VISIONARY ARCHITECTURE: UNBUILT WORKS OF THE IMAGINATION

Carrying on the idea of designing a cinematic dystopic set and following my natural fascination for fictional and fantastic spaces,  I am investigating and researching in deeper analysis some of the most relevant architectural works in the history of the so called “visionary architecture”.
This research is helping me to set the design foundations in which my final proposal will operate and it is giving me the chance to deeper clarify and understand the design process behind the final design resolution.
Below there are few examples of “visionary architecture” which I personally find more useful and pertinent with my project.



   
NEW BABYLON : ANOTHER CITY FOR ANOTHER LIFE  

New Babylon is a Utopian city designed by artist-architect Constant Nieuwenhuys and it is a visionary architectural project concerned with the issues of “unitary urbanism” and the urban scenario in a futuristic technocratic society.
New Babylon was conceived and designed as an infinite playground.
Its occupants continually rearrange their living environment according to theirs desires.
People are seen as players and as a result architecture becomes the only game they can play.

I find this project extremely interesting and fascinating and I am really intrigued by the process Constant used to design a totally new and futuristic city from scratches.
I was also interested in this project since the beginning because it meets the idea I have for my own project, of designing a new futuristic dystopic London set in an hypothetic post-nuclear future, where only dystopic sites managed to survived and took over the scene.

New Babylon book cover

New Babylon map

New Babylon view 

LONDON AFTER THE RAIN

This was the final project of Ben Marzys a student at the Bartlett School of Architecture completing Diploma Unit 15 in 2007.
The movie is set in a bizzare and surrealistic post-industrial scene, where the city of London has become abandoned and overgrown, but still partially inhabited by a strange variety of human beings and animals.

ECSTACITY

Ecsatcity is an imaginary city conceived and designed by architect Nigel Coates.
The city is an imaginary place which gathers together sensual sides of all existing cities.
The architect took fragments of seven different cities around the world and woven them together to create a totally new urban fabric.
The book itself it is designed as a touristic guide to illsustrate and explain the city.

What really intrigues me about this project is its highly fictional and narrative foregrounds in which operates.
I would like to apply a similar design process in the construction of my unrealistic dystopic London.
Taking the real London as the starting point and deconstructing its patter in  fragments to then be reconstructed and assembled into a totally new urban grid where spaces, areas and activities are reinterpreted.