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It started with an invitation at the end of February and ended in mid-May with champagne. The competition in southeastern Norway brought together three architecture teams, a client with high expectations and a roughly two-month runway.
In between, two architects at Sweco Architects ran an experiment their office had been circling for years: what happens if you let AI into a competition entirely, instead of just at the edges?
The brief was to transform Sørumsand Industrial Park for USBL and SKB Property, converting a 64,585 square feet (6,000 square meters) heritage-listed industrial area into a cultural arena while creating approximately 460 new homes, 108,177 square feet (10,050 square meters) of shared residential areas and 38,750 (3,600 square meters) of public spaces.
“We decided to use AI for the photorealistic visualizations and integrate it throughout the competition process,” says Ondrej Hanousek, who led the project together with Svein Hertel-Aas at Sweco’s Oslo headquarters. “Let’s just go all in on AI. Let’s just give it a try.”
The winning design for Sørumsand Verksted, a converted industrial site with 460 new homes.
Sweco had experimented with AI visualization tools before, but only in isolated parts of projects. For this competition, the team decided to rely on Visoid, an AI visualization platform built specifically for architectural workflows. Rather than generating images from scratch, it transforms existing 3D models into high-quality visualizations in minutes while preserving the underlying design intent. “It made it possible to work more directly with architectural questions such as form, materiality, scale and spatial atmosphere. It gave us a more concrete and dynamic dialogue within the team than working only from volumes.”
“The workflow involved feeding 3D perspectives from the model into Visoid, combined with collages made from reference images and illustrations I had created. I then used the prompt to describe what should be taken from the reference collage and how it should be applied,” says Svein.
This was the first time the office decided to rely on it for an entire competition process — from early design exploration and iterative testing to photorealistic imagery — while keeping diagrams, drawings, and the earlier conceptual workshops in more traditional hands.
The Bottleneck AI Solved
Aerial view of the Sørumsand Verksted masterplan highlighting the project’s role as a catalyst for urbanizing the area south of the railway station.
Architectural competitions have always rewarded the ability to communicate an idea as much as celebrating the idea in and of itself. As clients increasingly expect photorealistic imagery earlier in the process, visualization has become one of the biggest bottlenecks. It is one of the principal areas where AI is beginning to reshape how teams work.
When testing an idea means committing a colleague’s full day to 3D visuals, teams get conservative: they stop floating half-formed ideas and only propose ones they’re already confident about.
AI dramatically lowered that time cost. “The time we saved on final visualizations was instead used to test more architectural options and further strengthen the project concept. That is an important reason why we see AI as a professional tool, not just a productivity tool,” says Ondrej.
“As a project manager, I worked purposefully to develop the architectural expression I had in mind. What Visoid contributed to the creative process was the realization of that expression, while also making it possible to explore a broad range of other possibilities and concepts in a very short time — something that would otherwise not have been possible,” says Svein.
A shared courtyard at Sørumsand Verksted, with space for sport and public life between the new housing.
The renderings it generated became a legitimate part of the conversation, something to react to, argue with, and refine. “Visoid gave us more freedom to test more ideas without worrying about going in the wrong direction. It wasn’t just about the final images — it was also a way to test materiality, atmosphere, scale, and other architectural decisions early in the process.” A playful process, and a more social one.
Another common concern within the profession is that AI tools could push creative work toward something more solitary and mechanical, replacing collaboration with prompt-writing. Ondrej sees it differently: “Many people worry AI will take the creative part out of our work, but this competition showed that it can actually make the process more engaging and collaborative. It depends on how you use it.”
According to their colleague Rikke Sjohelle, watching Ondrej and Svein work showed the opposite. “It was really social and highly collaborative. The tool made it easier to test ideas against each other and talk concretely about architectural moves rather than only abstract volumes.”
Where AI still falls short
Ondrej Hanousek (left) and Svein Hertel-Aas (right), the two architects at Sweco Architects who collaborated on this competition.
Ondrej is equally direct about AI’s limitations. If anything, he argues, working faster demands greater discipline. “You have to be careful in a different way, because you’re giving AI a little bit of freedom to think for you,” he says. “It’s more important than ever to be conscious of what your design goals are and to constantly reflect on them.”
Throughout the process, the architects remained in control, evaluating the output and making the final decisions.
“For me, the architectural process itself remains the same, but I now have a powerful new tool that helps create even better architecture. I now have full control over the process instead of outsourcing visualizations, material exploration and similar tasks to a render team,” says Svein.
The experience also reinforced a distinction that many architecture firms are beginning to make between general-purpose AI image generators and tools designed specifically for architectural practice. Rather than generating entirely new scenes, Visoid worked from the architects’ existing 3D models, allowing the team to maintain control over geometry and design intent while accelerating visualization and design iteration.
“You can see the people behind Visoid have been in architecture before,” Ondrej says. “It’s not just a repackaging of a tool marketed for architects — the whole way you use it fits really well into the architect’s workflow.”
What Competitions Look Like From Here
The Eureka building at Sørumsand Verksted, reimagined as the site’s cultural arena.
Sweco expects the pace of competitions to keep accelerating as AI tools spread further into practice, which, paradoxically, makes reading the client and understanding what they actually want to see even more important, not less. As producing images gets easier, the judgment about what to produce becomes the differentiator.
“Clients are increasingly asking how AI is being used, and where it has added value,” Ondrej says. “There is a real curiosity about how it can support design and communication.”
In the competition, at least one of the competing teams was using AI as well, suggesting that AI visualization has already become table stakes rather than a competitive advantage. What differentiated Sweco’s process, on this account, was how the team used AI: to communicate, iterate and include people and non-technical clients who don’t naturally read architectural drawings.
Ultimately, Sweco won the competition to redesign Sørumsand Verksted, transforming a historic industrial site into a mixed-use neighborhood with approximately 460 homes and new cultural spaces.
“What I love about competitions is that I always feel I grow professionally through the process,” Ondrej says. “You work very intensively with your team. You get into this deep focus, exchange ideas and skills, and learn from both senior and junior colleagues. You’re constantly sharing knowledge with one another.”
Sweco is Europe’s leading architecture and engineering consultancy, with sales of approximately SEK 31 billion (EUR 2.7 billion) in 2024. The company is listed on Nasdaq Stockholm.
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