Architects don't need AI, says high-tech pioneer Norman Foster
British architect Norman Foster has spent six decades pushing the boundaries of technology with awe-inspiring modernist structures from California to Hong Kong, but he is yet to be convinced by the craze for artificial intelligence.
"Artificial intelligence at the moment has the ability to cheat, to invent," he told AFP in a recent interview in Paris, which is hosting a retrospective of his work.
"We live in a world which is physical, we inhabit buildings, streets, squares. That physicality, you can't replicate by artificial intelligence."
Foster has been shaping urban landscapes since the 1960s and won the Pritzker Prize, the equivalent of the Nobel Prize in architecture, in 1999.
His statement projects include Apple's giant ring-shaped headquarters in California, London's Wembley Stadium and Millennium Bridge, and Berlin's Reichstag.
Experts describe his practice, Foster and Partners, as possibly the most prolific in history, and the most adept at navigating changing trends and technologies.
"He conceives architecture almost as an organism balancing itself with the air, the sun, life," said Frederic Migayrou, curator of the Norman Foster exhibition at the Pompidou Centre in the French capital.
Yet he has not swerved controversy, irking climate campaigners with his keenness to build airports and his views on the environment.
- 'Hard facts' -
He is a champion of urban living -- "people live longer in cities" -- but his vision for sustaining urban lifestyles has courted some criticism.
He supports nuclear power, saying it had not caused a single death and the world would only be able to tackle climate change "with hard facts, not emotion".
He sees it as a vital part of the solution to the deprivation and poverty seen in megacities
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