Speculative Architectures: The Radical Legacy And Fables Of Accelerationism
kazys varnelis
(this essay accompanies the Fables of Accelerationism)
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As artificial intelligence reshapes contemporary culture, architecture finds itself at a critical juncture reminiscent of the late 1960s. Then, as now, technological transformation challenged architecture’s fundamental role in shaping human experience. The radical architecture groups of that era—particularly Archizoom and Superstudio—responded by creating speculative works that exposed modernism’s contradictions, demonstrating how its promises of societal transformation often resulted in conformity and alienation. Their projects operated in an intentional ambiguity that embraced both utopia and dystopia, complicity and critique. Today, as architecture confronts a world in which artificial intelligence is rapidly emerging, society and culture are dominated by networked mobile technologies, and academia has descended into cynical reason, their approach offers crucial insights for reimagining the discipline’s relationship to universal principles and technological change.
Modernism in architecture was driven by the belief that universal principles—rationality, functionality, and abstraction—could transform society and create a better world. It envisioned architecture not merely as a discipline of design but as a means to integrate art into life itself, reshaping human experience and aligning it with a vision of progress and collective transformation. Yet by the 1960s, high modernism’s aspirations had given way to an increasingly instrumentalist approach that prioritized efficiency and technical solutions over speculative ambition. This tension between transformative vision and technical pragmatism resurfaces today as architecture grapples with artificial intelligence—a technology that promises unprecedented formal possibilities while threatening to reduce design to mere technical optimization.
Revisiting the radical architecture movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s allows us to think through the reverberations of this work for the present, just as it did for us in the early 2000s when AUDC (Robert Sumrell and myself) revisited it to think through the consequences of the first moments of social media and broadband Internet. Archizoom and Superstudio responded to the transformative possibilities of computation and telecommunications just as these technologies took over the mantle of shaping human relations in space from architecture, shaking the foundational claims of the discipline. Today, a comparable transformation is underway with the rise of artificial intelligence, challenging architecture to rethink its methods, ambitions, and purpose.
And yet, thus far, architecture’s response has been to merely dredge up the naïve technological fetishism held by proponents of the Blob in the 1990s: let’s make buildings with “unprecedented” geometries, let’s make furry buildings, imagine growing a building like growing an ear on a mouse (using gene-editing software CRISPR). These surface-level gestures fail to engage with the deeper implications of AI as a force that redefines systems of thought and design. This fantasy’s worst aspect isn’t being uncritical—which it is—it’s being uninteresting.
Instead, what if we engaged with contemporary AI more deeply and critically examined the rising ideology of accelerationism? Accelerationism is a philosophical and political theory that argues the best way to respond to capitalism and technological change is not to resist it, but to accelerate these processes. Accelerationists believe that by pushing these systems to their extreme conclusions, we can either transcend their limitations or expose their contradictions. In contemporary AI circles, accelerationism has taken on particular significance, notably in the effective accelerationism (e/acc) movement, whose proponents call for the rapid development and deployment of AI systems, arguing that faster technological progress will lead to revolutionary societal transformation. Unlike earlier forms of accelerationism that maintained a critical edge by pushing systems to reveal their contradictions, e/acc represents a more unambiguous embrace of technological acceleration (see this article, for example). Given the remarkable developments in artificial intelligence over the last few years, it’s hard not to be simultaneously hopeful about the possibilities it has for helping people and the planet while being frightened about its pitfalls. The attached Fables of Accelerationism emerged from this tension—rather than choosing between pure critique or celebration, they use narrative speculation to examine both the transformative potential and the unsettling implications of accelerated technological change
In the Fables of Accelerationism, I set out interrogate what might happen to society and culture in this context and to do so in collaboration with AIs themselves. Where AUDC collaborated using Writely, which later became Google Docs, to explore the implications of early social media and broadband Internet, I collaborated with two artificial intelligences to write this essay and worked with two others to create its illustrations. For AUDC, just as for Superstudio and Archizoom, collaboration was a conscious choice. By working as collectives rather than individual architects, these groups rejected the humanist notion of solitary authorship. Moreover, the era of radical architecture was contemporaneous with the questioning of authorship itself, notably by Roland Barthes in “The Death of the Author” and Michel Foucault in “What Is an Author?” For Barthes, the author was no longer the source of textual meaning, while Foucault emphasized the author as a construct shaped by institutional and cultural frameworks. This questioning of authorship takes on new urgency in the age of AI collaboration, where technology becomes not just a medium but an active participant in meaning-making. In working with AI, the notions of authorship and originality become deeply entangled, destabilizing human intention and reshaping the intertextual frameworks through which meaning is constructed
The architecture of the 1960s and 70s was shaped by a productive tension between critique and aspiration. The radical architecture groups Superstudio and Archizoom challenged the failures of modernism, as its promises to transform life ultimately gave way to conformity, consumerist banality, and alienating urban environments. In response, these architects engaged in a form of accelerationism avant la lettre, intensifying the very contradictions of modernism they sought to critique, amplifying systems of overproduction and homogenization to expose their inherent instability. This strategy operated at the edge of critique and complicity, embracing and condemning techno-utopianism and ultimately engaging the audience by calling for reflection and dialogue.
