Architecture Fiction

Definition

Architecture fiction is a way of exploring and testing alternative built forms and urban environments without the overhead of physically building and testing objects in real life.

A way of exploring alternate systems thst may be more efficient or offer more creativity, better living conditions or worse ones. A way of speeding up or slowing down time. A way of exploring utopia and dystopia. Because sicnece fictino is not just about the people it is about the conditions in which one lives. And the conditions in which one lives, digital are not, are defined as architecture. Spaceships are entirely architecture. Entirely built and designed environments.

In his Defense of Architecture (Fiction) Kazys Varnelis wrote that “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 "A Handful of Dust", a piece on modernism by J. G. Ballard, to suggest that it is possible to write fiction with architecture.”

The safety. The idea of it as a testbed. It means that it can expand into other areas as well. Science fiction does it in the same way, but architecture fiction offers a more visual perspective that can easily be gleaned by the reader instead of first immersing themselves in an fictional narrative. If science fiction is a way of simulating the future, then architecture fiction is a way of simulating future architecture. Games are also a way of testing future architectures.

Most of architecture fiction doesn't come from architects but urbanists and science fiction writers such as Bruce Sterling, William Gibson and Philip K. Dick.. A type of speculative futurism that focuses on urbanism or the built environment. It's all of the things that happen within that built environment. It can also include the virtual layers as well.

"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".

"Architecture fiction anticipates the future present", says Mark Dery, and "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" writes Bruce Sterling, especially, "how they organize themselves spatially and give shape to their everyday lives".