Vertical Architecture and Science Fiction. Towards the Post-Skyscraper Age?

Sky-high cities, megatall skyscrapers, hyperbuilding agglomerations, extruded coastlines, soaring infrastructural corridors, stacked farms: the 21st-century world is a radically vertical(ized) one. However, and despite the growing scale, pervasiveness and complexity of these vertical architectures, the design disciplines still lack a critical-speculative vocabulary through which to undertake not only a systematic inventorying of their associated environmental/political-economic dynamics, volumetric urbanisms and morphological models, but also to explore their potential to configure other—more socially just, ecologically sustainable, and technologically progressive—possible urban worlds. In this lecture, Mariano Gomez-Luque proposes that, given its double nature as both a critical and a projective spatial discourse, Science Fiction is uniquely equipped to cognitively map the towering contours of the contemporary built environment and to envision —and design— alternative future horizons for it.   

Speaker: Mariano Gómez Luque, Doctor of Design candidate at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, and a research fellow at the Urban Theory Lab and the Office for Urbanization.

Sponsors: RCC; Design@RCC