Designing the Uncanny: Architectural Form and Artificial Imagination

REIA. Revista Europea de Investigation en Architectura. 2025. Vol. 26. P. 18–38.

Pirari G., Battelli C.

This paper investigates the relationship between artificial intelligence and architectural imagination by examining the uncanny dimension (Freud, Vidler) inherent in machine-generated images and spatial configurations. Drawing upon Freud’s concept of the Unheimlich and Baudelaire’s poetics of the double, it interprets AI-driven architectures as manifestations of disturbed familiarity, emerging from a syncretic combinatorial logic that challenges human rationality and control. Emerging generative technologies (e.g., Midjourney, large language models, text-to-3D synthesis) are conceptualized not merely as tools but as imaginative apparatuses capable of evoking hybrid visions situated between dream and design, symbol and reality. Engaging with Neoplatonic philosophy, this paper proposes that AI functions as a novel form of impersonal nous, revealing deep structures of human thought and desire, thereby transforming architectural design into an open, adaptive, and mythopoietic process. Consequently, AI generated architecture is framed not as simple replication or simulation but as a performative medium wherein space, body, and memory hybridize to generate new modes of inhabiting the world

Keywords: познание, неоплатонизм, cognition, Neoplatonism, Unheimlich, spatial hybrids, architectural uncanny, synthetic imagination, Unheimlich, пространственные гибриды, синтетическое воображение, архитектурное жуткое