Gian Luca Beccari (Visiting Doctoral Researcher 2026/27)
Supervisor
Abstract
Architecture after the Image
Cultures sustain themselves through their capacity to produce and renew symbolic forms: images, narratives, rituals, literature, architecture and other modes through which communities interpret the world and recognise themselves within it. Today, this symbolic infrastructure is undergoing a profound transformation. Digital media and generative AI have dispersed and automated practices of cultural production once associated with particular authors, institutions and forms of expertise. This research examines the real-time rewriting of the symbolic: news reformulated through AI-generated narratives, familiar films and images re-edited to reverse their moral or political meanings, and deliberately false content circulated through irony, parody and détournement. Here, representation operates less through correspondence to reality than through symbolic, emotional and political efficacy. Within a media environment dominated by the smartphone, architecture also enters this circulation: cities become interfaces and buildings reproducible icons. What happens to collective symbolic systems when their forms can be continuously rewritten by anyone?
Bio
PhD candidate — DADU, Department of Architecture, Design and Urban Planning, University of Sassari, Sardinia, Italy
Supervising
Images
News
Events
Images
Architecture PhD
Postgraduate Research
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Contact
Prof Dr Ines Weizman
Professor of History and Theory of Architecture
Head of PhD Programme
School of Architecture
Royal College of Art
Kensington Gore, London
SW7 2EU
ines.weizman@rca.ac.uk
School of Architecture, Royal College of Art
Postgraduate Research (PGR) Programme