Rebuilding the Gherkin: An AI Experiment in Modern Engineering

• Proeksa Meas
• 29 July 2026
• Construction Focus
• 1098 Views

Stuart Milne, a former member of the original Gherkin design team and current Product Manager at Bentley Systems, has successfully used AI to recreate the iconic London tower in just minutes.

This experimental project highlights a transformative shift in how infrastructure engineering software can integrate with AI to streamline complex design workflows while maintaining critical safety standards.

The project utilized an autonomous AI agent connected to Bentley’s engineering software via a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server. This technology serves as a bridge, allowing AI to interpret plain English instructions and execute commands directly within professional tools like MicroStation and STAAD.

By leveraging this connection, the AI agent generated the tower’s intricate geometry, significantly reducing the manual labor that originally took the team years to compute.

The primary benefit of this workflow lies in the balance between AI creativity and engineering reliability. While the AI imagined the tower’s form, Milne utilized Bentley’s existing deterministic tools—such as Bentley Copilot and a Python Assistant—to convert the conceptual design into a physics-based, verified model.

This ensures that the generated output is not just a digital sketch, but a structurally sound design that meets the rigorous demands of civil engineering.

Ultimately, this experiment demonstrates that AI can handle time-consuming computational processes, allowing engineers to evolve into “orchestrators.” By supervising AI agents to handle repetitive tasks while retaining final human judgment for verification, professionals can enhance their expertise, accelerate project timelines, and ensure the safety and integrity of modern infrastructure designs.

• Bentley
• AI
• STAAD Pro
• MicroStation
• Bentley Systems
• Gherkin