At the heart of these radical visions was an exploration of architecture as a universal system, one capable of reorganizing and reshaping the world on a fundamental level. Superstudio’s Continuous Monument embodied this dual ambition and critique. A structure that spanned the globe, indifferent to cultural or geographic specificity, the project simultaneously suggested the possibility of transcending parochial constraints and the peril of erasing individuality in the process. Similarly, Archizoom’s No-Stop City proposed a total environment that mirrored the fluidity and universality promised by telematics, as envisioned by Marshall McLuhan in his concept of the global village, a promise that would later materialize in our networked world. These speculative projects were not mere proposals but provocations, questioning whether architecture could escape its commodified role while gesturing toward a universality that remained fundamentally ambivalent. As such, they were as much dystopias as utopias, cautioning that the freedom of McLuhan’s Global Village might be indistinguishable from Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.
The universality these movements engaged with was always deferred, suspended in a realm of critique and speculation. Economic pressures, technological constraints, and the ideological dominance of modernist pragmatism prevented their realization. Far from being a limitation, this deferral was a deliberate strategy. By occupying the space between utopia and dystopia, the radical architects exposed the contradictions inherent in modernist ideals. Their projects were designed not to be built but to challenge whether architecture could transcend its commodified role and engage with broader systems of thought.
In the decades that followed the work of the radicals, younger architects reframed the radical provocations of Superstudio and Archizoom, shifting from critique to what has been termed “post-criticism.” Rem Koolhaas led the way. An admirer of Superstudio while a student, he eagerly embraced the forces of globalization and commodification, celebrating the intensities and contradictions of contemporary urbanism. Rather than resist these forces, he made them central to his practice, even collaborating with authoritarian governments. While this approach yielded works that were initially influential, it marked a turning point where architecture’s speculative and critical ambitions were increasingly sidelined in favor of an instrumentalist ethos. The once-radical exploration of universality was absorbed into a culture of complicit pragmatism, leaving architecture fixated on market-driven functionality and aesthetic surface effects. Nor did this succeed on its terms. The overhyped Bilbao-Effect—the belief that innovative formalism would lead to tourism and economic growth—led to an overproduction of formal experimentation and contributed immensely to overtourism and oversaturation. Koolhaas seems to have anticipated this in his 2002 “Junkspace”—when he wrote “Junkspace thrives on design, but design dies in Junkspace. There is no form, only proliferation … Regurgitation is the new creativity; instead of creation, we honor, cherish, and embrace manipulation. …” Perhaps it is no accident that after this essay the architect, once known for his prolific and provocative essays, all but abandoned writing.
The same instrumentalism that drives AI’s formalism mirrors broader trends in cultural production, where gestures of resistance or innovation are subsumed by systems of commodification and detached from meaningful critique. This oversaturation—the relentless flood of designs, images, and ideas—creates a deafening cultural din, where even the most provocative work is quickly lost. Architecture no longer provokes or transforms but becomes a passive accomplice to the very systems it once sought to challenge. Far from confronting the crises of our time, the post-critical turn in architecture paved the way for the current bankruptcy of architectural thought, where the deeper social and cultural implications of design are either neglected or addressed through “critique” that is increasingly just rote recitation of well-worn mantras.
The victory of the academic left has rendered it just as detached as the formalists, creating what Peter Sloterdijk terms cynical reason or “enlightened false consciousness.” This condition manifests as a form of double-think where subjects recognize the ideological nature of their participation in systems of power yet continue to participate anyway. Nobody believes in capitalism more than its harshest critics on the Left who see “no alternative” to it, worshiping it like a demon God. In architecture, this cynical reason appears in the endless production of critical theory that serves primarily to maintain academic careers rather than transform practice. We see it in conferences where scholars critique capitalism while building their CVs, in publications where radical positions become career currency, and in studios where experimental form-making is justified through post-facto theoretical frameworks.
