Hasta La Ideas

Fairytale story Alice in Wonderland becomes the backdrop for a dystopian world filled with fantastical structures in this competition-winning project by writer Kevin Wang and artist Nicholas O’Leary.

Wang and O’Leary, who studied together in New Zealand but are now based in England and Norway, won the competition run by New York organisation Blank Space to develop a modern fairytale set within a fantasy architectural environment.

Penned as the final chapter to Lewis Carroll’s famous story, Chapter Thirteen imagines “a bucolic yet futuristic world” where a grown-up Alice is battling to escape a wonderland that has become confining and frightening.

“The images were not intended to present an ‘ideal’ world, but one that is somewhere between dark and light, somewhere open for interpretation, a world between natural landscape and constructed cityscape,” Wang and O’Leary told Dezeen. “The architecture was integrated as architecture should be integrated – as an auditorium for life.”

“We tried to draw from nature to create the architecture of each image,” added O’Leary. “These floating balls were modelled on the structure of beehives, while other forms were inspired by mushrooms and fungi.”

The images were designed as a vertical journey through space, and gradually change colour from a yellowish green to a rich red. “We imagined a linearity from morning through to evening,” said O’Leary.

The project was chosen ahead of 300 other entries, judged by a panel that included architect Will Alsop, interior designer Nigel Coates and University of Minnesota professor Jack Zipes.

“The need and will to communicate universal messages resonates with every entry to the competition,” said Alsop. “Each entry is infused with topics and themes both inspired by the participants’ extremely diverse cultural backgrounds and from commonly shared thoughts and preoccupations about architecture’s role in today’s world.”

Scroll down to read the story text:

Chapter Thirteen

Tonight, I will end this life.

This is not the world I grew up in. A chess piece pinned on a two hundred square foot white box. Bounded. Absolute. Unrelenting walls inexorable after the hours I stare. Whispering a language without articulation, its only response the occasional pounding from the other side. A glimpse of life beyond these walls in the briefest of moments returns stoic as the door slams shut. Severed from desire, yearning of what is beyond reach. A barrier exists unseen and unnoticed. Few inches of air that separate its surface to me. I clean, I polish, I scrutinize over these encapsulating shells. They surround my life, yet recede into the background. There is no reason for contact. There is no reason to exist.

I am tired of these blank walls confining me. These lines are static. They are unforgiving. My English Ivy at the corner never made her reach to the window, she would not last the winter. Her shriveled yellow leaves scattered on the floor mixed in with strands of my fallen hair, barely a foot away from salvation. Her remains will slowly decay along with the carcasses of the rats that rule this city; the shadows that inhabit a world between ours.

Inside. Outside. They are no longer any different. Over-sized openings show me another interior enclosing my own prison. The world out there. Another cage with more restrictions. More rules. More limits. More of the cold steel, and hard concrete walls. Endless, and anonymous. They grow taller every year; perhaps reaching for fresher air, perhaps searching for a spot further away from the rest. I see open windows beyond my own, they show me adjacent bodies remaining completely unaware of the next, longing for signs of life. I am no different from them. No more free. No more wiser. Each compartment dressed for escape. Paintings, photographs, elaborate sculptures, all reminders of places far from here. I was once an eagle, the Queen of my world. Now a battery chicken, a body without organs. Feeding this city.

Don’t follow me. The unyielding pavement pounds against the bottom of my soles, vibrating the city up my spine. Don’t follow me. The cold pierces through my skin and pricks at my bones. Don’t follow me. The smell is nauseating, it lingers and reappears in my sleep. Don’t follow me. The stench of rot and fading life penetrates the city, disguised by chemicals of ocean fresh, lavender blossoms, white linen. I am pursued by those I cannot see. Constant noise wherever I go. Sharp sirens and low horns. Bangs of the steam pipes. Creaks of the floorboards. Stilettos against marble lobbies, and rattling of trains. A living corpse, this is the machine. This is the city.

I am disengaged with all that surrounds me. The footpath leads me to places I do not wish to go. This alienating city is bitter. Day after day I wake, I walk, I stand, and I sit. I am incarcerated within the flesh that has betrayed me. It takes me to spaces swarming with other lifeless forms, smashed inside a moving sardine can, transfixed to the sickly warm glow of the screen in their fat sticky fingers. Longing for connections in a virtual world. There is a thin film of slime on every surface. The metal bars smeared with fingerprints leave suggestions of previous life. Life, that is promised behind the posters. Life, that exists elsewhere. Vacant glances down to the ground, out of the darkened portholes partly obscured by the humid interior steaming up against the glass. Moist and stale. Suffocating. Occasional glimpses of flickering lights, and scribbles on surfaces defiant of the city. Still, there is no escape.

Where can I go? The city rejects me. Pounding lights and deafening sound, mixed in with smells of alcohol, smoke, and sweat, find me no refuse. Flocks of a new religion, looking for machines of freedom. Dripping bodies grinding against the next faceless form provide no more connection than my lifeless walls. It numbs whatever was left at the end of the day. Accepted obscenity in a neat box, with a cherry on top.

