The original note, as written at the time
Like the name suggests, this AI tool would be trained to guess the basic layouts of buildings by merely taking photos of them from the outside or even from the inside. Basically, it would be trained to recognise building form and spatial layouts from as little visual information as possible.
Ongoing development
An AI tool trained to guess the basic layouts of buildings from photographs taken outside them, or from photographs taken inside.
It sounds like a surveillance product and that is one of the things it could be. But the more interesting thing it does is teach us how much spatial information we are throwing away.
Look at a building from the street and you already know a great deal. You know roughly where the stair is, because the windows change rhythm. You know the depth, because of how the shadow falls and where the wall meets the pavement. You know which rooms are on the front and which are dark, because the front rooms have a different kind of curtain. A person with a little experience reads a plan out of a photograph in about four seconds, and almost none of that reasoning is taught.
So the tool is first a study of that reading. What is the minimum visual information from which a competent observer can infer a layout, and what cues do they use. Take a thousand photographs, ask architects to sketch the plans, and you have a dataset of exactly the inference we do without noticing.
The output will be a hypothesis, not a survey, and it must be presented as one. A guessed plan that looks authoritative is dangerous — it is the kind of drawing that gets used in a meeting and never caveated. But a guessed plan that is presented as a first guess, to be confirmed by measurement, is genuinely useful: it lets a surveyor arrive knowing where to look, and it lets a researcher compare a hundred buildings that nobody has ever documented.
And in the interior case it becomes something else again — a way of recording the spatial logic of buildings that no one will ever survey, which is most of what our cities are made of. The domestic interior, the shop, the workshop. Not a survey of a building. A record of a type.