Can you share some insights into your early career, particularly your role at Rita Mody Joshi and Associates, and how it shaped your approach to architecture?

Sahil Tanveer: Rita is my mentor. I did my internship with her in 2007 and then went back to working with her after graduating in 2010. I worked with her for about 14 months before joining an event company called Funky Heads in Goa, where I worked for another year before moving to Pune. My early career was an absolute mix of everything. I juggled architecture, photography, poetry, writing, cinematography, music, and many other things. All of this had at least one odd project commissioned, so I can’t call it a hobby. Rita had a lot to do with what I was doing apart from plans, sections, and elevations in the office. She allowed me to take off early 3 times a week so that I could take dance classes! I met Rita recently, almost after 7-8 years, and realised how much I’ve turned into her! ‘Sleeping is a waste of time,’ she said, and my wife turned to look at me because I say the exact same thing all the time! She let me explore who I was and what I wanted to do, without any condescending overtures of “You’re an architect, you’re supposed to make buildings!” That shaped my psyche, it shaped who I am today. When I look back, I realise that I am able to bring two absolutely unrelated concepts and connect them to architecture and the philosophy of architecture because of the diverse things that I grew up with in my formative years.

How did your time at Design Inc. and Design Consultants Architects Pvt Ltd influence your design philosophy and career trajectory?

Sahil Tanveer: I moved to Pune and joined DCAPL as a project architect and quite frankly it was a culture shock for me, coming from a small house-turned-office in Goa to a semi-corporate setup with architecture and interior design departments, quantification dept (I didn’t know that was a thing), and entry access cards! Infact, even Design Inc had an entry access card, which recorded the time of entry, upon which our pay cuts were decided, while the exit didn’t really have any cards hence the 2-3 hours of prolonged work in the evenings was conveniently ignored. One of the most important thing I learnt at DCAPL was time management and standardisation of tasks and workflows. Basically creating processes that you can rely upon when people are unpredictable. It was some sort of automation similar to what we employ in our office now albeit with AI agents. I was at Design Inc for quite a brief time, so I think that is the office that made me realise that Mumbai is not a place to live in. It is the most enjoyable city in the country but an absolute nightmare to live in. One great thing did happen at Design Inc though–I met my wife there! She’s now my partner at RBDS and handles work related to Interior Design, mainly in the hospitality genre. In a way, I’m thankful to have worked in both of these offices. They taught me much about life and I haven’t forgotten any of those lessons. My design philosophy developed more because of my thirst for knowledge and one eternal mentor who I never met: Charles Correa. I literally read and watched everything that I could find about him and his ideas. After 11 years of practice, I still believe that the core ideas of climate, culture, and technology that we are building upon are still in their nascent stages. We strive to see every design project through these lenses and then double down on what data and feedback we get, from the location, the client, the site, and the current capabilities of technology.

You spent several years in photography. How did this experience contribute to your architectural perspective and creative process?

Sahil Tanveer: If you see on my LinkedIn profile, I have a section called “Life Experience.” That is actually when the obsession with photography started. It wasn’t as much to do with photographing buildings than it was to do with photographing people and moments. I assisted one of my photography teachers in Goa, Prasad Pankar, with a photoshoot for Remo Fernandes. When Remo heard I was an architect, he said, ‘Ah! Another one bites the dust!’ Since he was an architect himself who turned into a musician. What started back then as a hobby, turned into a lot of freelancing work. Turns out it actually helps in photography what you learn about composition in architecture. I was doing weddings all over the place! I even did family portraits, industrial photos, page-3 photos outsourced to me by photographer friends, model portfolios, birthday parties, and what-not! Because of my extensive use of Photoshop, I was also doing graphic design and editing assignments too. Again, everything boils down to the experience, the observation of different cultures and behaviours of people and the influence of that on my thought processes. I stopped taking photography assignments about 2 years after RBDS was born. Mostly because I had discovered how to apply the observations into the process of design.

How do you see the interplay between your photographic work and architectural designs? Are there specific projects where this influence is evident?

Sahil Tanveer: I wouldn’t say that. I don’t think it is so easily noticeable. It is more of the abstraction of my experience in photography that influences my projects rather than the photographic work itself. Although, now when we hire photographers for our projects, I know exactly what they are thinking and intuitively understand the technical aspects of looking at a space through the lens.

Can you share your thought process that went into founding Red Brick Design Studio (RBDS)?

Sahil Tanveer: I think the reasons for founding RBDS were quite personal and somewhat selfish. I wanted a space where I could be me. I wasn’t fitting into any of the constructs created by others. And I have this burning desire to have a legacy. Something that people will remember me by once I’m gone. One of the other reasons was to be able to spend time with my mother (which, as much as I want to, I haven’t been able to, in the last few months after the AI Lab was born). The more professional thought process was to have a design practice that was truly an immersive experience in multiple creative fields rather than just architecture or interior design. I wanted RBDS to be a large umbrella where everything to do with design, filmmaking, music, graphic design, and communication was not just a part of the studio culture but a core philosophy that would inform each other of the paths to take. Apart from the RBDS, the RBDS AI Lab, and the AI For Architects (AIFA) learning platform, we also have a storytelling and branding company called Silhouette Media. All of these are constantly evolving and I wouldn’t call any of them commercial machines because they literally aren’t. They simply inform each other. A project in one platform helps in thinking about a project in another.

What inspired you to create RBDSai Lab, and what were the initial challenges in integrating AI with architectural design?

