When I started doing research, it wasn’t into cities. It was into a more general idea of futurism and modifying organic life. Of course, I immediately got distracted and started looking at earthships and arcologies. I’d been exploring cityscapes as a loose theme in printmaking, so I did the obvious thing and leaned into research on the architecture of futurism.
I started with Isaac Arthur’s videos on megastructures, as well as his ‘upward bound‘ series. I’d seen a few of these in the past, but I went back over them and wound up watching about 10 hours of material. Though most of the information in these videos is in voice-over narration, Isaac works with a team of artists to provide some beautiful graphics, which gave me a ton of ideas to work with.
I also looked at the art of Shaun Tan, one of my all time favorite artists. His work leans more to the fantastical, with sprawling cities filled with wild creatures. The scenes from his children’s book The Arrival, were particularly inspiring.
I had a lot of material to draw inspiration from, but was having a hard time pulling all of it together until our in class conversation with Robin Lynch, when I told her what I was trying to accomplish and she mentioned the phrase “speculative architecture”. I was struck. Stories about cities. Megastructures. The fantastical and the real brought to the same level. I’ve always been a fan of speculative biology, creating fantasy creatures with real world principles, so of course it makes sense that speculative architecture would be where I wound up. From all of these points, I started to draw.
