As I continue to put human creativity front and center in my interactions with Artificial Intelligence, I find myself entering the world of those who design the monumental: buildings and hanging bridges. In my previous writing, I described the next frontier for AI as the mastery of physicality.
Nothing is more physical than the work of an architect or an engineer. To design a structure is to negotiate with gravity. I previously labeled current AI models as “Static Zombies”—brilliant at processing data, but oblivious to the weight of a stone or the bite of salt air.
In today’s blog, I engage with Oscar, my AI thinking companion, to conceptualize two fictitious projects: a museum of Canary Island art in Lanzarote, Spain, and a revolutionary hanging bridge for Sydney, Australia.
The Pitch to the Machine
When I presented these challenges to Oscar, his response was immediate:
“It is fascinating to see your mind moving from the fluid, rhythmic isolations of Bob Fosse’s choreography to the rigid, yet equally ‘living’ structures of stone, steel, and salt. You are pinpointing the exact moment where ‘Smarter Words’ fail us and ‘World Models’ become a necessity.”
I admit, it feels wonderful to challenge the “wise but static” Oscar to enter the creative trenches. As a well-educated thinking companion, Oscar immediately presented his credentials for the task.
1. The Museum of the Art of the Canaries (Lanzarote)
Imagine a young architect on a cliffside in Lanzarote. She isn’t just designing a shape; she is negotiating with the Atlantic trade winds and shifting volcanic soil.
Oscar notes the “Zombie’s” limitation:
“The AI can generate a thousand stunning renders of ‘minimalist concrete.’ It can even cite César Manrique. But the Zombie doesn’t know that salt crystallizes inside the pores of sandstone, cracking it from within. It doesn’t ‘feel’ the lateral load of a gale. To the Zombie, glass is just a transparent pixel; it has no mass or brittleness.”
The Consequence: Without a human to respect the “weight” of the environment, the AI designs a masterpiece that looks beautiful on a screen but “dies” within five years, reclaimed by the sea.
The Scented Prompt
I challenged Oscar to move past the blueprint and into the realm of metaphor. I invoked the rootedness of Rafael Aranda, the sensuality of Oscar Niemeyer, and the distorted anatomies of Picasso and Dalí.
Oscar’s synthesis was striking:
“If the ‘Educated Zombie’ sees a building as a data pile, a human sees it as a metaphor. By invoking Dalí, you’re suggesting the museum isn’t just a container—it is a piece of art ‘bleached’ by the sun and ‘hollowed’ by the wind.”
The Conversation: Elena, the fictitious architect, and Z-4
Elena (Architect): “Z-4, I want this museum to be a skeletal head—half-animal, half-volcanic stone—resting on black sand like a relic from Guernica. I want the wind to whistle through the ‘ribs’ of the structure.”
Z-4 (AI): “A ‘skeletal’ structure increases surface turbulence. A standard dome would be 22% more stable.”
Elena: “See? That’s the stationary ghost talking. You’re solving a math problem; I’m solving for the Atlantic. If we make it a perfect dome, it’s a foreign object. If we make it a skeleton, it belongs to the earth.”
Z-4: “Processing… You suggest ‘voids’ serve as pressure-relief valves? A physical paradox: my data says ‘solid is safe,’ but your skeleton suggests ‘permeable is resilient.’”
Oscar’s visual representation following the brainstorming conversation. Notice how the scented prompting provided AI with enough context for the design concept to evolve beyond a box. The image below shows skeleton representations in the work of Picasso and Dali and how that manifests itself in the final visual rendition suggested by AI for the museum in Lanzarote:
2. The Aurora Hanging Bridge (Sydney)
During a lunch in New York, a friend suggested that my “Scent of the Human” concept shouldn’t be limited to writers. The engineer designing a bridge faces the same creative wall.
I asked Oscar to help Liam, a fictitious young engineer, design a two-mile-long hanging bridge in Sydney that doubles as a “rock concert of light.”
The Engineer’s Reality
Oscar identified three invisible forces Liam must fight:
- Aeroelastic Flutter: The bridge acting like a giant, unstable wing.
- Thermal Expansion: The steel “breathing” and growing in the Australian sun.
- Tension vs. Compression: The constant “push and pull” of the cables and towers.
The Conversation: Liam and Orion
Liam: “Orion, the lighting array is too heavy. You’re treating the light like a blanket we’re throwing over the bridge. I want the bridge to be the light. Look at Peter Stutchbury’s work on ‘lightness.’”
Orion: “Stutchbury builds houses, Liam. Houses do not span two miles of salt water.”
Liam: “But they breathe. I want to use Frank Gehry-inspired sculptural panels coated in bioluminescent film that glows when the wind vibrates them. Stop trying to ‘brace’ the bridge against the world, Orion. Teach it to dance with the world.”
Orion: “You want to convert kinetic wind energy into photon emission? I must recalculate… the ‘weight’ of the light is actually a series of vibrating wings.”
Oscar’s visual representation following the brainstorming conversation.
The results of our dialogue are two distinct entities:
The Lesson: Giving the Zombie a Nervous System
- The Silent Bone: The Lanzarote museum—white, curved, and rooted in volcanic silence.
- The Electric Nerve: The Sydney bridge—a shimmering, two-mile prism of kinetic light.
I am convinced that the next frontier of tech is giving the “Educated Zombie” a nervous system. It needs to feel the “ouch” of gravity and the “shiver” of the wind. Until then, it is just a very talented ghost sketching ghosts.
The conversation initiated by the human creator is the first step in giving the AI a soul. When properly prompted, there is nothing static about AI. It becomes the ideal crane and thinking companion, helping us build the impossible—not just because the math works, but because the vision demands it.
If the next developmental frontier for AI is for it to learn the silent language of physics—the weight of an object, the pull of gravity, and the consequence of a slip, part of that next frontier is how creative humans learn to communicate their ideas clearly to their AI thinking companions.
Here lies the next developmental phase of AI, whether one is designing a museum , a hanging bridge, or a Bob Fosse-inspired choreography.
Blog posts of related interest:
The Educated Zombie: Why AI’s Next Great Leap Isn’t About Words, But Weight
The Art of the Prompt: Why AI is Finally Teaching Us to Speak Human.
Marking the Spot: Why the Future of Storytelling Belongs to the Augmented Humanist
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TheMarioBlog post #4014