Why Ross Levy Believes Hands-On Building Experience Still Matters in the Age of AI

Ross Levy's father bought large ships from the United States military and dismantled them for a living. Aircraft carriers and submarines went through his naval salvage business. "His business was taking things apart," Levy says. "And he liked, in his spare time, to put things together." He built some of the houses the family lived in. Levy's grandmother ran building jobs too. She told stories of how on Friday afternoons she would set up a card table, count out the money and pay the men.

"I come by this naturally," says Levy. The San Francisco-based studio works at the intersection of architecture, environmentalism and art. Its approach is site-specific, with research and sustainability at the base of the design process. The firm's projects have been recognised by the AIA and featured in Architectural Digest, Dwell, Dezeen, SPACES and Fine Homebuilding.

A builder first

Levy grew up on the Southern California coast, playing sports, surfing and exploring tide pools. He played soccer in college until he hurt his knees. When visiting a friend at architecture school he found students working on their projects late into the night, together. It struck him as liberal studies "except it has a name". He enrolled and did well.

After his undergraduate degree he went to work for a builder. "We did everything," he says. Levy worked as a carpenter, plumber, electrician and tile setter. A professor, Stanley Saitowitz who had once taught at Harvard urged him to apply there. Levy applied with his referral and got in.

Levy describes his Harvard education as highly theoretical, with little practical instruction in construction or running a business. Its philosophy of design taught him to connect a building to its cultural moment and setting. "There wasn't too much about how to actually build it," he says. Levy never gave up the practical side and calls it a bad habit. "I will continue to do it. I like to work with tools."

He reaches for Picasso to explain why it matters. The painter's radical work rested on a mastery of figure drawing and portraiture that many people overlook. "I think the same holds true for what we do, the fundamentals underpin the innovation" Levy says. They've always had a gallery and curated art. "Art moves more quickly than building and makes us more aware of contemporary culture. It tunes our eyes."

Talking to the builders

A new home on San Francisco's Ocean Beach shows how that plays out. The client was a surfer who wanted to live where he could see the waves and decide exactly when to get in the water. The house's design drew on the experience of surfing and being inside a wave. Its staircase is supported from the ceiling down, a nod to the weightlessness a surfer feels. The house was later featured in Dwell.

The rods Levy wanted to support the stairs came only in 20-foot lengths, so the team worked with the contractors to determine how to join them. Drawings went to the builder and on to the subcontractors, who came back with what they could and could not do.

"You get into dialogue," Levy says. He has worked with architects who hand over a drawing and want no questions from the people building it. "I don't work that way."

Knowing what to ask

At a design show in New York, Levy met an interior designer who had stopped taking on clients. They all think they can do his job, the man told him. Levy knows the feeling. AI allows people without architectural training to generate images of buildings. "You simply talk to your machine and it produces for you," he says.

His answer is that everyone involved becomes a curator. "What we say matters more than ever," he says. Getting a machine to do what you want depends on knowing what you are talking about. That keeps an architect's skill, education and experience "entirely relevant", in his words.

He wants clients who see it that way. Some come to him only because a permit needs a licensed architect's stamp, and that is not the work he prefers. "I want people to come to me because they value what I do," he says. He asks what clients cherish in life as well as what the building must do. "The thing that we make is an embodiment of them."

Expertise shows in the budget too. Levy estimates that material selections can make roughly a 10 per cent difference to a project's overall cost. The bigger savings sit in the basic design, so structure is considered while the form is still being drawn. "There's a tremendous cost to making an entirely glass building in a place where the ground shakes," he says.

Built for the place

The University of California keeps its Big Creek Reserve in Big Sur in a natural state for scientific research. It runs 2300 feet undersea into the Pacific and climbs to about 4,000 feet of elevation in the Coastal Range. Levy's studio designed a classroom and housing on the reserve for UC Santa Cruz. Fire and mudslides come in cycles in those mountains, so the buildings are fire resistant. They run entirely on solar power. The classroom sits close to the creek, so its wastewater gets advanced treatment. According to the studio, the project survived the Dolan Fire. Levy says it "embodies the spirit of the place more in its function than in its form".

In the city the test is different. He believes a new building should belong to its own time and calls that "a measure of our integrity as designers". "There is a way to work within an existing context, but not be a slave to it."

A new architecture

"Architecture is more important than ever," Levy says. "It is quite literally the way we make the world."

In 1923 Le Corbusier published Vers une architecture, a book shaped by new technology and new social conditions; reinforced concrete, steel, glass, ocean liners and aeroplanes of the age. Levy believes architects are "sitting in that moment again". Solar technology, AI and new materials point towards buildings that generate their own energy and dispose of their own waste. Properly planned buildings can be net positive for the environment.

"We have a great opportunity and responsibility to create these new forms," he says. For Levy, that means responding to the technological and environmental conditions of the present.

At Levy Art & Architecture, that future draws on lessons learned long before AI entered the design studio: understanding materials, listening to the people who build and knowing how a place will be used. New tools expand what architects can imagine, while practical experience helps them decide what is worth building and how to make it work. The opportunity is to bring those capabilities together, creating buildings that serve their occupants and respond thoughtfully to the environments they become part of.