The essay draws on Graviglia’s book Addio al linguaggio. La trasfigurazione dell’architettura (Bordeaux edizioni, 2025).

In this essay, Flavio Graviglia starts from Roland Barthes’s idea of photography as a certificate of presence and asks what remains of it now that generative AI produces architectural images that look like photographs without having recorded anything. Photographs of built buildings and AI-generated images of architecture can no longer be told apart, although they are different in nature, and they feed designers’ imagination in the same way. Architecture now lives in physical and virtual space at once, and generative tools recombine fragments of built and merely imagined buildings, loosening further the bond between a building and its context.