Disciplinary Tradition and AI: New Perspectives for Architectural Education

The current accreditation system for university degree programmes in Eu-rope, based on the Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance in the European Higher Education Area (ESG), requires continuous monitoring and periodic review of curricula to ensure educational quality and the de-velopment of effective and inclusive learning environments.
Since the approval of the ESG in 2015, digital transformation has increas-ingly demanded advanced technological competencies from architecture graduates. This rapid acceleration, however, has often produced an imbal-ance, privileging technical proficiency at the expense of the theoretical, cul-tural, and critical foundations of architectural design. Within this context, the integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) brings to the surface a deeper tension: how to embrace emerging tools without dissolving the discipli-nary identity of architecture.
This contribution develops a theoretical framework that traces the potential uses of AI, highlighting the structural similarities between digital devices and certain approaches to architectural design, reconciling tradition and in-novation. Drawing on the disciplinary legacy of the Italian school of archi-tecture, the project explores the potential of AI in the early stages of design, particularly in the identification of references and the construction of func-tional and structural layouts. The objective is to foster a more balanced in-tergenerational dialogue, in which collaboration between teachers and stu-dents becomes a reciprocal exchange. In this perspective, architectural edu-cation emerges as a hybrid field, where humanistic heritage and algorithmic intelligence converge to redefine the future of the discipline.