Show and NOT tell; Architecture Week - Thu...

Prompted by some great comments from Tuesday’s installment. I thought it’d be fun to linger a bit and showcase fictional architecture. You know. The kind of stuff that exists only in the illustrator’s/architect’s mind vast territory of madness. Illustrations of architecture that could be real, but aren’t; except as depictions of a space, a place, or an object.


As I compiled the images to illustrate this post I noticed something interesting. Whether old, new, painted, computer generated, or drawn the actuality of cities and buildings is rarely shown. As far as I can find, fictional architecture is depicted either as an ideal utopia, or nightmarish dystopia. It’s as if there’s only hope, or despair, in peoples minds at any time throughout history. Curious.

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Coruscant; The capitol city of the Empire in Star Wars.

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Broad-acre City; from the mind of Frank Lloyd Wright.

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Nice painting. Though it doesn’t appear that any boat could fit through those buttresses, let alone one big enough to require cranes for moving freight.

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Sweet drawing. I don’t know who did it.

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Radiant City; as conceived by Corbusier.

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Fishing village dystopia.

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One of the sets in the movie; Metropolis.

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Reminiscent of sets from Metropolis, no?

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Destruction of the Empire; Thomas Cole.

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Check out all of that utpoic hygiene.

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Surely the future will kick ass...

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Or it’ll kick. Your. Ass.

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Even the dirt is clean.

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Picturesque landscape. Clean, peaceful city. Planets rising in the distance.

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It appears that the cities of the future will either have built-up every square foot of the landscape, or will coexist peacefully with it.

What’s on your list of obscure, interesting architecture? Leave a comment.