In contrast, Sloterdijk identifies an older tradition of kynicism—exemplified by Diogenes of Sinope—that uses embodied critique, satire, and provocative action to expose the contradictions of power. The radical architects of the 1960s operated in this kynical mode. Projects like Superstudio’s Continuous Monument and Archizoom’s No-Stop City didn’t merely critique modernism’s contradictions through theory—they amplified and embodied them, pushing modernist logic to absurd extremes. Their provocations weren’t meant to maintain critical distance but to collapse it entirely, forcing confrontation with the implications of modernist universalism. Unlike today’s cynical critics who acknowledge problems while perpetuating them, the radicals used exaggeration and acceleration to make these contradictions impossible to ignore.
Academics know that critiques of capitalism are unable to produce any meaningful change, but they persist in producing them—not because they believe such work will lead to that change, but because this performance of critique has become essential to their professional identities. This cynical reason differs fundamentally from both naive belief and classical ideology critique. It represents a paradoxical condition where knowledge no longer leads to action—they understand the problems yet continue to reproduce them, maintaining an ironic distance that serves only to perpetuate our complicity.
Nor can we find an alternative in the recent rise of identity politics. As Jean-François Lyotard described, postmodern thought thrives on the proliferation of localized, incommensurable narratives. While identity politics has importantly foregrounded marginalized voices and challenged modernist assumptions of universal experience, its emphasis on difference and particularity has made it impossible to imagine collective futures. This fragmentation reduces knowledge production to a solipsistic exercise, where the value of discourse is confined to its immediate context, where only specific individuals are permitted to talk about certain topics. In such a landscape, dialogue becomes nearly impossible, and critique risks losing its relevance to humanity, retreating into an insular process of self-legitimation.
Together with the instrumentalism of AI formalists, such performative critique heightens the condition of cultural oversaturation, where gestures of dissent and innovation alike are absorbed into the din. Far from confronting the crises of the present, both tendencies leave architecture and critique hollow and irrelevant.
So why turn back to the radicals now? Their speculative provocations, once aimed at exposing the contradictions of modernism, have been subsumed into academic discourse, their ambitions reduced to aestheticized commodities or theoretical exercises. What was once a deliberate ambiguity, oscillating between utopia and dystopia, has been flattened into the sterile language of peer-reviewed articles or institutional critique, sapped of its provocative power. But in their speculative projects, the radicals anticipated the emergence of a networked culture that has become a defining characteristic of our era. Works like Archizoom’s No-Stop City or Superstudio’s Continuous Monument and Journey from A to B, imagined a world governed by flows of information, energy, and global connectivity, projecting the nascent developments in computation and telecommunications of their time forward. Firmly grounded in their historical moment, these projects also operated with a temporal ambivalence that resisted resolution. Their visions pointed both to the future and back to the contradictions of their present, holding these tensions in productive suspension.
The Freudian notion of Nachträglichkeit, or deferred action, as articulated by Hal Foster, offers a framework for understanding how historical movements re-emerge under new conditions, not as static legacies but as dynamic provocations. Avant-garde movements, he explains, are projective, anticipating the structures of a world they can only partially apprehend in their own time. Neo-avant-gardes, Foster continues, engage in the dual move of re (temporal reconnection) and dis (spatial disconnection), producing radical returns: a deliberate engagement with unfinished history to disrupt the present and open new fields of practice. Members of the first neo-avant-garde themselves, the radical architects were already engaged in this framework, reconnecting with the avant-garde movements of the Futurists and Constructivists to critique and reinterpret their own time. Superstudio and Archizoom absorbed the systemic thinking of the Constructivists and the Futurists’ fascination with technological progress, yet reimagined these in light of late modernity’s contradictions. Their projects did not simply revive these earlier movements but disrupted their celebratory outlooks, holding their utopian promises and dystopian risks in productive suspension. In doing so, the radicals created speculative spaces that simultaneously reflected on the failures of modernism and gestured toward uncertain futures shaped by cultural and technological forces emerging at the time. Provocations like No-Stop City and the Continuous Monument extrapolated the contradictions of their time to project futures that confronted both liberation and its potential perils, many still valid today—like the risk of reducing humanity to “pet cats” in a post-work society or the banality of a world of endless self-actualization and creativity.
The networked world once envisioned by radical architects has fully arrived, complete with artificial intelligence available on demand through mobile and portable devices. What was promised as a liberatory space—a playground for creativity, communication, and new forms of living—has instead accelerated division and distraction. Cultural production now faces a crisis of oversaturation. The sheer volume of content, churned out initially by human creators and now by AIs, overwhelms our capacity for meaning-making. In this endless stream of noise, ideas, movements, and expressions lose their transformative potential, reduced instead to fleeting signals competing for attention. In a landscape where content flows endlessly, even the most thoughtful contributions are swallowed by the torrent, raising the question: how can meaning persist? We read all the time but read nothing that sticks. For individuals, this oversaturation leaves identity fractured and unstable, shaped by fragments of an ever-shifting, algorithmically curated stream. Algorithms designed to optimize engagement have become instruments of polarization, amplifying extremes and eroding shared understanding. The dominance of leftist identity politics in the academy—along with its right-wing variants in social media and the press—only echoes this dynamic, shifting discourse toward individualism and fracturing collective action.
