Mark Alan Hewitt

Mark Alan Hewitt is an American architect, architectural historian, and preservationist, a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects who has taught in US architecture schools and lectured in art history at Rutgers. He is the author of several books, including “Draw In Order To See: A Cognitive History of Architectural Design” (2020), which grounds his argument that drawing and embodied thinking are central to how architects design.

A manifesto against the “revolution”

In a 2023 Common Edge essay, “Architects Must Resist the AI ‘Revolution,’” Hewitt broke sharply from the profession’s cautious optimism. He argued that architecture is already in crisis and must not surrender to hype about tools that promise to make design easier while hollowing it out. Human designers, he contended, are the best judges of beauty, human need, and emotional resonance — judgments he does not believe generative algorithms can make.

Drawing on his cognitive research, Hewitt insists that optimal design solutions have been refined by architects and users over centuries, and that turning that process over to a machine sifting millions of options would yield either recycled paradigms or “garbage.” His broadside is notable for its refusal to hedge, warning that if younger leaders don’t resist as he would, the profession is “in deep trouble.”