Giulio Marchesani

Giulio Marchesani is an architect and creative technologist based in London. He trained in Italy, moved to London in 2018, and has spent close to a decade working at practices including Büro Ole Scheeren, AHMM and Fletcher Priest, as well as specialist visualisation studios, producing imagery to the standard those projects demand.

He is also a photographer, and during the pandemic he made Lockdown: London Architecture and Landscape, a book of photographs of a city emptied of its crowds, where familiar buildings revealed a beauty that had never been visible before. That habit of waiting for the conditions in which a place shows you something new carries directly into how he works with generative tools.

He is now AI Lead and 3D Artist at Fletcher Priest Architects, where he sets the practice's approach to AI across design and production. What sets his work apart is that he builds the tools himself. He writes custom plugins, retrieval systems and generative pipelines shaped around the way architectural teams actually work, including a visualisation platform that runs in the browser and connects straight into 3ds Max and Revit. These are not tools borrowed from other industries. They are built for competition deadlines, and for the standard of image a practice is willing to put its name to.

Just as important to him is knowing when not to reach for these tools at all. Giulio works on the governance side of AI in practice, asking where it belongs in a project and where it does not, what a studio should disclose to its clients, and how authorship and judgement stay with the people who carry the professional responsibility. He argues that the interesting question is no longer what these tools can generate, but when it is right to use them.

He teaches this inside the studio through regular sessions with architects and visualisers, including hands on classes where teams build their own AI tools rather than only using them. For Giulio, AI is not a shortcut. It is a way of extending intuition and moving faster through the ideas worth having.