Architectural Imagination: When the Sketch Becomes Spatial Knowledge and the Render Passes Judgment on Reality
How the philosopher Kant overturns the concept of design, and why architecture schools need to rethink their relationship with imagination
In architecture studios around the world, the same phrase recurs every semester: “Imagine first, then face reality later.” The sentence sounds innocent, even motivational, but it conceals a dangerous assumption beneath its polished surface — the assumption that imagination is the opposite of reality, and that what a student draws on tracing paper or models on a computer screen is nothing more than an “absence” waiting to be filled with concrete and steel. Yet a recent research paper, one that intersects Kantian philosophy with theories of the political imaginary and psychoanalysis, presents a fundamentally different proposition: imagination is neither void nor fabrication. It is, quite literally, a form of form-related knowledge, and without it, human beings cannot issue any judgment about anything — including the built environment. If this holds true philosophically, its implications for how we teach design, adjudicate projects, and evaluate render images are seismic.
The Sketch Is Not a Dream: When the Pencil Produces Knowledge, Not Fantasy
To understand what “form-related knowledge” means, one must return to the source: Immanuel Kant. In his first Critique, Kant defined imagination as “the capacity to represent an object in intuition even in its absence,” but he did not stop at this simple description. He demonstrated that the productive synthesis of imagination is what generates what he called “schemata” — those imaginative procedures that determine time in accordance with a concept, thereby rendering an abstract rule applicable to a particular case. As Alfonso Ferrarin demonstrated in his detailed study of imagination and judgment in Kant’s practical philosophy, “judgment is the faculty of subsuming under rules,” and the transcendental schema is the imaginative bridge that grants a rule intuitive meaning so that a particular case can be recognized in its light.
What this means architecturally far exceeds abstract philosophical explanation. When an architect picks up a pencil and begins drawing a preliminary sketch of an interior space — a building entrance, a hospital lobby, a school courtyard — they are not producing a “dream” awaiting verification. They are engaged in the production of real spatial schemata. The lines they draw carry embedded knowledge about how the human body interacts with vertical dimensions, about the relationship between circulation paths and the angle of natural light, and about the rhythm that the sequence of narrow and expansive spaces imposes on a user’s perception. This knowledge is not deferred until the concrete is poured; it is present and complete at the very moment of drawing. The building has not yet been built, but the spatial knowledge contained in the sketch is real, testable, and evaluable — just as a mathematical equation carries genuine physical knowledge before any laboratory experiment is conducted.
This distinction is no academic luxury. Ferrarin insists that “there is no legislation without judgment, nor judgment without imagination” — meaning that a universal rule is established only through the reflective interpretation of particulars, and particulars are recognized as morally or politically relevant only against an imagined order of ends. In architecture, this means that every design decision — however simple it may appear — is at its core an act of judgment grounded in productive imagination, not in the absence of reality.
Three Layers of Imagination: From Image to Horizon
What makes this philosophical framework exceptionally rich for architectural practice is that it does not reduce imagination to a single layer. The research distinguishes three interlocking layers, each of which finds a direct echo in the world of design.
The first layer is the plane of images and the imaginary — the register of representations and collective symbols through which reality is pictured and re-pictured. In architecture, this is the level of reference images an architect gathers at the beginning of any project: photographs of inspiring buildings, urban scenes, material textures. These images are not mental decoration; they are the visual infrastructure upon which every subsequent design decision is built.
The second layer is imagination as a form-giving activity — the interpretive force that organizes these images and grants them structure. Kant called this force the “fictive faculty” and attributed to it the capacity to generate its own lawful unity independently of predetermined concepts, as Larissa Ostaric demonstrated in her study of the free harmony of the faculties and the primacy of imagination in Kantian aesthetic judgment. In the architecture studio, this is the moment when the architect moves from collecting images to composing a new spatial conception — the moment of “grasping the design concept” that every practitioner recognizes.
The third layer is the transcendental: imagination as the horizon upon which objects, norms, and possibilities are constituted for a judging subject. This is the deepest and most architecturally provocative level, because it asserts that imagination is not merely a tool the architect uses but the horizon that determines what the architect can see as possible in the first place. An architect who has never been exposed to the mud architecture of Upper Egypt or the Hadhramaut region of Yemen does not merely lack a “visual reference”; they lack an entire imaginative horizon — a complete field of spatial possibilities that has never taken shape in their design consciousness. This means that expanding architectural imagination is not a matter of “inspiration” but a matter of knowledge.
