This essay analyses a visual reinvention of architecture in media by using Idris Khan’s photographs to show how the expression of a new reality of the Anthropocene changes the experience of architectural space in our collective imagination. From ancient ideas of how to animate form, to attempts by early cinema at decomposing life’s movement, and to the most recent features by groundbreaking digital technologies manipulating visual narratives, the relentless recreation of the world has long been the concern of artistic expression. Could inanimate representations, such as photography, committed to the literal recording of reality as perceived from the eyes of the observer, be considered as a mechanism for animating form?