A subculture of designers and artists—masters of fictional architecture—are at last getting their moment in the limelight. A new book, Dreamscapes & Artificial Architecture: Imagined Interior Design in Digital Art, which is being released with Gestalten publishing house on June 16, looks at the best moments of this CGI elegance. Featuring roughly 100 designers from Argentina to Tel Aviv, the tome comprises gravity-defying bizarre buildings, otherworldly landscapes, and pastel-hued interiors.
“These CGI visualizations have become the end result,” says Elli Stuhler, the editor of Dreamscapes & Artificial Architecture. “The result is these utopian environments, full of exquisite furniture and extraordinary natural surroundings that can’t, and won’t, ever be built.”
Unsurprisingly, the digital architecture movement has seen a rise in the age of Instagram. “It has underlying themes similar from artist to artist; pastel-hued skies, floating spherical objects, and ultra-inviting bodies of water,” says Stuhler. “There is something so pleasing about these impossible, utopian environments, and of course that’s not an accident.”
The practice had a key moment in 2018, when Buenos Aires–born designer Andrés Reisinger posted an image of a chunky pink armchair he called “Hortensia” on Instagram. It was only a CGI rendering, but it became so Insta-famous he decided to build it into reality, lining the chair with 20,000 pink fabric petals and selling it. “It demonstrated the appeal of this type of work, and that it had the potential to spill over into the physical realm, if unintentionally,” notes Stuhler.
The book features the works of London-based designer Charlotte Taylor, who uses a pale pastel palette to create calming poolsides, cave-like lounges, and futuristic modular homes (one strikes a resemblance to the Palais Bulles in the South of France). They blur the lines of what is rendered and real. “Utopia is a notion not too far from reality for me,” writes Taylor in the book.
There’s also the pink-hued works of Venice-based designer Massimo Colonna; Ouum, a 3D design studio in Ukraine; and Prague-based designer Filip Hodas’s dystopian scenery. Paris-based designer Hugo Fournier’s minimalist, meditative scenes are included too, as are the lush, green landscapes of Paul Milinski.
Many of the designs here are made with 3D modeling programs, like Rhinoceros 3D, Enscape, Lumion, and Octane. “These are interiors and buildings with no constraints: no budgets, no clients who will inhabit them,” says Stuhler. “It’s uncompromising architecture that’s completely freed from reality.”
Source: https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/dreamscapes-and-artificial-architecture-book