Mind-Bending Buildings That Were Never Meant to Be Built




When we talk about architecture, we’re usually talking about buildings that serve some practical purpose. The walls keep us warm and out of the wind, the roof shields us from rain. These are our homes, our office buildings, our banks and our restaurants—the structures that keep society going. But architecture can serve more quixotic purposes, too. A new book focuses on this side of the field: buildings that don’t really exist at all.


imaginearchitecture_side

Gestalten



From wild, speculative blueprints of future cities like these from a young North Korean architect to the adobe-like buildings of Star Wars’s Tatooine, there are countless examples of the architecture of imagination. These structures don’t really exist in our world, but they enliven our narratives—and sometimes influence structures we do end up building.


A new book called Imagine Architecture: Artistic Visions of the Urban Realm , from publisher Gestalten, is a collection of these kinds of buildings. In the book’s introduction, architectural curator Lukas Feireiss writes that imaginary architecture—the kind found in art and literature—can be seen as a way for people to wrestle with new ideas about themselves, their intellect, and their social, political, and cultural environments.


“Even scientists begin their experimentations with pure speculation and imagination,” Feireiss writes. “The fruits of their investigations are often not expected to materialize in the near future. Like science, artistic imagination is experimental, but in a way that values invention, and attempts to establish new forms of knowledge and representation.”


Artist Laura Kicey's images of buildings could never exist, because they're stitched together from photos she's taken around the world.

Artist Laura Kicey’s images of buildings could never exist, because they’re stitched together from photos she’s taken around the world. Laura Kicey from Imagine Architecture, Copyright Gestalten 2014



Imagine Architecture is broken down into four sub-sections: “The House,” “The Tower,” “The City,” and “The Ruin.” References to great thinkers and creators dot the opening text for each chapter. Marco Polo, Carl Jung, and architect Rem Koolhaas are all quoted, framing the unexpected images that follow: upside down apartment flats, office buildings that split like zippers in mid-air, levitating houses, skyscrapers made of clouds.


The Ruin sub-section is especially curious. It makes sense to envision buildings that could someday be—you can think of them as dreams for the future. But why imagine a decaying building that never was?


“The future of any building is its ruin. So why not plan, draw, or build one from the onset?” Feireiss writes. This section is the most speculative of the bunch. It invites us to have a hand in the imaginary building ourselves. As Feireiss puts it, “The incompleteness of the ruin calls to be completed in the mind’s eye of the onlooker.”



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