My body aches, movements prescribed. The city is the architect of my body, the puppeteer with invisible strings. It tells me where to walk, where to stand, and where to sit. I am judged wherever I go. Eyes from behind the curtains, above the newspapers and dirty magazines. They see me, they judge me, and they haunt my every move. See what good little girls and boys are made of. We stand in colored lines, moving one step at a time motioned by flashing numbers overhead. The factory floor of the human farm. Order inscribed into our psyche is not without constant reminders. Signs and lights burn into my eyes wherever I look. They say,
No Standing Anytime.
No Climbing.
No Sitting.
Keep Off, Private.
Green.
Orange.
Red.
Stop.
Every inch of this city screams at me.

No more attachments with this city, nothing would remain. I will not be missed, a headline soon forgotten. They called me crazy when I was younger. Last time I fell there was more. A world that moved me. A world with life. A wonderland created for the girl I was then. Now stuck in this moment that I’ve been told as truth, constructed with glittering gold. No more wandering blind. I have to get back.

I will fall. I will succumb to the city. Return to the blank slate, and we will be bound together in flesh and mind.

Eternally,
Alice L. Dodgson

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wins architectural fairytale contest appeared first on Dezeen.

Famous film set designs are translated into detailed cross sections that resemble the insides of dolls’ houses in this series of illustrations by architect and illustrator Federico Babina.

The collection of 17 posters is entitled Archiset and accurately replicates interiors from iconic films such as Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo and The Shining by Stanley Kubrick.

Federico Babina wanted to create an architectural representation of the set designs and chose to present them as two-dimensional elevations, like a cross section of a dolls’ house with characters appearing in familiar poses.

“The idea was to find a different form of expression to be able to enter and walk inside a movie,” Babina told Dezeen.

The artist said the selection of movies was based on his favourite set designs: “The film, its atmosphere and script are a fundamental guide for the ideation and design of the posters.”

Each of the illustrations depicts key details and props from the original sets, which were integral to the plot of the films.

Among the recognisable images is the apartment from 1961 film Breakfast at Tiffany’s, where Audrey Hepburn’s character lounges in a bath in her living room.

The set designed by Ken Adams for the ranch occupied by the famous villain Auric Goldfinger in the 1964 James Bond film is also featured.

The illustration of the Overlook Hotel from The Shining includes details such as an axe lodged in a door and the entrance to the haunted Room 237.

Darth Vader appears in front of the bridge on the Death Star.

Babina has previously created an alphabet of illustrated letters that depict buildings by 26 famous architects and a set of graphics representing architects in the form of vintage video game characters.

Here’s a short text from the artist:

The project is called Archiset. The idea is to represent a film set as if it were a doll’s house where we can start to play with the imagination together with the movie’s characters.

I am representing some of my favourite and inspiring movie set interiors. Seventeen images where cinema and architecture merge into a single frame to speak the same language.

In a movie we discover the spaces through the camera movement that reveals the spaces where the main characters live.

I enter on tiptoe through the drawing in the rooms and environments where there’s the film’s life: I touch objects, I look through the windows, I open doors.

I like to think that in a set design each object is carefully chosen. Nothing is left to chance.

Each item participates in the script and helps the development of the plot. A half-full glass on a table reveals clues and becomes part of the puzzle that makes up the story.

In these films every room has a style and a defined personality and contains surprises and unexpected details. They are like big magic boxes full of stories and characters, able to make us dream.

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by Federico Babina appeared first on Dezeen.

British illustrator Toby Melville-Brown imagines impossible architectural structures in his latest drawing series.

The Tower Series depicts three fantasy skyscrapers, each intended to explore a different architectural scenario.

“Through drawing, I try to convey my obsession with civilisation,” explains Toby Melville-Brown. “I’m not commenting on environmental issues, nor condemning our excessive nature; I’m merely fascinated with the synthetic landscape we have constructed around ourselves.”

Favela Arch presents an entire city’s worth of buildings piled up as a single structure, as a way to overcome a scarcity of land. Melville-Brown describes it as “like barnacles clinging to a rock”.

Regency Tower is intended as an oversized trophy, celebrating the ingenuity of mankind, while Power Station is an industrial building on a mega scale.

“Each explores a different facet as to why we build the way we do,” adds Melville-Brown.

The artist is selling 30 limited edition screen-prints of Tower Series from The Print Club in London.

Other fantasy architectural illustrations we’ve featured include Tom Ngo’s Architectural Absurdities, which feature a building made of stairs and an impossible lighthouse. See more architectural illustrations »

We’ve also published several fantastical photography projects, including a series of flying houses and giant Lego buildings. See all stories about manipulated photography »

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Toby Melville-Brown appeared first on Dezeen.

Turkish architects are creating line drawings of protest shelters and structures following the recent occupation of Istanbul’s Gezi Park.

Thousands of citizens took to the streets earlier this month to join one of Turkey’s largest anti-government demonstrations in decades and non-profit organisation Herkes Icin Mimarlik – which translates as Architecture For All – has since initiated an archive of photographs and drawings, documenting the makeshift shelters, tents, and other temporary structures that have been constructed.