The Render Crisis: Is the Digital Image a Lie or a Spatial Judgment?
Contemporary architecture is living through what might be called an “existential render crisis.” Major firms spend thousands of hours producing hyper-realistic digital images of buildings that will never be built — images displayed in competitions, published in magazines, and driving entire real estate markets. Critics accuse these images of being “visual fabrication” — sophisticated deception that seduces the eye and misleads the investor. But if we apply the Kantian framework this research advances, the question changes fundamentally.
A render image, in light of this framework, is not “fabrication” but an embodied spatial judgment — a visual representation that carries genuine knowledge about the relationship between light and material, about the effect of proportions on human perception, and about the rhythm created by the sequence of architectural elements within a single scene. When an architect adjusts the sun angle in rendering software to see how shadow falls on the façade of an unbuilt building, they are not lying. They are producing a light-spatial schema that carries testable knowledge about the behavior of light at that site and in those orientations. This knowledge remains valid even if the building is never constructed.
What supports this argument philosophically is a highly revealing reading the research offers of Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre, typically regarded as the philosopher of “negating reality through imagination,” presented in his book on the imaginary an illuminating example: the impersonator Franconay performing the singer Chevalier. In this scene, imagination does not substitute an absent object for a present one. Instead, the spectator sees one person in another, discovering affinities and possibilities that ordinary perception had not disclosed. As Lior Levy demonstrated in his study offering a new interpretation of Sartre’s notion of imagination, imagination here “enriches and augments perception” and discloses the world as a space of potential connections. This is precisely what happens when an architect looks at a well-executed render: they do not see an absent building but spatial possibilities present within the image itself — possibilities that may reveal relationships not apparent in the floor plan or section.
The provocative question this framework raises is not whether render images are “real” or “fake,” but whether we possess the philosophical tools to understand the kind of truth they carry. Perhaps the absence of these tools — rather than the nature of the images themselves — is the true source of the crisis.
The Jury and Reflective Judgment: Why Architecture Studios Fall Short
If imagination is the medium that makes judgment possible, then the place where this relationship manifests with greatest intensity in architectural practice is the design jury. In every architecture school, a student stands before a panel of jurors to present their project and receives a verdict that ranges from acceptance to rejection, from admiration to dismantling. But what is the nature of this judgment?
Kant distinguished between two types of judgment: determining judgment, which subsumes the particular under a pre-existing universal rule, and reflective judgment, which begins from the particular and searches for a rule not yet given. Ostaric demonstrated that imagination in Kantian aesthetic judgment can “schematize” beyond any determinate concept — that it can exhibit a lawfulness not borrowed from a predetermined concept, thereby intimating a supersensible ground of freedom. This is exactly what happens — or what should happen — in an architectural jury: a skilled juror does not evaluate the project against a fixed checklist of criteria but uses their reflective judgment to assess whether the proposed space “succeeds” in creating spatial relationships that were not anticipated, and whether the project generates meaning that exceeds the sum of its technical parts.
The problem is that many juries in architecture schools operate according to the exact opposite model. They treat imagination as “the absence of reality,” demanding that the student be “practical” and “realistic,” and reducing evaluation to a technical checklist: Do the areas comply with the code? Is the structural system logical? Is the budget reasonable? These are legitimate questions, but they belong to determining judgment, not reflective judgment. When architectural adjudication is reduced to determining judgment alone, the genuine spatial knowledge produced by the student’s imagination is extinguished — knowledge that does not yet have a ready-made concept under which to be subsumed but carries a real spatial possibility worth exploring.
This is not a defense of design chaos or of projects detached from their context. Quite the opposite: Ferrarin confirms that “the Kantian imperative cannot be executed automatically; it must be schematized — given an analogical or symbolic presentation — and this requires judgment as interpretation and orientation.” Similarly, a good architectural project is not one that ignores the rules but one that schematizes them — granting them a spatial presentation specific to the site, the context, and the program, thereby disclosing possibilities that the rule alone would never have produced.
Between Epistemic Friction and Poetic Enclosure: Two Traps Threatening Architectural Imagination
The research warns of two traps that threaten any theory of imagination, both of which find direct translation in architectural practice.
