Architecture Fiction

Definition

If science fiction is a way of simulating the future, then architecture fiction is a way of simulating future architecture.

"Architecture fiction anticipates the future present." says Mark Dery.

"The sci-fi subgenre is exemplified by short stories such as Bruce Sterling’s “White Fungus,” a post-recession vision of exurbia regained, where farmers grow cash crops on the crabgrass frontier and “derelict buildings [are] gutted and transformed into hydroponic racks,” transforming what was once farmland, before sprawl rolled over it, back into farmland. “Naturally, no (exurban bobos) wanted this logical solution,” writes Sterling".

Quotes

“Instead of absorbing into itself, a Dada Capitalist architecture would look out into the world, creating architecture fiction, a term that Bruce Sterling coined after reading this brilliant piece on modernism by J. G. Ballard, to suggest that it is possible to write fiction with architecture.”

"The field becomes almost infinitely more exciting when you realize that architectural projects, by definition, entail the reimagination of how humans might inhabit the earth – how they organize themselves spatially and give shape to their everyday lives".

Related Reading

• The Growthing - Fiction By Bruce Sterling - Renderings By Greg Lynn FORM. Published in MetropolisMag - January 2003.
• Science Fiction and Architecture Fiction by Bruce Sterling Published 03/20/2006 at 12:35 pm 2006-03-20.
• Thought Catalog: Architecture Fiction - Premonitions of the Present
• Pedro Gadanho, “All the Beyonds,” Shrapnel Contemporary, May 7, 2009, /.
• David Gissen, “Architecture Fiction—A Short Review of a Young Concept,” HTC Experiments, February 22, 2009.
• Geoff Manaugh, “Hotels in the Afterlife,” BLDGBLOG.com, April 21, 2008.
• Kazys Varnelis, “In Defense of Architecture (Fiction),” Varnelis.net, March 2, 2009.