Architecture / AI / Experiment
saltgrid.
Can a model design a city block that works?
A competition that gives AI models the same design brief, then checks whether the result would function as a piece of city.
Private experiment · Not publicly available
A brief on
the salt flats.
The city sits on drying salt pans, and the tide comes further in at every level. By the last level, two channels and a wide tidal margin have broken the buildable ground into fragments.
Players are asked to design with the water, without holding it back. A fitting theme for a studio named after salt.
Six levels, ten questions.
More to consider at each level.
Sites grow from a 12 by 12 grid to 24 by 24. Streets and housing come first, followed by a mix of uses, civic buildings and open space, a tidal channel, tram stops and winter light. The last level brings everything together.
Every layout is scored on ten urban design questions. These include how walkable, connected, mixed, green and flood-safe it is, and whether tall rows leave light for the rows behind them.
The worst-served home counts.
Walkability is measured from the worst-served home. An average can hide the home that the layout leaves behind.
A player that fails a level is out of the competition. A hand-built reference layout clears the first four levels and fails the fifth. A plain street grid works for a simple site, then stops being enough once transit, light and fragmented ground all count together.
Two rounds.
One brief.
In the first round, models build the game itself from one identical prompt. The prompt is fingerprinted to check that every entrant received the same words. In the second round, the models play it.
The entrants include Claude Code online and two small models running offline on a laptop graphics card with 8 GB of memory.
The limits
Proxies, not
planning software.
The scores are simple, repeatable approximations on a coarse grid. They can rank attempts at this brief, but they are not good enough to design with.
No output from Saltgrid should go near a client drawing.