The first trap originates in Miranda Fricker’s framework of epistemic injustice. Fricker developed the concept of “hermeneutical injustice,” which occurs when a gap in collective interpretive resources places marginalized subjects at an unfair disadvantage in making sense of their social experience. This concept is of immense importance — consider how many local communities lack the architectural language to articulate their spatial needs before an urban planner or a real estate developer. But Trystan Goetze demonstrated that this model requires complication through the concept of “hermeneutical dissent”: marginalized groups often produce their own interpretive tools, so that the relevant gap is not a global absence of meaning but a differential distribution of meaning across local hermeneutical economies. José Medina went further still in his study of aesthetic resistance, demonstrating that epistemic resistance requires not merely correcting deficits but transforming sensibility — an aesthetic dimension in which artistic and public interventions produce “epistemic friction” that opens recipients to silenced voices and unheard grammars.
Yet the danger lies in reducing architectural imagination to its resistive function alone — in assuming that imagination exists only where it rubs against injustice. The truth is that imagination is the constitutive force that makes the production of new meanings and new worlds possible in the first place, before and beyond any particular struggle. Resistant architecture matters — the architecture of marginalized communities, participatory design, critical urban interventions — but it is not the sole function of architectural imagination, nor should it be. Imagination is a horizon, not merely a friction.
The second trap originates in Gaston Bachelard and the poetics of space. This may seem paradoxical, since Bachelard celebrates imagination and defines it as “not the faculty of forming images of reality but the faculty of forming images that go beyond reality, that sing reality.” This definition is of considerable beauty and depth, as Christian Thiboutot, Alejandro Martinez, and David Jager demonstrated in their study of Bachelard’s theory of imagination. But its danger lies in sequestering imagination within a realm of intimate reverie and material elements — fire, water, air, earth — severing it from the public, discursive, and political constitution of reality, as James Magrini analyzed in his study of dwelling and creative imagination in Bachelard’s phenomenology. In architecture, this trap is all too familiar: the architect who drowns in the “poetics of place” and produces beautiful spaces entirely disconnected from their social, economic, and political context. Architectural imagination that transforms into private “psychological matter” — individual meditations on the aesthetics of wood and stone — loses its transformative capacity because it withdraws from the field where shared meaning is produced.
The alternative the research proposes is to retain Bachelard’s insight into the image’s excess and transsubjectivity while insisting — in parallel with the theory of the political imaginary as advanced by Craig Browne and Paula Diehl — that images and forms are also collective, instituted, and contestable. The psychoanalytic-sociological literature, as Matt ffytche demonstrated in his study of real fantasies, clearly warns against reducing the imaginary to a “private theatre” inside the head or, conversely, to abstract discourse alone: imagination is neither inner ornament nor discursive surface but a social fact in its own right. In architecture, this means that the imagined space — whether a sketch, a render, or a digital model — is neither a private meditation nor an abstract discourse but a social act that produces shared spatial knowledge and reorganizes the horizon of collective possibility.
The Virtual Building: When Physical Construction Is No Longer a Condition for Architecture’s Existence
What grants this philosophical framework its present urgency is the technological transformations the profession is undergoing. In the age of the metaverse, virtual reality, and digital twins, complete architectural spaces are being built that do not physically exist — spaces in which users navigate, interact, and issue genuine aesthetic judgments. Are these spaces “absence” or “reality”?
The Kantian framework the research presents permits an answer that was not possible within traditional frameworks: these spaces constitute a complete architectural reality because they produce real spatial schemata and elicit real aesthetic judgments from users. The criterion is not the physical existence of matter but the production of spatial knowledge that mediates between rule and particular case — and this occurs in virtual space as much as in physical space.
This argument finds support in the research’s reading of Foucault. As Tamson Wandel demonstrated in his analysis of Foucault’s discourse of power, power “produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth” — meaning that every structured domain of judgment is an effect of power-knowledge. If virtual spaces produce their own domains of objects and rituals of truth — and they clearly do so through digital economies, design standards, and user experiences — then they constitute structured domains of judgment that do not differ structurally from those produced by physical buildings. The architectural imagination operating within these virtual domains does not differ in its epistemic nature from the imagination operating within physical domains: both produce schemata that mediate between rules and particulars, and both enable judgment.
The theory of the political imaginary offers an additional dimension: Browne and Diehl demonstrated that the political imaginary is the “magma” in which instituted meanings coexist with instituting currents capable of contesting them. The virtual architectural space is precisely this kind of magma: a place where established architectural norms coexist with untested possibilities — a place where imagination can challenge prevailing standards without having to pay the price of material error. As the study by Hawlina, Pedersen, and Zittoun on imagination and social movements confirmed, imagination propels social movements through dialogical movements between a remembered past and an imagined future, and through the “proleptic” power of imagined futures to reorganize the reading of the past. Virtual architectural space grants this proleptic power a tangible spatial form.