Sahil Tanveer: The AI thing actually started as an exploration into something new. I was introduced to chatGPT by my best friend and then I was literally hooked. When we started exploring image generators and LLMs at the studio, it was quite casual. Before we knew it, we were spending 6-7 hours on average in a day just exploring AI models. Once I was convinced that this was something unseen and unheard of before, we formalised the approach. I’m one of those people who simply has to know how things work. I still fix my own computer, television, washing machine, fridge, fuse, cellphone, etc., and that’s why I had to know how artificial intelligence works too. So I dug in. I watched, read, and listened to everything and anything to do with AI. This led us down another rabbit hole of building language models for mid-sized architecture firms! In fact, I’m actually developing my consolidated RBDS X RBDS AI Lab website on our hosting platform with the help of ChatGPT! Coding and everything! Most of the stuff you would normally see on our social media is imagery. And that is barely half of what we are doing now. Since the day we started, the energy and the spirit haven’t died down. We currently subscribe to about 27 AI apps and have explored close to 130 of them. Out of the 27, about 6 of them are used constantly to integrate our research into practice. We have had challenges but they’re of a different sort. Since we explore apps as they are released, we sometimes face problems when some of the apps or their features don’t reach India. One of the biggest challenges in integrating AI with architectural design has been consolidation and being highly alert of hallucinations. Within the studio, we are at about 70% integration of AI and with processes that are client-facing, I would say we are at about 30-40% integration of AI. We have won projects because of AI and we have also lost projects because of AI. It is simply fascinating. I sort of enjoy the journey more than the destination. I sometimes feel we might get a certain project too easily because of AI! RBDSai Lab has two parts to it. One is the hardcore applied research aspect that explores the unknown in the hope of finding a way through to the other side. And the other is the teaching and mentoring aspect which is informed again by both the practice of architecture and the research about AI. We have recently started AIFA, which is AI For Architects, through which we have managed to consolidate a fair amount of things we do at the AI Lab. We have started consulting with architecture firms to help them integrate AI into their processes and we have also started working with some of the premier architecture schools, consulting on the integration of AI into the pedagogy of architectural education. All this, and yet I feel an AI Tsunami is coming and none of us can even comprehend its impact. In the years to come, I hope we are still in control and I get to scale RBDSai Lab to a much bigger level.

How has the Midjourney model influenced your approach to design, and what unique possibilities does it open for architects?

Sahil Tanveer: Midjourney has been one of the biggest influences not just in our approach to design but in our lives. We started our AI explorations with Playground AI, working with Stable Diffusion but quickly moved to Midjourney. It has had a profound effect on the way we perceive design and the process of design itself. I have seen people struggle to plug Midjourney into their existing thought processes but it is the wrong approach. This is not a plugin. Neither is it a rendering engine. It is a dreaming engine! We have to forget what we were taught. We have to forget about what we know about design and when it comes to the larger question of AI, we have to forget about what we know about life itself. Midjourney has given us the capability to communicate exactly what is going on in our minds in the easiest way possible, an image. I don’t know any other way of brainstorming anymore apart from visual brainstorming. While I may be deeply influenced by Midjourney, I am equally aware that it is actually not intelligent. It is a simple image synthesizer that works on the principle of diffusion; populating noise on a blank canvas called the latent space. The real intelligence actually lies with the Transformers. If we speak purely in an architectural design perspective, Midjourney has changed the way we conceive and communicate ideas. But, when you couple it with a few more AI tools like Control Net on SD and a few GOFAI (Good Old Fashioned AI) tools like Rhinoceros 3D and Revit, it is literally ready to blow anyone out of the waters. It is a huge opportunity for small and mid-sized architecture firms to exponentially rise to the playing grounds of the big players. Not to mention when coupled with ChatGPT, it can actually make you a hundred times smarter.

Can you tell us about your book, Delirious Architecture: Midjourney for Architects – Hallucinations and Reality? Are there any key takeaways that you might want to share?

Sahil Tanveer: Delirious Architecture is the culmination of a year’s exploration into Midjourney and its intricate workings. It is literally a guide mixed with a little bit of philosophy about image synthesis and where we are headed. The entire book was put together in a month’s time with me and 2 of my colleagues working together with ChatGPT, Claude, and QuietQuill. As luck would have it, Midjourney released v6.0 on the day the manuscript was due for publication. So, we paused. We spent 10 days straight working on v6.0 with the same explorations we had covered in v5.2 and noted our observations down. Cranked up the volume and worked through several nights to include the v6.0 details in the book. Delirious is really close to my heart. It may become redundant soon since the development of AI models is at a supersonic speed and the race to AI supremacy is unprecedented but, it will always be a milestone, not just for us but for anyone who has read, seen, or heard about it. I wanted it to be a hardcover, something deliberate and purposeful, and not just another e-book. I was warned by many of my friends and colleagues about the investment and returns, but then, I believe the monetary returns are only a by-product. The real return is holding a 330-page, hardbound volume in your hand and reminiscing about the night you hit the last ‘save’ button. As I said before, its all about the journey.

What would you advise budding architects about navigating this field?

Sahil Tanveer: There is one thing that I would surely tell young budding architects, I keep saying this all the time: strive to know everything, regardless of how unrelated it might seem to architecture or interior design. There is a common thread that connects everything, find that thread and you’ll see that the universe might have actually come from a singularity! Don’t consider anything out of reach. I have never written a piece of code in my life, hell I don’t even know how to read Python code, yet, I just created a world environment with buildings and roads and cars moving through it on blender with a Python code! When it comes to AI, there is nothing but moving forward. Don’t get trapped in debates about where the ‘originality of humans’ will go if AI does everything; I don’t think there was any originality to begin with. Remember the Fight Club, everything is a copy of a copy of a copy. Whatever you do, stay true to yourself. Forget about what someone else taught you about design, how to design, how to live, what constitutes architecture, etc. Create your own constructs. Trust your intuition, it is usually better than any advice you may ever get.

I would like to leave here with a quote by Rabindranath Tagore. “Don’t limit a child to your learning for he was born in another time”