The most beautiful arena of the Milano Cortina Winter Olympics is fake

It is mid-December 2025 and, as the date of the opening ceremony of the Milano Cortina Olympics is announced, a carousel of renderings appears on Instagram: a suspended ski slope descending from Torre Velasca, the Duomo turned into an arena for ice sports with temporary platforms and grandstands, a curling rink on the waters of the Navigli, and an Olympic skatepark attached to the Arco della Pace. These are the ephemeral architectures of the Milan–Cortina 2026 Olympics. Or rather, those of the monumental Olympics as many of us imagined them — and as they have not been.

The concepts, plans, and renderings of these structures that do not exist are created by Filippo Mercuri, the architect behind the Instagram account @gaude.ai, who last year, together with the firm Lombardini22, took part in the Venice Biennale curated by Carlo Ratti with a project focused on AI and climate change. “The role of the architect is to gather complexity and return it quickly to the world,” he tells Domus, explaining how artificial intelligence is, for him, a means of making complex concepts legible.

Filippo Mercuri

On his profile, inspired by the announcement of the new “Colosseo” metro station in Rome and by the theft of jewels from the Louvre, Mercuri wonders what the Paris museum would look like if it went underground, moving the Winged Victory of Samothrace between two metro canopies. Or he imagines San Siro turned into a garden after its closure. “What if all abandoned stadiums became parks?” he writes in the post caption. “This profile was born to rethink Milan’s major events — a city that now hosts events of every kind, every week,” he explains.

Among all the images, the most powerful is the ski slope running down Torre Velasca. A snow-covered ramp with banked curves, safety nets, floodlight towers, and start and finish areas coils around the building designed by BBPR in the 1950s. The drawing follows the logic of temporary infrastructure: it would be an engineering nightmare, but it does not belong to the realm of the impossible. The Olympics have already produced suspended structures and urban installations of comparable scale and will likely continue to do so. Here, the logic of mega-infrastructure for a mega-event is laid onto a modernist icon, and that is precisely why it provokes.
“It is intentional to want to generate a reaction,” Mercuri says. “As an architect, I would never design such a structure on Torre Velasca. The AI process is something that must also be explored with awareness.”

Gaude.ai’s tools are professional, the drawings are precise. The language of temporariness, event culture, sustainability, and the smart city is the same as that of built architecture. And that is why many believe they are real: they do not look like artistic provocations, but like technical dossiers of projects awaiting approval. This is what makes these images — though false — among the most convincing Olympic visions. The snow-covered Torre Velasca tells us what people today expect from major events and from architecture: render-ready spectacle, ideas drawn from urban science fiction. “The aim of gaude.ai is not to replace traditional design tools,” Mercuri confirms, “but to give architecture a more direct channel of communication with people.”

Filippo Mercuri

What emerges is that AI is becoming a tool for architectural criticism. Gaude.ai does not use collage as Archizoom or other Italian radical groups once did, nor the language of traditional criticism. Instead, it adopts the same hyperrealistic and spectacularizing lexicon as the projects it questions. And precisely for this reason, it works.

It is not the only case: other Italian creators such as @eclissidilana have chosen artificial intelligence as a tool to comment on the Olympic Games of February 6. Institutions have done the same: at the entrance to the exhibition “White Out,” curated by Konstantin Grcic and dedicated to sport at the Triennale di Milano, visitors encounter AI-generated videos. One shows Cortina d’Ampezzo in the not-too-distant future, when the lack of snow and water on ski slopes will somehow have to be addressed, and the weather forecast is delivered by a dystopian robot on a giant screen. Thinking about it, even in those images Cortina looks strikingly similar to the renderings that gaude.ai creates for fun.

All images: Courtesy @gaude.ai