The emergence of text-to-image generative models (e.g., Midjourney, DALL-E 2, Stable Diffusion) in the summer of 2022 impacted architectural visual culture suddenly, severely, and seemingly out of nowhere. To contextualize this phenomenon, in an issue of The International Journal of Architectural Computing, I offer a socio-technical history of contemporary text-to-image generative systems.

In a chapter of Diffusions in Architecture - Artificial Intelligence and Image Generators, edited by Matias del Campo, I argue that in the context of prompt-based architectural visualization, designers must learn to navigate landscapes beyond the technical.