The fully practical interactive workshop allowed participants to test the ability of artificial intelligence to generate graphic visualizations of various poems. Using tools such as Stable and Mid Journey, students chose poems and introduced keywords extracted from the metaphorical meaning of the texts in the programs to generate virtual images and designs made by AI.

AI is making its way into many disciplines and has become the new paradigm in many sectors, including architecture. “AI is revolutionising everything,” said Lecturer Estévez. It offers us many possibilities in the field of architecture, but we must organise ourselves.” Students have seen firsthand the facilities that this new world offers for innovation, design and creation.

The speakers explained how to extract the metaphors from different poems in English, Catalan, Spanish and Arabic that can have a spatial translation or representation in reality through design. “We should be interested in the concept of metaphor. Poetry has the possibility to speak metaphorically; it is a possibility that humans have to relate things that can be very distant,” Escribano said.

The machine learning process that AI goes through when generating an image was shown in the workshop. The speakers differentiated between diffusion and convolution models. Lecturer Abdallah explained, “Two very important elements for dealing with AI are connections and keywords. These programs continue to recognise other images, process them and make new ones. From this process a vision is produced by AI.”

Artificial intelligence is a valuable and rich source of new knowledge and concepts. This workshop, organised by the UIC Barcelona School of Architecture in cooperation with the Faculty of Humanities, demonstrated that AI can contribute additional aspects to architectural design and human imagination based on the richness of the words of a poem.