Architecture in Soviet fiction

Druzhba Sanatorium © Frédéric Chaubin

Frederic Chaubin's photos of soviet architectures bring Utopia and Science Fiction together : the Georgian Highways Ministry 's concrete blocks piled on top of one another are monumentally alienating, the Druzhba's Sanatorium recalls the space shuttle concept, a time when the Soviet Union overtook the United states in the space race.


Highways Ministry © Frédéric Chaubin

The buildings' eerie surroundings, in locations at the peripheries of USSR, are preserved by the photographic use of the wide angle. By mixing hybrid shapes, passage ways, bubble windows, gold plated decor and flying saucers, this amazing architectural vocabulary expresses a new born freedom from the soviet regime.


Institute of Scientific and Technological Research and Development © Frederic Chaubin

Building the Revolution

Narkomfin Communal house © Richard Pare 

Former soviet architecture is monumental, industrial and cold and that melancholy makes me wonder how life was before the revolution ? 
One photograph by Richard Pare captures almost by accident the loneliness of a communal house in Moscow : with its dinning room and its pilled turquoise walls, the reproduction of Raphael's Sistine madonna above the chimney, the little Pushkin statue and the faded flowery cloth on the table, this apartment is infused with the passage of time, testimonies for a lifetime not spent in leisure but working in factories. 

Pare's photos of Power stations, derelict buildings and abandoned rooms now standing like post-apocalyptic background with their obsolete machines and futuristic enginery brings to mind scenes of surreal work conditions. 


Brazil © Terry Gilliam

How real is tomorrow ?

© Christopher Nolan

What is reality made of, in the future ? 
Science fiction imagery might be an unlikely place to decode the reality of images but Thrilling wonder stories 3 explores reality via the manipulation of visual data and the future of images and technologies.


© Valerie Bennett

This ten hours momentum at the AA in London is directed by Liam Young from Tomorrows Thoughts Today and Geoff Manaugh from BLDGBLOG. As I lasted only half of the marathon, I missed the taxidermy performance - a good thing in my view -, so I can only comment on the special effects artists and the futurist narratives developed in SF movies.

©2009 by
© Christian Lorenz Scheurer

Christian Lorenz Scheurer is an illustrator of dystopian futures for video games and films such as The Matrix, Fifth Element and Superman Returns. His artistic world is so rich in details that Hollywood needs only one of his drawing to write the scenario of a whole movie : one panoramic city view contains enough data to create futurist civilizations, migrant communities, streets, vehicules, set of rules, characters, smells, sounds, colors ... Scheurer is an amazing artist but the problem is that when fictive realities are loaded with pre-digested and self-referenced information, it leaves no room for one's imagination.


Spov TV has now removed those images so I am showing a similarly controversial concept/images of seed bombs by © Hwang Jin Wook, Jeon You Ho, Han Kuk II and Kim Ji Myung

Spov TV is a group of motion graphics artists which uses information as the basis of storytelling : information is out there, anything can be found, even secret information is available, so to build narratives, they research the news and mix existing formulas from everyday objects or historical events, stories from a contemporary space with an inauthentic past.
Real news inform fictive news, the past informs the future which reveals how visual data can turn the news into fiction, into fictive reality. Using archive footage to create live action footage presupposes that wars can be created out of nowhere, they can be fictions invented by governments via the manipulation of media and visual data. This answers the current trend in visual media of using reality to make images look real - the opposite of what Scheurer does.


© Hwang Jin Wook, Jeon You Ho, Han Kuk II and Kim Ji Myung

Spov TV presents slick images of future weapons from their recent movie Project Earth for Discovery channel. The animation uses high end CG, computer generated imagery and graphic sequences to examplify how engineering weapons can be used in the fight against global warming. The complicated spatial weapons shown on the trailer direct the energy of the sun to send it onto earth or shoot seeds into the atmosphere to develop new ecosystems.
Despite its slick imagery, the movie is highly referenced and in case of the seed bombs, recycles guerilla gardening and permaculture principles - the mimicking of nature's intelligence by re-designing the environment in a world of less energy and resources - to replace it with its opposite; the supremacy of human engineering, the old belief that science will improve ecology, while dismissing the importance of waste impact.


© Duncan Jones

The main set and special effects of Moon (directed by Duncan Jones) was designed and supervised by Gavin Rothery : in the movie is a long corridor, a robotic space house of the future, as Rothery calls it, which shelters one man during a three years solitary retreat on the far side of the moon to mine Helium 3, a non-radioactive source of nuclear energy.



© Duncan Jones

The success of the set lies in its respect of Science fiction rules - if it is not real enough it is fantasy - and its minimalist depiction of reality due to budget limitations - no CG here -, a choice which is crucial to the belief of what we see. Here, the use of modeling technology, fine artists and shooting in real space instead of creating computer design worlds, brings more importance to the sense of touch than to the sense of vision, making the movie more sensual, more plausible. 


© Valerie Bennett

When you don't know how the images are made anymore, says Gavin Rothery, you can't connect with them. The fact that the details are real in the movie, that the characters/actors bring their own stories in the story, gives it strength, makes the movie more real.


© Christopher Nolan

When Andy Lockley joins the panel, the conversation carries on the subject of the authenticity of images and the minimalist use of special effects has having a positive impact. As Special effects director for Inception, he explains that filmmaker Christopher Nolan is "the anti-digital guy" so the film is not scanned and re-worked but shot on location (there is nearly no green screen) : the film doesn't use much special effects so the design of the sets is very important. This is good new for artists and designers who are back on movie sets.
Nolan is very interested in architecture, says Lockley, he hates when people makes things up because he is peculiar about reality. He likes the ugliness of reality because most things in life are disappointing. If he needs to build fictive places it will be from real locations; in locations he gets the true lighting effects and the actors are in a live emotional moment, and this is what sticks in the viewer's mind when watching the movie : there is life and soul, therefore it looks real, therefore it exists.