What if the ruins of the future had already been imagined? This project explores a paradoxical temporality—where what lies ahead feels ancient, and what is lost resurfaces as possibility. Blending AI-generated forms with a deep architectural sensibility, Past Future questions linear time and constructs a space where memory, prophecy, and material vision collide. These are not just images—they are architectures of elsewhere: grounded, and yet to come
TIME MACHINERY
Medieval Future
Past/Future is a visionary architecture project exploring the overlap between past and future, through temporal dissonances
The Blind Visionary
Unlike the gaze, or a certain way of ‘visibly’ entering into contact with the world, the visionary eye is an organ of a complex nature. Contradictory in the two words in which it resides, it not only refers to this ‘world,’ but, at the same time, is capable of bringing another into being. It blinds one thing to illuminate its hidden and invisible face. Though suffering from an intrinsic form of blindness, which is also contemplation, intellectual or artistic intuition, it shuns the physiological eye without repudiating it. It is the eye and its negation.
Saint Augustine by the Sea
By the sea, Augustine seeks no answers—he contemplates. Each wave refracts thought, each ebb reveals the enigma of time: passing without passing
Mappa di Sant'Agostino
Past/Future is a visual and conceptual inquiry into temporal overlap, where architecture emerges as a dissonance in time—a layered fusion of what has been and what might be. In these visions, the past is not memory but active matter, ready to merge with projections of the future in a disjointed, visionary present.
AI-generated images evoke off-axis utopias and speculative architectures, where ruins transform into spacecraft, and ideal cities dissolve into dreamlike landscapes. Each scene is a temporal short-circuit—a harmonic dystopia where epochs ignore and embrace one another simultaneously.
In Past/Future, the heterochronies are not simply temporal, but also cognitive and emotional. Each era has its own rhythm and logic, but these logics do not exclude each other; on the contrary, they contaminate one another. An architecture that emerges from the heterochronies can be a palimpsest that does not follow the chronological rhythm, but instead embraces influences from various historical moments and future projections, as if each phase of time were reflected in a different but coexisting dimension.
Credits
Type: AI Architecture
Year: 2023-24
Architect: Cesare Battelli
AI Labs: MidJourney. Alter (Chat GPT)
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