Riya's Riyaaz

It has been over four years since I started working, since the inception of my professional career, since I started working in the field I love. For me, architecture was a a small boat in a vast ocean. I couldn't have had two legs in two boats. I did not have a backup. There was no second career option. And after five years of architecture school, yes five, in India the undergrad program is five years, I understood what architecture is. It was beyond drawing fancy sketches and lines (something you only later realize is post production). You learn design, form and function, culture, history; derive your ideas from nature, music, dance; are motivated to deeply care about society, its people, learn to be sensitive towards who you are designing for, the context, understand that it isn't merely a problem-solving agenda but it could be self expression, a statement, a movement, a symbol.  Every fresher right out of college is the most enthusiastic, energetic, ambitious person you meet...

I recently came across a reel on Instagram, by Shawn Kanungo, a recognized strategist and a keynote speaker. There was thrilling excitement in his voice as he announced the Sketchup + Claude partnership. He spoke about how an image of a floor plan can be input to Claude to generate a 3D model. Now, we all saw that coming. We are witnessing the boom of AI with each blink of an eye. I, myself have been chatting with Chat-GPT for under 3 years now. The time for architecture collab was due soon. Shawn's words intrigued me and so, I spent some time Saturday morning doing the same. I took an image of a floor plan of a random apartment and asked Claude Opus 4.6 to generate a CAD file.  1st prompt - "is there a way for me to give you a floor plan and you export it into a cad file or a 2D rhino file?" However, it couldn't produce a CAD file but a dxf file that could be used on various software’s.  The input for the first version was plain and simple. It did not do a good j...

In these cold winter months, I am starting to reminisce about the summer. Past summer, when I and Savan took a mini vacation in the Rocky's of Montana. We visited three national parks - Yellowstone, Grand Teton and Glacier.  We landed at the Bozeman airport and unlike any other major airport that is intimidating, this one was welcoming - a simple wooden structure, where we rented a car and made our way to Yellowstone National Park. We stayed inside the park in a lodge by the lake. Early next morning we witnessed the most beautiful sunrise and a couple bison's roaming in the heavily grown grass between the lake and the lodge. Our food for the entire trip was mainly oatmeal for breakfast and burgers for dinner.  Our first destination was the Old Faithful where we discovered that Yellowstone sits on a super volcano. The last time it exploded was 640,000 years ago. There is no rough estimate of when this can happen again. But when it does, it will wipe out three-quarters of N...