Prompted construction: Protocols for a new architectural intelligence

The book

How is architecture changing in the era of artificial intelligence? If artificial intelligence can design, build, and monitor, what remains for the architect? Between prompts, algorithms, and robots, design becomes an ecosystem of data and automated decisions. This book explores the tools, challenges, and opportunities of an emerging practice, offering a critical guide for designers, researchers, and innovators aiming to navigate the future of construction

The authors

Pierpaolo Ruttico is an architect-engineer and researcher at Politecnico di Milano, specializing in complex constructions and advanced production processes. He previously worked in New York City for Pelli Clarke & Partners, then earned a Ph.D. in Building Engineering, with a specialization in non-standard geometries. He is the founder and director of INDEXLAB, a multidisciplinary research group established in 2010. INDEXLAB focuses on contemporary architectural languages and pioneers innovative processes in digital fabrication, robotics, and machine learning.

Carlo Beltracchi blends architecture, engineering, and code. A driving force within INDEXLAB at Politecnico di Milano since 2013, he steers robots and algorithms to rethink how we design and build. His PhD probes the frontier where generative AI meets Web 3.0, investigating evolutionary digital twins for the built environment. Beltracchi orchestrated the digital fabrication of the COPAGRI pavilion at Expo 2015, earned China’s 2019 Silk Road Robotics Innovations award, and publishes research on construction robotics and the architectural metaverse..

Bauhaus 101. Intercultural Dialogue Books

«Bauhaus 101. Intercultural Dialogue Books» è una collana interdisciplinare che affonda le proprie radici nei paradigmi culturali e nelle finalità espresse dalla scuola voluta da Walter Gropius nel 1919. La collana si basa sui principi fondativi della scuola Bauhaus. Avanguardia, innovazione, contatto con la realtà, sperimentazione, ricerca e formazione, libertà di espressione creativa e mentale, dialogo, collaborazione e contaminazione tra discipline umanistiche e scientifiche, nel rispetto di una visione innovatrice fondamentale per ristabilire un equilibrato rapporto tra tecnologie, arti creative, scienza e cultura, favorendo processi di connessione e condivisione fondamentali per lo sviluppo delle attività umane. I testi esprimono in maniera chiara e costruttiva questa forte connettività interdisciplinare, favorendo la creazione di punti di tangenza nei differenti ambiti culturali, ossia lì dove avvengono interessanti conflitti creativi che costruttivamente rimettono in discussione regole e codici per esplorare nuovi e interessanti paradigmi.

Pierpaolo Ruttico, Carlo Beltracchi

Prompted construction

Protocols for a new architectural intelligence

preface by Andrea Dari

tab edizioni

© 2025 Gruppo editoriale Tab s.r.l.

viale Manzoni 24/c

00185 Roma

www.tabedizioni.it

Prima edizione giugno 2025

ISBN versione cartacea 979-12-5669-161-6

ISBN versione digitale 979-12-5669-162-3

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con qualsiasi mezzo effettuata, compresa la fotocopia,

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Indice

Preface. How is the design process evolving?

Introduction. Welcome to the Prompted Era. Why AI matters for architecture today

Part I. Understanding the present: how AI is changing architecture. An overview of current digital technologies reshaping design and construction

Chapter 1. The rise of architectural data. Data as a new design material

Chapter 2. Smart construction: Industry 4.0 and digital twins. How virtual models improve building performance

Chapter 3. Capturing reality: photogrammetry, LiDAR, and 3d scanning. Creating accurate digital models of the real world

Chapter 4. From parametric design to generative intelligence. Evolution of digital design tools

Chapter 5. AI tools for architects: from text-to-image to code generation. How generative models assist creativity

Chapter 6. Robotics and adaptive manufacturing. Automating the construction industry

Chapter 7. Web3 and blockchain in the built environment. Tracking authorship, ownership, and value

Chapters 8. The metaverse as a design tool. Immersive spaces for collaboration and testing

Chapter 9. Summary: a fragmented but evolving ecosystem. Making sense of today’s digital toolkits

Part II . Designing with intelligence: new processes and roles. How prompts, protocols, and AI systems change the way we design

Chapter 10. The prompt as a new design tool. Language as an interface between humans and machines

Chapter 11. Architects as intelligence designers. New skills and responsibilities in a hybrid workflow

Chapter 12. Collaborative design: distributed teams and token-based credits. Designing across borders, tracking contributions

Chapter 13. Smart contracts for construction. Automating payments and project milestones

Chapter 14. Simulation as a design sandbox. Parametric playgrounds for design exploration

Chapter 15. Talking to machines: interfacing with robots. From scripts to sensors on the site

Chapter 16. From prompt to building: new possibilities and new risks he full pipeline from imagination to construction

Part III . Building the infrastructure for prompted practice. What is needed behind the scenes to make AI-based architecture

Capitolo 17. Decentralized data and the economy of datasets. Open and fair access to training data

Chapter 18. Autonomous agents in architecture. How AI entities collaborate with humans

Chapter 19. Confidential AI: sharing data utility without exposing the data. Keeping data and models secure

Capitolo 20. The challenge of standards and interoperability. Making diverse tools and systems work together

Chapter 21. Digital twins as platforms for evolution. Buildings that learn and adapt over time

Chapter 22. Digital built economy: tokenisation, blockchain and regulatory frontiers. Ownership, provenance, and NFTs in building

Part IV . Looking ahead: the future of AI and architecture. What kind of architectural practice might emerge from these changes?

