Architecture between fiction and reality in the age of artificial intelligence

In recent years, generative artificial intelligence (AI) has begun to profoundly influence the way we conceive architecture and the history of the built environment. Today, advanced algorithms can create images and texts that imitate architectural styles of the past, often with surprising realism. At the same time, we are witnessing a transition from traditional paper archives to digital ones, raising crucial questions about the authenticity of historical sources and the ability to distinguish real projects from pure inventions. This essay examines how AI can produce “fictional architectures” with a historical appearance and the resulting future difficulties in distinguishing real from invented architecture, in a context where AI can fabricate a past that never existed. The perishability of paper archives and the risk of the disappearance of analog originals will fuel the difficulty of distinguishing between reality and fiction. Finally, the consequences of increasing digitalization, with implications for the truthfulness of real architecture, will force us to question not only whether the past risks being reinvented but, above all, whether this may lead to the development of architectural theories based on pure fictions passed off as real.