MILAN — The second episode of the Room For Dreams podcast series, recorded live at Milan Design Week 2026 in cooperation with INDX|GLOBAL, features architects Arun Sharma and Jaskaran Singh as they unpack what they call the digital vernacular. The conversation turns typical tech anxiety on its head, reframing artificial intelligence not as a threat to heritage, but as an unexpected ally for keeping local identity alive. The architects describe a process that flips the script.
Instead of AI replacing the hand-drawn detail, the ornament, the regional quirk that makes a building belong somewhere — they frame it as a tool for preservation. A way to keep local identity breathing in an era of globalized glass towers.
The podcast episode, recorded before a live audience, wrestles with a question that haunts the profession: can architecture embrace the future without losing its soul? Sharma and Singh answer with a word: vernacular. Not as a museum piece, but as a living language.
They propose that the digital vernacular — a term they are actively defining — allows architects to feed regional patterns, materials, and building traditions into AI systems. The machine does not overwrite the local.
It learns from it. The timing feels deliberate. Milan Design Week draws the global architecture world to one place, year after year.
The same firms, the same materials, the same aesthetic. Sharma and Singh are pushing back against that sameness, arguing that technology can be the thing that saves difference, not erases it. Room For Dreams, now two episodes in, is positioning itself as a platform for exactly this kind of rethinking.
The series records live, in front of an audience, which gives the exchanges an edge — no polished talking points, no rehearsed answers. Just architects working through the tension between what is new and what is old.
What comes next for the digital vernacular is unclear. But the conversation in Milan suggests a shift: AI as a tool for remembering, not replacing. For keeping the local alive in a profession that often chases the global.
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