Edward McIntosh and Alejandro Garcia Gadea argued that even as AI reshapes how façades are designed, the thing that matters most is still the narrative, the story a building tells, and showed how that thinking sits underneath the Mukaab.
They opened with a candid summary of their own studio. Design is being reshaped at unprecedented speed by new technologies, AI among them; the pair have used AI text-to-image tools for about four years and are enthusiastic about them. But their core point cut the other way: human intellect, and above all human intuition, is what turns those tools into a result that adds something to society and culture.
Hence the “narrative brief”, a story developed before the client’s brief is even tackled. Drawing on the argument that storytelling is what separates humans from every other animal, they framed narrative as the shared, almost invented frameworks that let us build large organisations and advance culture. It does three things, they said: enables mass cooperation (the reason we have countries and currencies), retains information (codifying each day’s advances and carrying them forward), and holds social cohesion.
The Mukaab is where that lands. Its façade is a contemporary reading of the Najdi architectural screen, the narrative of place driving the form first, with computation then making it real: thousands of panels resolved with repetition through computational and parametric design and AI workflows, then installed across the curtain wall. The story sets the geometry; the tools deliver it.
They closed on a fitting note, a colleague’s master’s research into how you might scientifically measure the beauty of a city’s street fronts. For a talk about keeping human judgement at the centre of an increasingly computational process, it was the right place to end.