INTRODUCTION
What we explore in this studio, Spaceship Architecture, is not Sci‐Fi architecture. Yet it derives from the latter its speculative nature, its imaginative concepts, futuristic science and technology imagery. It stops short from inheriting its futuristic settings. Instead it aims to become them. Spaceship Architecture is built architecture. It is found in realized projects that manage to become a setting of their own in an otherwise established and consistent built environment. They create a parallel world which no one expects to become the new norm, but everyone aspires to enter.
COURSE OBJECTIVES + AIMS
The analysis of make‐belief drawings and models of Sci‐Fi spaceships, space‐station, extraterrestrial world and anything that can be perceived as architecture, leaves architects always in absence of interior information. Designs fall short from resolving interior space as that is not required either for filming or animation. Textures, materials, openings, lights etc very rarely correspond with the interior, nor have any continuance. Interior scenes are most of the time filmed on separately designed sets (or digital sets) which are made in a way to correlate the ‘atmosphere’ of the exterior. But they rarely correspond in what architects would expect, in an interior program vs exterior façade system. The depth of a sci‐fi digital or physical model is virtually non‐existent, and thus useless in architectural spatial terms. This discrepancy in Sci‐Fi architecture we investigate and try to see why it often gets lost when architectural intents aiming to realize qualities, textures, materials and sci‐fi atmosphere, fail to implement them as intended.
“Jory had told the truth; he had constructed – not this world – but the world, or rather its
phantasmagoric counterpart, of their own time. Decomposition back to these forms was not of
his doing; they happened despite his efforts. These are natural atavisms, Joe realized,
happening mechanically as Jory’s strength wanes. As the boy says, it’s an enormous effort” .
Philip K. Dick ‐ UBIK (1969)