Yet speculative futures to interrogate this condition are rare in architecture today. Instead, the discourse around AI has coalesced around the production of supposedly novel forms—forms that prioritize aesthetic novelty and technical achievement while remaining indifferent to systemic critique or broader societal implications. Framed as a celebration of progress, this instrumentalism reduces architecture to a spectacle of endless production. The obsession with producing “alien yet beautiful forms” exemplifies a broader detachment from critical engagement, where AI is treated as a tool for endless aesthetic exploration rather than a means of producing useful knowledge. Architecture has lost its edge as technology has come to dominate the shaping of space. What was once a speculative inquiry into the future of human life and the built environment has devolved into a hollow exercise in formal experimentation, untethered from the urgent crises of the present. Far from confronting these challenges, architecture has settled into an aestheticized irrelevance, trailing behind as a mere decorative layer to the forces that truly shape our world—increasingly, not even a layer anybody cares about. The Bilbao Effect’s ultimate fate was to be crushed by the very overproduction of form it advocated for.
A kynical approach to artificial intelligence in architecture today would move beyond both uncritical enthusiasm and cynical critique, instead using the technology’s own logic to expose its contradictions. Just as Superstudio and Archizoom amplified modernist rationality to reveal its absurdities, contemporary practice might push AI’s capacity for endless iteration and pattern recognition to its logical extremes, using AI to envision worlds that make visible the contradictions inherent in accelerationist visions of technological progress.
This practice is, just as AUDC was from 2000 to 2015, consciously speculative and temporally contingent, with no intent of claiming to be a new form of practice. Instead, it uses AI to evolve a new radical inquiry—one that holds ambiguity and contradiction at its core. In this practice, AI is not a tool for endless novelty, but rather a collaborator in rethinking architecture’s fundamental questions. Instead of judging AI to be a savior or a threat, it becomes a collaborator in exposing the contradictions of accelerationist visions and the resultant cultural oversaturation in a world in which intellectual and creative work itself has become redundant. Just as Superstudio and Archizoom amplified modernist rationality to reveal the new world being born then, architects today might use AI to generate the worlds emerging in our present. The resulting environments, I hope, move beyond formal experimentation to provoke critical reflection on the systems—human, technological, and ecological—that shape our built environment.
The images and fables accompanying this essay emerged through a systematic process combining machine generation, human curation, and collaborative editing. Moving beyond the use of AI as a mere tool, the work involved multiple cycles of generation, selection, and refinement to challenge traditional concepts of authorship. This approach extends the notion of intertextuality by introducing AI as a creative partner that both responds to and prompts human intention.
This, too, builds on historical precedent established by the radical architects. Superstudio engaged critically with mass media by appropriating commercial photography (for example, the work of Will McBride), to create provocative imagery. Their approach transcended simple appropriation, deliberately juxtaposing idealized commercial imagery of modern life—utopic advertisements of conventional consumers and romantic photographs of counterculture dropouts alike—against stark architectural interventions to examine the relationships between photography, architecture, and consumer culture.
Drawing on this tradition of critical image appropriation, I sought to leverage AI image generation to interrogate our era of visual oversaturation. These AI systems, trained on vast datasets, process images fundamentally differently from humans—they do not “understand” images in any meaningful sense but instead identify statistical patterns and correlations in data, which they draw upon in response to prompts. This creates a productive tension between human and machine approaches to visual meaning. Where Superstudio carefully selected photographs for their cultural and symbolic significance, AI systems generate imagery through pattern-matching processes that are simultaneously sophisticated yet fundamentally alien to human visual understanding. Often, the results are absurd, but these failures themselves can be productive. Through iterative prompting, curation, and manipulation, this work engages with this perceptual divide, using the misalignments between human and machine vision to generate new forms of architectural speculation. Starting with a small selection of images from a large set of generations, I worked with AIs to write the fables, which then led to further iterations of revising texts and images. This approach suggests a way forward that neither uncritically celebrates nor merely critiques AI but instead draws creative potential from the characteristics that make machine vision distinct from human perception.
These works embody a speculative approach to our technological condition, revealing the exhaustion of form in an age of algorithmic reproduction. Yet, unlike the mindless proliferation of AI-generated content, they employ conscious repetition and oversaturation as critical strategies. In a time when architecture drowns in its own output, these images transform oversaturation into a new dialogue, revealing how technological systems—enabled by our own desires—increasingly exceed human comprehension and control and thwart those desires.