Chapter 23. The architect as a curator of prompts. Moving from form-maker to system-designer

Chapter 24. Case studies: prompted construction in action. Real-world examples of AI-assisted building

Capitolo 25. AI ethics in architecture. Ethical frameworks for intelligent architecture

Chapter 26. Designing the AI-integrated studio. Education, tools, and roles for tomorrow’s architects

Chapter 27. Future scenarios: autonomous construction and AI-driven cities. Where we might be heading

Chapter 28. Conclusions: building protocols for a new architectural intelligence. Final thoughts and a call to action

Glossary

Acknowledgments

Preface. How is the design process evolving?

The musical score is the medium that translates thought into music. Tomorrow, will the prompt become the score of architecture?.

This question accompanies every AEC professional approaching Prompted Construction – Protocols for a New Architectural Intelligence.

In this era that is rapidly becoming prompt-centric, architecture once again finds itself questioning its own future. Artificial intelligence – capable of shaping data, language, and matter – no longer knocks at the doors of our studios: it has already thrown open the gates of the construction site, embedding itself both in our collective imagination and our daily operations. Yet, as Pierpaolo Ruttico and Carlo Beltracchi remind us, The digital ecosystem of architecture and construction is expanding at remarkable speed, yet it still resembles an archipelago of solutions that rarely communicate seamlessly (Ch. 9, § Summary: A fragmented but evolving ecosystem).

This observation captures the starting point of our reflection: an archipelago of tools, practices, and visions that risks remaining fragmented unless we define bridges, protocols, and open formats. Prompted construction offers a kind of nautical chart to navigate and connect these islands, proposing a shared grammar – the grammar of the prompt – that allows professionals, researchers, and businesses to engage in dialogue as fluidly as the neural networks underlying these systems.

The authors identify the prompt as the interface that transforms words into design – laying the groundwork for a new balance between human creativity and machine-generated potential. Fittingly, at the heart of the book echoes Andrej Karpathy’s statement: We’re entering a new computing paradigm with large language models acting like CPUs… This is the Large Language Model OS (LMOS) (Ch. 10, § The prompt as a new design tool).

It’s a powerful insight: language becomes an operating system, and the designer discovers themselves as a programmer of possibilities, an orchestrator of conversational processes. Just as the transition from analog to digital photography replaced the silver oxidation of film with digital bits – transforming the photograph from a memory object into a piece of memoryless data – we are now entering a phase where even image-making no longer requires capturing reality, but merely describing it for AI to render.

This shift brings a profound metamorphosis in the professional role of the architect:

The architect’s role undergoes a profound redefinition: from crafting individual forms by hand to curating entire ecosystems of prompts, models, and feedback loops (Ch. 23, § The architect as a curator of prompts).

This statement encapsulates the core reason why this book is indispensable: it offers the AEC community a foundational framework to understand – and shape – the evolution of professional roles. From the Prompt Engineer to the Data Steward, from the Ethical Overseer to the Workflow Integrator, a constellation of new competencies is emerging that we must develop and integrate if we want the human-machine dialogue to produce architecture that is ethical, resilient, and beautiful.

I invite engineers, architects, builders, academics, and policymakers to read these pages as one would consult a book of signs: within, they will find practical best practices, future scenarios, case studies – and most importantly, open questions. What kind of relationship should we establish with learning digital twins? How can we trace data flows without compromising privacy? What standards will allow us to balance interoperability and specialization?

Each chapter sows the seeds of a conversation we can no longer postpone. My hope is that this publication becomes a shared platform for dialogue – across conferences, regulatory forums, university classrooms, design labs, and company workgroups. Only in this way can we transform today’s fragmented archipelago into a connected continent, capable of merging artificial intelligence, social responsibility, and construction quality.

With gratitude to the authors and with confidence in our community’s critical curiosity, I entrust this preface to the hands of AEC professionals. Let the debate begin – and may our prompt-cities, still in potential, find a real place in the world.

Andrea Dari

Director of Ingenio

Introduction. Welcome to the Prompted Era. Why AI matters for architecture today

We are witnessing a radical paradigm shift – profound, inevitable, and far-reaching. Like many creative and scientific fields, architecture stands at the threshold of a new era: the age of artificial intelligence. Following the computational design revolution of the early 2000s – which transformed geometry, fabrication, and the interaction with design data – we now face an even broader acceleration that redefines the foundations of architectural thinking.

With its generative and predictive capacities, artificial intelligence is reshaping how we conceive, represent, build, and experience architecture. Its impact goes far beyond automation: it introduces a new, distributed design intelligence capable of collaborating, adapting, and even operating autonomously. Natural language becomes a working interface, data turns into design material, and prompts evolve into protocols. Design is shifting from control to conversation, from form to behavior, and from closed projects to open systems.

We cannot ignore or delay this transition. As designers and as citizens, it is our responsibility to consciously embrace this change, to guide it and shape it toward ethical, sustainable, and human-centered goals. Architecture, as both a cultural and technological discipline, has the opportunity – and the responsibility – to lead this transformation.

Far from diminishing the human role, this new era opens unprecedented and exciting scenarios: a future where human creativity is amplified and enhanced, where the architect is no longer merely a maker of forms but a curator of intelligences. The architect of the future will be an orchestrator of complex systems, a designer of dialogues between humans and machines, a director of new productive ecologies. New challenges will confront the architect and raise new questions, but grounded in body and emotion the architect will always be responsible for bringing the artificial into the real.

This book aims to explore, structure, and give direction to the present. Through a critical mapping of emerging technologies, evolving processes, and shifting roles within architectural practice, we offer a set of conceptual and operational tools to navigate the Prompted Era – an era where design is no longer just an