Gallery: Writing Sci-Fi Could Make Architects Better at Their Jobs
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"Welcome to the 5th Façade," is a tale of science-fiction by architect Alan Maskin. Maskin is a principal at the Seattle firm Olson Kundig; this story won him and the firm first place in the third annual Fairy Tales competition. The event is coordinated by Blank Space.
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In the story, the narrator wakes up decades in the future, after being cryogenically frozen. He returns home to Seattle, and it's drastically different.
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Kinetic vertical farms decorate the neo-classical brick buildings that are still standing. Above those is a new layer of the city, where farms, parks, and energy-collecting machines braid together to form a new, high-rise urban landscape.
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The images here—five double-exposure style drawings—illustrate the narrator and the new world that he inhabits. He, like everyone else, wears an augmented reality headset that replaces human-to-human contact with a series of intelligent animations.
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This results in a sense of isolation, which is where the tale becomes dark. By viewing this futuristic landscape through the lens of a person who might inhabit it, Maskin says it became much easier to see where things could go wrong—a useful exercise for projects that will actually be implemented.
