Blending Buildings is an Atlas (infinite) of non-existing buildings, created by blending existing ones, that aims to highlight how artificial intelligence can be used as a tool to consolidate the conceptual equation that underlies architectural thinking (observe, rework, produce). Creating or proffering new reference images, going where the past has not taken us and where the future has not yet led us, daring and imagining architectures that have not been thought of and using them as a starting point for the design of new forms, new spatial solutions, new structures, new relationships: the Blending Buildings precisely. But not only that. Blending Buildings, in their inherent abstractness, pose complex questions above all. What is the value of what is produced by such a blendization process?How does it affect (or how might it affect) our profession? Blending Buildings wants, in a sense, to create awareness about the value, potential, but also the risks and change that AI could bring to the way we do architecture. The purpose of our research is to generate a debate, to raise questions, to focus on what is happening no longer in the practices and universities of the world, but inside servers and routers buried under who knows how many meters of earth and from which, today, digital revolutions are coming unimpeded into our homes, our offices, our screens in the form of cutting-edge software and system updates. Creating awareness means, first of all, acknowledging changeand recognizing that change implies accepting the consequences that this change might generate, whether positive or negative. And so, the architect, should ask himself: is this tool, this process, thisnew way of preceding and proceeding architectural thinking, useful? 

The Blending Buildings we propose in this publication (to which they give their name) are images of buildings that are part of the Swiss architectural landscape, from those in the vernacular tradition, such as the raccards in Grimentz or the Maisons a Sgraffito in the Lower Engadine, to the more contemporary buildings that define Zurich’s more modern neighborhoods such as the Europaalle; buildings that have been blended-that is, mixed, amalgamated, fused together by AI programs. Blending Buildings open up a critical interrogation of design-making, an inquiry into the imaginative aspect of the creative process that, with the addition of this new instrumentation, could changeradically.BlendingBuildingsareforus,in other words, an awareness, a way of saying that this age of ours, so contradictory and difficult, has provided perhaps the most powerful tool ever. A tool with which to begin to shed light in the dystopia of everyday life by trying to understand, not so much whether we are lost or not, but whether there is a way to control change and not be, thus, unwittingly overwhelmed by it.