Futures Past: Retro-Future buildings

 

For this month, I'm going with a reduced lineup to make time for other things. In the process, I decided it was time for something new. Through my life, my strongest influences have been ridiculously outdated sci fi, and as I've tried to return to writing after my dark years, I have increasingly looked at the intentionally "retro", as seen with my first and much more recent second installments of Percy the robot cop. In the process, I finally found an opportunity to delve into the motherlode of retro kitsch, the 1964 World's Fair and its centerpiece, Futurama 2. I also indulged very heavily in autoshape concept drawings, which have proved to be a convenient way to go through what has always been a big part of my creative process. To dive right in, here's one of my concepts and a World's Fair design I based it on directly.

This is a design I called the Aster, and I spent a good deal of time trying to develop it into a major setting before the whole project bogged down. When I thought to try restarting things, I decided to keep the Aster in a more limited role. I also decided to make it two towers as shown in the original, something I took a while to figure out for sure. I also decided on a design that fit better with what I had in mind, which was an arcology-style skyscraper (a concept that fascinated me before I knew the name or full history) with interconnected secondary buildings. Here's my main sketch; for scale, the squares are supposed to be 20 meters on a side. Just how tall it would be is still in flux, but something like 200 to 300 stories. An incidental idea I settled on is that the future city-state government would require all living units to have a window and a minimum of 24 square meters living space (small but not quite the low end for existing housing). Invariably, this meant a bunch of long, skinny apartments with the window filling one end, and undoubtedly a much higher price for anything on a corner.

What I had wanted all along was something huge enough to dwarf everything else, close to but not quite over a mile high. (By comparison, half a mile/ 800m is still the final frontier for anything filled out with practical, occupied interior space.) I settled on 1.44 km, and for a very long time, I held with the idea of something that would be pretty "fat", not more than 1/10th as wide as it was high. However, I finally decided something with a compact profile was in order. I quickly came up with a design that would fit within the footprint of existing buildings but still scale to the height I planned without going past 1/24 for the height and width. Here's the design I came up with, scaled at 60 to 70 meters wide minus the bits on the sides.

Once I came back to this, I quickly decided what I needed was some intermediate structures. Meanwhile, I came across something to awesomely impractical to pass up. It's called the National Commercial Bank headquarters, in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, apparently designed for the express purpose of having space for light aircraft to fly through, which of course fitted what I wanted for the story.

Here's a couple shots I took at scaling this up while keeping it practical, "only" 50-100 stories. The first is a main tower alone, the second is envisioned including a "base" and a wider complex with a bunched of tiered courtyards, parking lots and so forth.

Finally, I had had an idea all along for more spread-out housing, and it was the design most directly based on the source material. I call this the "Stacker", and I picture it as a condominium-style development with two or three levels, maybe 30-50 meters wide. This time, I could at least assume a ground-level entrance, with perhaps a pool or gym in the middle.

And with that, I'm done for now. For an extra, here's a video of the exhibit being assembled, including the best image I have found of the "Aster" towers. I still don't know how far I will go with this, but I at least want to get far enough to go through the material I already have (including an adventure of the Evil Possum). That's all for now, more to come!