“The protests in Istanbul indicated one simple thing for architects,” writes organisation co-founder Yelta Köm on the Tumblr page for the project. “We need new definitions for architecture in situations when architecture is removed from architects.”

He continues: “Each unique structure that we encounter in the streets and Gezi Park has its own in-situ design and implementation process. Documentation of these temporary structures is of huge importance for further examination, considering their limited life-cycle.”

A stage for speakers, a barricade made from benches and a communal dining table are already included in the archive, and Herkes Icin Mimarlik is asking for more submissions.

“We really want to document as much as possible,” says the team. “While we are drawing what we could find, we are also open to contribution from everyone.”

The demonstrations began last month, following a brutal police attack to remove a small group protesting the demolition of Gezi Park to make room for a new shopping mall.

See more stories about architecture in Turkey »

Here’s some more information from Herkes Icin Mimarlik:

As Herkes icin Mimarlik (Architecture for All), we believe in participatory architecture processes. The things that we saw in Gezi Park was really impressive examples of event architecture and we were naturally encouraged to document these unique stuff.

We have been struggling with this project since the time it was announced to public. We started with workshops in which we discussed the administration’s claims that the square and the park do not serve their purpose as a public space. The workshops gave birth to weekly ‘Gezi Park Festivals’. We publicised the event through social media channels, invited musicians, dancers and performance artists; organised workshops and games that would attract people. While 50 people attended the 1st Festival, our popularity raised rapidly and the 5th Festival received more than 500 people. With the festivals we tried to show to people who used Taksim Square but never passed by the park that Gezi Park is a calming place to spend time. Unfortunately, our festivals were not enough to stop the destruction process, so we started an online petition to save the park which requested an open and democratic design process. We tried everything to start a dialogue but were never successful. For a very long time, we had dreamed of an opposition which could stop the destruction. That miracle happened. Since the first days of the protests, all of us were scattered around the streets of Istanbul. We were communicating through our mail and watsapp group. Following days, some of us focused on online projects that could help the resistance.

We really want to document as much as possible. We tried to create an open database. While we are drawing what we could find, we are also open to contribution from everyone.

While we were in the park, we tried to photograph what we thought could be interesting. We also created a pool for photos from Facebook and Twitter. What we are interested is the use of the scrap materials, in-situ design solutions. It is also exciting to see how these structures become part of the community there and accepted.

We always define architecture with architects. But, Gezi Park was an atmosphere where all paradigms that we were used to has shifted to something else. We dont know what is the new definition, perhaps there will be many more definitions. We are seeking for a new one maybe, but we know that this new definition will be shaped by people, not only architects.

Creating a collective memory is really important when the government is trying to forget everything. The life cycle of these structures were really short so we had to document them. We believe it is way of passive resistance. We keep remembering what happened in Taksim. In a way we merged the practice and protest by using architecture as a tool to critic. We want to make a publishment after all this progress.

Idea & Project: Herkes İçin Mimarlık (Architecture for All)
Editor and Coordination: Yelta Köm
Contributors: Ayşe Selin Gürel, Beyza Derbentoğulları, Burçak Sönmez, Ceren Kılıç, Ceren Sözer, Erdem Tüzün, Erdem Üngür, Emre Gündoğdu, H. Cenk Dereli, Hayrettin Günç, Kerem Özcan, Merve Gül Özokçu, Yasemin Sünbül, Yelta Köm

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by Herkes Icin Mimarlik appeared first on Dezeen.

Competition: we’re giving readers the chance to win one of five graphic prints that depict iconic buildings by architects including Oscar Niemeyer, Zaha Hadid and Álvaro Siza.

Portugese illustrator André Chiote created the series of architectural illustrations by simplifying images of recognisable buildings to emphasise their form and shadow.

Designs include MAC Niterói by Oscar Niemeyer, Fundação Iberê Camargo by Álvaro Siza, Mercedes Benz Museum by UNStudio, Museum of Islamic Art by I.M. Pei, Ningbo Museum by Wang Shu, Riverside Museum by Zaha Hadid, Whitney Museum by Marcel Breuer, MUSAC by Mansilla+Tuñón and Casa das Histórias Paula Rego by Eduardo Souto Moura.

The minimal graphics are slightly mottled and executed in faded colours to give a vintage feel.

Each poster is printed with the building’s name and architect in typography chosen to compliment individual designs.

The posters to be won are 30 centimetres wide by 42 centimetres high, though they also come as 50 by 70 centimetre prints. Both sizes are available from the artist’s Cargo Collective online shop.

To enter this competition email your name, age, gender, occupation, and delivery address and telephone number to competitions@dezeen.com with “André Chiote” in the subject line, stating which poster you would like to win. We won’t pass your information on to anyone else; we just want to know a little about our readers. Read our privacy policy here.

Competition closes 23 April 2013. Five winners will be selected at random and notified by email. Winners’ names will be published in a future edition of our Dezeen Mail newsletter and at the top of this page. Dezeen competitions are international and entries are accepted from readers in any country.

See all our stories about architectural illustrations »

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by André Chiote to be won appeared first on Dezeen.