Architecture and Surrealist Automatism: From Historical Models to AI Speculations

This paper develops a theoretical framework for understandingcontemporary architectural automation through the historicallens of surrealist automatism. Tracing a shift from André Breton andPhilippe Soupault’s automatic writing to René Magritte’s problem-pairingand Salvador Dalí’s paranoiac-critical method, it argues that surrealistautomatism progressively moved from motor execution toward perceptual,associative, and interpretive forms of cognition. On that basis, thepaper identifies three modes of architectural automatism—architecturebuilt with automatist construction, architecture modelled on the innerworld, and architecture persuasively interpreted as surreal—using themto reassess contemporary AI-assisted design. Rather than treating suchsystems as neutral instruments of efficiency, the paper asks whether theyremain tools governed by intention or whether they reorganise designthought in ways that exceed simple instrumentality. Surrealist automatism,it argues, offers architecture a critical framework for understandingautomatism/automation as an opaque, generative and speculative force.