Assistant Professor of Architecture Sabri Gökmen has been selected for a 2026 Google Higher Ed Faculty AI Fellowship for North America. The fellowship brings together academics from across disciplines who are at the forefront of artificial intelligence use in their teaching and research.
Chosen through an application process, the faculty meet periodically in virtual cohorts to work collectively on tasks and share ideas and insights. As early adopters, they are positioned to both advocate for and lead the incorporation of AI in their academic fields. Their final gathering will take place in person at the Google headquarters in Mountain View, Calif.
Gökmen, who joined the faculty of UNC Charlotte in 2024, teaches undergraduate and graduate courses focused on computational design, generative AI, parametric modeling and digital fabrication. His research investigates prompt-to-geometry systems, multimodal datasets and AI-assisted architectural workflows. He was recently awarded the Architectural Research Centers Consortium New Researcher Award, which honors “emerging figures in architectural and environmental design research who demonstrate innovation in thinking, dedication to scholarship, contributions to the academy and leadership within architectural and environmental design research.”
In his fellowship application, Gökmen said that he began seriously investigating the uses of generative image models and large language models in architectural design three years ago. The challenge for architectural design education, as with so many areas of study, is how to fully integrate such a new and quickly developing technology into the curriculum.
“While generative and agentic AI tools are rapidly transforming computational design, their adoption in architecture studios and departmental curricula remains fragmented, often limited to isolated experiments rather than sustained pedagogical change,” he said. “This creates a gap between emerging AI workflows and the structures needed to teach them critically, responsibly and at scale.”
In a graduate architecture studio last spring, Gökmen had students use agentic scripting to develop custom computational design algorithms to analyze historical structures, such as English manor houses, hospitals, prisons and Baroque palaces.
“These tools were not used to replace the design process,” he explained, “but to help students translate historical precedents into explicit computational rules, rapidly test many formal and spatial alternatives, and then critically evaluate the results through architectural judgment.”
Gökmen will teach a design studio this fall with a similar focus on AI-assisted design methods, computational workflows and the critical interpretation of architectural form.
Gökmen acknowledges that the rise of generative and agentic AI in the design industry raises questions about authorship, creative agency and collaboration. But he sees AI “not as a shortcut or replacement for design thinking,” he said, “but as a new medium that students must learn to interrogate, adapt and integrate into architectural workflows.”