Gendo Uses Generative AI to Revisit Architecture That Was Never Built

Christopher Wren's St. Paul's Cathedral was originally approved in 1675 as a spire-topped design — the Warrant Design — that he reworked as construction progressed and that most people have never seen. A new visualization series by Gendo, an AI design canvas for architecture studios, is using generative tools to bring that proposal and a century-spanning roster of unbuilt projects back into view, while labeling exactly where documentation ends and interpretation begins.

The series starts with archival drawings, models, and descriptions. It then sorts each resulting image into one of three categories: evidence-based visualization, grounded interpretation, or open-ended provocation.

What projects does the series cover?

The roster spans three centuries of unbuilt or heavily altered work:

• Thomas Willson's pyramid-shaped necropolis for Primrose Hill in London, designed to hold millions of burials and dominate the city's skyline
• Charles-François Ribart de Chamoust's triumphal elephant for the Champs-Élysées, conceived in 1758 with a dining room containing trees and a stream
• A Napoleon-era elephant monument for the Place de la Bastille, which got as far as a full-scale plaster model that stayed on site for decades
• Claude-Nicolas Ledoux's classical toll-collecting structures on boats for Paris
• Étienne-Louis Boullée's cenotaph for Isaac Newton, a monumental sphere whose interior evoked the night sky
• Antonio Sant'Elia's Città Nuova, a layered city of elevators, bridges, and power stations
• Mies van der Rohe's glass-enveloped Friedrichstraße skyscraper
• Erich Mendelsohn's and Hermann Finsterlin's expressive, almost biological forms
• Adolf Loos's Chicago Tribune competition entry, a skyscraper shaped like a giant Doric column
• The Hotel Attraction, a soaring Lower Manhattan tower attributed to Antoni Gaudí, though its authorship and drawings remain disputed
• Postwar urban systems: Arata Isozaki's Clusters in the Air above Tokyo, Ron Herron's Walking City for Archigram, and Rem Koolhaas's Bangkok Hyperbuilding

How does the three-tier labeling system work?

At the evidence-based end, Gendo's visualization of Willson's pyramid uses survey data and defined camera positions to place the structure within aerial views of Primrose Hill and the London skyline. The method draws on verified views used in planning applications, testing both technical accuracy and visual persuasion. Mies's Friedrichstraße tower gets similar treatment on its Berlin site, and Wren's Warrant Design will be shown beside the cathedral that was actually built, allowing direct comparison.

Grounded interpretation covers projects where the record is incomplete. The Hotel Attraction, Boullée's cenotaph on a plausible French site, and Isozaki's clusters — reconstructed from photographs of his models — sit here. Lighting, materials, and surroundings are added today; the original drawings and descriptions only go so far.

Open-ended provocation moves furthest from reconstruction. Finsterlin's and Mendelsohn's forms could seed experiments in dialogue with the visual worlds of H. R. Giger or M. C. Escher. Loos's column-shaped tower invites a sharper move: covering it in graffiti and tattoos, revisiting the architect's own association between ornament and bodily decoration. Gendo states plainly that none of these images constitutes a definitive completion of another architect's work.

Why does the medium change the reading?

The series argues that representation is never neutral. A watercolor suggests atmosphere while leaving details unresolved; a section explains spatial relationships without describing every surface. Photorealism gives surfaces and details greater apparent certainty — useful for a developed proposal, misleading when decisions are still provisional. Historical architects worked with the tools they had, and the challenge of making unfamiliar ideas legible to patrons and committees could determine whether a project won support alongside cost, feasibility, and political will.

The series also stages conversations across time. Boullée's sphere can be set beside the LED-covered Sphere proposed for Stratford in London — a sibling of the Las Vegas venue that was refused planning permission in 2023 — comparing what two eras monumentalize: the cosmos in one case, entertainment in the other. Rendering Sant'Elia's Città Nuova in restrained realism and in Blade Runner's rain-soaked atmosphere shows what the drawings already contained and what the treatment adds. Animating Herron's Walking City across different landscapes tests the movement that static drawings could only suggest.

Who gets to make architecture legible?

Gendo frames the tools as democratizing. Polished visual proposals have traditionally demanded training, time, and resources that are unevenly distributed; generative tools lower those barriers for students and small practices. The company cites a recent community design competition where submissions began arriving within hours and participants produced polished visuals over a single weekend. It is also testing workflows where a camera reads a physical model on a desk and generates consistent views in real time — with Koolhaas's model-based Hyperbuilding as a candidate subject.

Gendo plans to publish the canvases behind each image: source materials, references, iterations, and production decisions, so viewers can trace the path from archival record to contemporary picture.

Wren's spired cathedral and Boullée's sphere will stay unbuilt no matter how convincing the renders become. But as the company notes, the tools architects use to imagine have always shaped what they build — and unbuilt projects like Sant'Elia's drawings, Walking City, and Mies's glass tower have already influenced generations of architects through publications and education. Making them visible again, with the evidence labeled, extends that influence to a wider audience.