“Cities” is a series of drawings by Atelier Olschinsky, depicting fantastical, fictional urbanisms that have more in common with sci-fi than with existing cities. The drawings after the jump.

These are non-terrestrial cities, whose viral growth have spawned dense, labyrinthine blocks of sprawling and soaring structures. The viewer is presented with monolithic, yet pixelated urban terrains, paradoxical clusters of articulation and undifferentiation. These cities bear little resemblance to external reality, as they are radical expressions of nonexistent political, economic, cultural, and scientific systems. Their construction is contingent on new orders of belief, where human beings–assuming that we are the ones still in charge here–fully embrace entropy and disassociation as living conditions.

The illustrations themselves owe a lot to the work of so-called “paper architect” Lebbeus Woods, whose exhilarating drawings and designs of unbuildable architectures–”anarchitectures”–match Piranesian exuberance with a cyberpunk aesthetic. Woods, and other practioners like him, have explored architecture’s projective capabilities through impossible scenarios which examine architecture’s mutative agency, tapping its potential to influence and guide political and technological change.

Similarly, “Cities” projects visions of what our urban centers might look like if such large-scale changes were forced into effect, for better or worse. What we see may look crazy, dystopian even, from above, but perhaps if we were to look more closely,  we may find some intriguing alternatives. The endless city is, if anything, possibility.

by Samuel Medina

posted in New Projects Uncategorized

tagged architectural fiction, cyperpunk, drawings, lebbeus woods, sci-fi, urbanism

more articles by Samuel Medina