  The recent explosion of high-quality image-to-image methods has prompted
interest in applying image-to-image methods towards artistic and design tasks.
Of interest for architects is to use these methods to generate design proposals
from conceptual sketches, usually hand-drawn sketches that are quickly
developed and can embody a design intent. More specifically, instantiating a
sketch into a visual that can be used to elicit client feedback is typically a
time consuming task, and being able to speed up this iteration time is
important. While the body of work in generative methods has been impressive,
there has been a mismatch between the quality measures used to evaluate the
outputs of these systems and the actual expectations of architects. In
particular, most recent image-based works place an emphasis on realism of
generated images. While important, this is one of several criteria architects
look for. In this work, we describe the expectations architects have for design
proposals from conceptual sketches, and identify corresponding automated
metrics from the literature. We then evaluate several image-to-image generative
methods that may address these criteria and examine their performance across
these metrics. From these results, we identify certain challenges with
hand-drawn conceptual sketches and describe possible future avenues of
investigation to address them.
