Follow this tag to curate your own personalized Activity Stream and email alerts.
This fall at SCI-Arc, the school’s graduate Fiction and Entertainment program director Liam Young will present Views of Planet City as part of the regional PST ART: Art & Science Collide exhibition organized by The Getty Museum. Previously: 'AI Is a Dangerous Distraction From the... View full entry
Zaha Hadid Architects has shared photos and a video to coincide with this month's inauguration of its new Chengdu Science Fiction Museum project in China. The culmination of the firm’s now 15-year-long foray into the country that has produced multiple science and cultural sector designs in... View full entry
The next major cultural project from Zaha Hadid Architects has been revealed after the firm published the first images of its under-construction Chengdu Science Fiction Museum to coincide with the announcement that it will play host to the Hugo Awards later this year. In the form of a solar... View full entry
Designer Colin Cantwell, who was responsible for the design of the Death Star and several iconic ships in the Star Wars saga, has passed away at the age of 90. The news was confirmed by the designer’s partner, Sierra Dall, and reported first by the Hollywood Reporter. Born in San Francisco in... View full entry
The director and speculative architect Liam Young has launched a new project, speculating on the future of urbanism within the context of climate change and urban sprawl. The project, titled Planet City, presents a future world in which urban sprawl is reversed, and humanity retreats to one... View full entry
Revered as a legend in the field of science-fiction, the American industrial designer Syd Mead has given the world memorable and inspiring designs of what the future could be. Recognized for his contributions on the silver screen, he produced conceptual art for blockbuster Hollywood films like... View full entry
Syd Mead, the legendary science fiction illustrator responsible for concocting the retro-futurist conceptual drawings that inspired movies like Blade Runner, Aliens, and Tron and other seminal sci-fi films, has passed away at age 86. Mead passed away in his Pasadena... View full entry
The work of Japanese photographer Hisaharu Motada envisions what Tokyo might look like in some version of the future. Offering glimpses of doomsday, Motoda's lithographs depict deserted cityscapes, crumbling buildings, monuments overgrown with weeds, and other markings of a post-apocalyptic world... View full entry
Space remains a vast, untamed place, penned in only by the limits of our own imaginations.
So why the hell are there so many staircases in space? [...]
Once you start realizing how many stairs there are stopping you in real life, it becomes impossible not to notice them existing in the sci-fi you adore. Turns out they’re everywhere [...] our sci-fi imitates a real-world reliance on steps and stairs in our architecture.
— io9/Gizmodo
With Staircases in Space: Why Are Places in Science Fiction Not Wheelchair-Accessible?, Ace Ratcliff pens an excellent analysis of the pervasive presence of staircases in sci-fi that appear to foreshadow a future where universal accessibility for wheelchair-bound people like herself—and beyond... View full entry
For Lovecraft, the ubiquitous angle between two walls is a dark gateway to the screaming abyss of the outer cosmos; for Ballard, it’s an entry point to our own anxious psyche. — Places Journal
H.P. Lovecraft and J.G. Ballard both put architecture at the heart of their fiction, and both made the humble corner into a place of nightmares. Will Wiles delves into the malign interiors of their imagined worlds and the secret history of the spaces where walls meet. View full entry
graphic artists Michael Eaton and Felicity Hickson designed a wide range of props, from books and cigarette packs to the entire contents of a supermarket ... to help cement the look and feel of 1970s apartment living [...]
the film follows Dr Robert Laing ... as he adjusts to his new life as a tenant on the 25th floor and explores the relationships between the building’s various social groups and the tribal mentalities that emerge as the tower gradually descends into chaos.
— creativereview.co.uk
In any discussion of poor doors, newly urbanized class structures, or gentrification, there's a spot for J.G. Ballard's "High-Rise" (1975). Check out the trailer for the film adaptation, directed by Ben Wheatley, below. View full entry
But supplementing that aesthetic of “the future” sketched in imaginary edifice, the full SF vision of the future city is a mosaic, constructed from fragments of the cities that we recognize, including symbols that are decidedly from the past. [...]
If SF functions by taking the world we know and altering it with a constructed future fantasy, the Statue of Liberty serves as the junction point, the axis where the speculative fantasy begins and ends.
— motherboard.vice.com
Rod Serling, creator of the 1950s television series "The Twilight Zone", defined science fiction as "the improbable made possible." The same might be said for the practice of architecture. After all, architects by trade conceive of spaces, places, and worlds that do not (yet) exist. Furthermore, the ability to make the improbable possible is held in especially high regard today and is oftentimes what defines an architectural practice as “innovative” in the first place. — CLOG
Contemporary architecture publication CLOG has released its seventh issue, SCI-FI. In the digital glow of the internet age, architectural discourse has become both bountiful and ephemeral, oftentimes muddling the lay of the land. In response, “CLOG slows things down. Each issue explores... View full entry
