artificial inteligence (AI)

Koto uses artificial intelligence. We use it in research, in feasibility studies, in written communication, and increasingly as a creative tool in the design process itself. We think honesty about that is more useful than silence.

What AI does not do is replace the conversation between architect and site. A language model cannot walk a plot at seven in the morning and feel what the light does. It cannot know that a particular view demands a particular restraint. It cannot decide that a building should be lower, quieter, more absent than the brief suggests. Those judgements belong to people, and they are the judgements that make architecture worth commissioning.

What AI can do is help us work with greater precision, explore more possibilities, and communicate more clearly. We use it to analyse site constraints, test ideas, generate visualisations, prepare documents, and accelerate the parts of our process that benefit from speed, so that the parts that benefit from patience get more of it.

Every Koto project still begins with a site, not a specification. The design is still led by the landscape, the light, and the people who will live in what we make. AI is a tool in that process. The brief is still written by the ground.