Milan Design Week draws the global architecture elite to one place, year after year. The same firms. The same materials.
The same aesthetic. Against that backdrop, two architects are arguing that technology — specifically artificial intelligence — can break the cycle of sameness, not accelerate it.
The second episode of the Room For Dreams podcast, recorded live at Milan Design Week 2026 in cooperation with INDX|GLOBAL, features architects Arun Sharma and Jaskaran Singh. They are pushing back against the anxiety that has shadowed AI in architecture since the technology entered the mainstream. Their argument: AI does not have to overwrite the local.
It can learn from it. Sharma and Singh are actively defining a term they call the digital vernacular.
The idea is straightforward. Feed regional patterns, local materials, and building traditions into AI systems. The machine absorbs the quirks — the ornament, the hand-drawn detail, the regional difference that makes a building belong somewhere.
Then it helps architects design with those same quirks, at scale, in an era of globalized glass towers. The timing of the conversation feels deliberate. Milan Design Week is a magnet for architectural standardization.
The same international firms return year after year, exporting the same visual language. Sharma and Singh are pushing back against that export.
Their argument flips the script on typical tech anxiety. AI is not the threat to heritage. It is the tool for preservation.
A way to keep local identity breathing. The podcast format itself reinforces the point.
Room For Dreams records live, in front of an audience. No polished talking points. No rehearsed answers.
Just architects working through a question that haunts the profession: can architecture embrace the future without losing its soul? Sharma and Singh answer with a single word: vernacular. But not as a museum piece.
Not as something frozen in time. They frame it as a living language.
One that can be fed into algorithms, learned by machines, and reproduced in new contexts. The digital vernacular, as they define it, lets the machine do what machines do — process patterns — while keeping the human hand in control of what matters. The episode wrestles with a tension that is not new.
Architecture has always balanced the local against the global. But the tools have changed.
Sharma and Singh are arguing that the profession does not have to choose between tradition and technology. The choice is false. They are proposing a third path: use the technology to save the tradition.
Room For Dreams is now two episodes in. It is positioning itself as a platform for exactly this kind of rethinking. The live recording gives the exchanges an edge.
No script. No safety net.
Just architects, an audience, and an argument that AI might be the thing that saves difference, not erases it. Whether the profession listens remains to be seen. But at Milan Design Week, where the global architecture world converges, Sharma and Singh are making the case that the future does not have to look like the present.
It can look like everywhere.
{“@context”: “https://schema.org”, “@type”: “NewsArticle”, “headline”: “Milan Design Week: Architects argue AI can break cycle of industry sameness”, “description”: “Milan Design Week draws the global architecture elite to one place, year after year. The same firms. The same materials. The same aesthetic. Against that…”, “datePublished”: “2026-06-24T14:04:00+00:00T09:30:00+00:00”, “author”: {“@type”: “Person”, “name”: “Beatrice Ferrari”}, “publisher”: {“@type”: “Organization”, “name”: “InfoPulse Today”, “url”: “https://newsfeed.infopulsetoday.com/”}}
