where authorship begins. When does an AI-generated concept become a design? Is it at the moment of human curation, or somewhere earlier in the process? Until we decide that, we can’t safeguard either our rights or our responsibilities.

In the Public Interest

Yes, we should fight to preserve our profession — but not for its own sake. The architectural license exists not to guarantee architects a living, but to safeguard the public. The buildings we design shape lives, communities, and civic identity. That’s the real reason we need to get AI right.

Asking regulators to protect us merely because we like being paid for what we do misses the point. The question isn’t how to defend our fees; it’s how to defend the public realm from what you might call AI slop — a flood of low-quality, unreviewed, and potentially unsafe design output masquerading as professional work.

Without oversight, automated design could easily produce a built environment that looks fine in pixels but fails in performance — buildings that ignore context, climate, or accessibility, and ultimately erode trust in the idea of good design altogether. Protecting against that isn’t self-interest; it’s public service.

That’s why architects must lead the conversation about AI ethics, quality control, and civic accountability. We can’t leave those values to software vendors or regulators to define after the fact. The public deserves built environments shaped by systems that respect human context, not just compute efficiency.

The Kodak Moment

Architecture’s Kodak moment isn’t on the horizon; it’s here.
We can either watch AI redraw the boundaries of our work, or we can lead the process, ensuring that design remains a human-led, ethically grounded discipline.

What we do between now and 2027 will decide whether architects remain authors of the built environment — or just consultants to the machines that now design it.