Science Fiction Architecture
— some notes from The Aesthetics of Science Fiction. What does SciFi look like after Cyberpunk? an article by Rick Liebling, 2018, who coins the term Hard Concrete to describe the article’s title
— also another good article is What styles defined specific eras of science fiction? by Robert McLaughlin
— a really cool breakdown of the typography in 2001
Liebling thinks bout what science fiction looks like beyond the prevailing design aesthetic of the past 35+ years which is Cyberpunk, as he focuses on the architectural design of SciFi.
The main example of Cyberpunk is almost always going to be Blade Runner (and Blade Runner 2049, and Black Rain too) as the established visuals of dark, rainy, urban landscapes with neon signs and a multicultural street life, to some degree a call back to film noir as well. Also literary origins from William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Pat Cadigan, and Japanese mangas like Akira and Ghost in the Shell. “The city of Blade Runner is much more influenced by the aesthetics of 1900–30s skyscrapers than those of the 1960s. So in a sense it’s natural that it’s moved on, while still looking backwards for inspiration.”
The cyberpunk look was a product of the times, mixing rebellious youth culture with advancing technology, the explosions of capitalism and the lingering scepticism of the military-industrial complex, the late 70s and early 80s were a deeply cynical time that called for a visual identity to match
The signature Sci Fi look that came before Cyberpunk was the Atomic Age and Space Age ushered in a vision of the future that was clean, crisp and bright, — side note: makes me think of the retro futurism aesthetic — Stanley Kubrick shook up the genre in 1968 with 2001: A Space Odyssey. Which then led to Star Wars, but that is more rooted in fantasy than in hard science.
“I’ve noticed over the last decade or so that there are some recurring themes. I call it Hard Concrete. Like Cyberpunk and Atomic Age & Space Age design before it, Hard Concrete is linked to the realities of the times. If Cyberpunk was the visual embodiment of the corporation as mysterious behemoth, Hard Concrete parallels a world where corporations and governments have been exposed as brutal, uncaring and stripped of their shiny, mirror-glass facades. They may be no less controlling, violent or malevolent, they just no longer bother to hide it. “The aesthetic of futurism changed, too, without anyone issuing a manifesto — from big and bold, primary colors and metallic shine to grim, dank rot and ruins.” — James Gleick in his book Time Travel (p. 305)”
“Gone is the coolness of cyberpunk, no longer neon on black but just colour palettes of pall greys, flat blues to a drab olives. The slick polish is gone. Hard Concrete also looks back to design cues from Brutalist architecture. While Brutalist architecture was built for government organisations, and in viewing its use as a science fiction aesthetic it fulfils the same role, what’s happened in between the 1960s and today infuses the look with a different meaning.”
“As a material, concrete gives life to our relationship with power structures, especially as depicted in science fiction. It is at once transparent — a sort of “nothing to hide here” transparency — while also being opaque and impenetrable.”
“I think the Hard Concrete also performs like a frame of the human condition through its materiality. Many sci-fi narratives are ultimately questioning our humanity in a speculative way, including our relationship with technology, our social evolutions and devolutions, etc. The blank concrete surfaces are most often in stark contrast to the human figures and their interactions. There is not a human scale to this material. In fact, it doesn’t really have a scale. Thus it does not relate characters to the natural world or themselves.”
side note — was just writing my end of semester reflection and looked up the word ‘cyberpunk’ into google to decide whether to write it being an aesthetic or genre, and it didn't come up with the usual definitions or wikipedia, it came up with a new video game called ‘Cyberpunk 2077′, which actually looks pretty cool, the game design is really pretty so note to self keep that in mind
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