Norman Foster

It was always a kind of gentleman's pursuit and that may have been appropriate at a point where architecture was a very, very tiny slice of the buildings that society

So it was your cathedrals, it was your, maybe your town halls, but the whole, I mean, the hospital was most likely a converted other kind of building.

Airports didn't exist, railway stations didn't exist.

So the whole building spectrum has grown

But in many ways, the importance of the architect is an integral part of that.

And a decisive part because design determines so much of the outcome, the cost of a building, the performance of a building, how much it meets the needs of the public at large or the

everything we've been talking about, that is underappreciated.

It's undervalued and it's underpaid.

And those of us who are able, we try to do what we can to change that.

But you're needing really to bring in the profession at an earlier stage of decision-making.

I could argue an opposite point.

that if you could do more with less, if you had the enhancement of such a tool.

But if I go back to square one, AI is not something that happened yesterday.

It's been evolving gradually over time, gaining momentum, gaining awareness in the same way that the whole issue of sustainability

Sustainability was at the core of the practice when it emerged in the 1960s.

You could argue the rest of the world has finally caught up with that.

But many of the things that we were doing back then were fringe activity.

Now they're mainstream.

They're in everybody's front page headline.

And if artificial intelligence is the accumulation of everything that has gone before,