This article focuses on the emergence of "speculative architecture" as a distinctive strand within the professional field of urban studies, one that is future-oriented and claims to "create narratives about how new technologies and networks influence space, culture, and community [with the aim of] imagining where new forms of agency exist within the cities changed by these new processes" (Liam Young, 2017). In so doing, speculative architecture is conceived of as a discursive space (Heller, 2007) for social performance (Briggs & Bauman, 1992; Hanks, 1987) and capital accumulation (Bourdieu, 1986) under conditions of late capitalism. I examine how a set of semiotic and discursive features that become emblematic of "doing speculative architecture" get "enregistered" (Agha, 2007) or "stylised" (Cameron, 2000) in ways that regulate access to socio-institutional networks and associated material/symbolic resources. This approach is intended to shed light on the semiotic production of new professional selves while at the same time identifying the embedded forms of inequality that these may enable.