Yet Lilja and Vinthagen, in their study of forms of power and resistance, remind us that resistance cannot rest on a pure “outside” — it operates through the rearticulation of the dominant discourse, through repetition with a difference, and through “reverse discourse” that speaks in the same vocabulary to challenge the norm. In architecture, this means that the most transformative virtual imagination is not the kind that ignores the rules of physical architecture but the kind that takes them and rearticulates them — repeating them with a difference that discloses possibilities that were not previously visible.
We may be standing at the threshold of a fundamental shift in the very definition of architecture: a point where “physical construction” is no longer the sole criterion for its existence, and where imagination — in its three layers, from image to form-giving activity to transcendental horizon — becomes the true field in which architectural knowledge is produced and its judgments are exercised. Not because matter does not matter, but because matter itself does not become “architectural” until imagination grants it form, meaning, and horizon — until it passes through the bridge Kant identified two centuries ago: the bridge without which no rule is applied, no judgment is issued, and no world is inhabited.
✦ ArchUp Editorial Insight
The persistent separation of imagination from reality in architecture studios is not a pedagogical oversight but a structural feature of an educational system calibrated to produce practitioners who internalize risk-aversion before they develop spatial judgment. When accreditation bodies reduce design evaluation to code-compliance checklists and real estate markets consume photorealistic renders as financial instruments rather than spatial propositions, the profession systematically strips imagination of its epistemic status. The resulting “render crisis” and jury dysfunction are not failures of individual talent but logical outcomes of a procurement and governance apparatus that rewards verifiable certainty over productive ambiguity. Until architecture schools restructure their evaluation frameworks to treat spatial imagination as a form of knowledge rather than a preliminary exercise, the profession will continue producing buildings that satisfy regulations while foreclosing the very possibilities those regulations were meant to serve.
References
- Ferrarin, Alfonso. “Imagination and Judgment in Kant’s Practical Philosophy.” Philosophy & Social Criticism, 2008.
- Ostaric, Larissa. “The Free Harmony of the Faculties and the Primacy of Imagination in Kant’s Aesthetic Judgment.” European Journal of Philosophy, 2017.
- Browne, Craig, and Paula Diehl. “Conceptualising the Political Imaginary: An Introduction to the Special Issue.” Social Epistemology, 2019.
- Hawlina, Helena, Oliver Pedersen, and Tania Zittoun. “Imagination and Social Movements.” Current Opinion in Psychology, 2020.
- Bott Spillius, Elizabeth. “Freud and Klein on the Concept of Phantasy.” The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 2001.
- Gerson, Samuel. “Unconscious Phantasy and Relational Reality.” Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 2008.
- ffytche, Matt. “Real Fantasies: Reinserting the Imaginary in the Scene of Social Encounter.” Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, 2019.
- Levy, Lior. “Ways of Imagining: A New Interpretation of Sartre’s Notion of Imagination.” The British Journal of Aesthetics, 2019.
- Levy, Lior. “Sartre and Ricoeur on Productive Imagination.” The Southern Journal of Philosophy, 2014.
- Thiboutot, Christian, Alejandro Martinez, and David Jager. “Gaston Bachelard and Phenomenology: Outline of a Theory of the Imagination.” Journal of Phenomenological Psychology, 1999.
- Magrini, James. “Dwelling and Creative Imagination in Gaston Bachelard’s Phenomenology: Returning to the Poetic Space of Education and Learning.” Educational Philosophy and Theory, 2016.
- Wandel, Tamson. “The Power of Discourse: Michel Foucault and Critical Theory.” Cultural Values, 2001.
- Lilja, Mona, and Stellan Vinthagen. “Sovereign Power, Disciplinary Power and Biopower: Resisting What Power with What Resistance?” Journal of Political Power, 2014.
- Goetze, Trystan. “Hermeneutical Dissent and the Species of Hermeneutical Injustice.” Hypatia, 2018.
- Medina, José. “Aesthetic Resistance: Reimagining Critical Epistemology and the Grammars of Silence.” Social Epistemology, 2024.
- Pía Lara, María. “Reflective Judgment as World Disclosure.” Philosophy & Social Criticism, 2008.
