The city of the future is one of the most popular themes in the visual arts. However, each time the artist is faced with the question of how to depict this city, what model of the future should he prefer? Oddly enough, genre accuracy is as important as composition, proportions and chiaroscuro.
Instructions
Step 1
Techno-futurism. Technocracy, the power of machines, artificial intelligence and the fusion of man and machine are the key points of this direction. Urban landscapes presuppose the presence of complex mechanisms, robots, sometimes humanoid, bizarre flying machines and ground vehicles. Gadgets are an indispensable attribute of citizens. It is quite interesting to look at a school or hospital, where schoolchildren work with the most bizarre devices, and patients can move around thanks to complex prostheses and even exoskeletons. Descriptions of such landscapes can be found, for example, in the novels of William Gibson and other representatives of the cyberpunk movement.
Step 2
Eco-utopia. A triumph of ecology, bioengineering and high technology. The urban landscape is harmful to the harmonious fusion of high technology with bizarre plants. One of the "chips" in this direction is floating cities and biodomes in tree trunks or on trees. The typical eco-city of the future is like an English park, where residents ride bicycles or use personal flying vehicles. As for the landscape as a whole, the roofs of eco-buildings are covered with vegetation or they have solar panels, wind generators - any other sources of eco-energy. The garbage recycling plant is perhaps one of the most important attractions of the eco-city of the future.
Step 3
Apocalypse. The pessimistic model of the city of the future is a non-standard, but quite possible choice. If the artist wants to emphasize that the existing problems will lead to disaster (be it scientific, technical, military or environmental issues), he is free to depict an urban landscape destroyed by military operations, or in desolation. For example, there are no people, animals frolic in empty houses, plants twine around lamp posts, trees make their way through cracked asphalt.
Step 4
Dystopia. Descriptions of such landscapes and cities can be found, for example, in the novels "We" by Zamyatin, "1984" by Orwell, "Brave New World" by O. Huxley. The space of these works is a world, more precisely closed cities, where absolute control is established for the individual, where personal life is absent as a phenomenon, everything is in plain sight. So, at Zamyatin, the central element of the urban landscape is the houses, the glass walls of which do not allow privacy. Citizens are practically faceless, they walk in formation, as in a parade, dressed in the same tunics with numbers. Another important point is the city wall and dome. Surveillance equipment, guards in fancy equipment, citizens - in the same clothes - these are the signs of a city of this type of future.
Step 5
It is impossible to draw a city of the future without its citizens. But what they are, how they look - it depends on the model of the future. We can say for sure that the topic of controlled mutations, "biological upgrade" and the fusion of a person with a machine is quite in demand in this context, regardless of the social structure of the city of the future. For example, Saul Bellow, in Mr. Sammler's Planet, describes the man of the future as follows: "A grandiose personality of a beautiful green color, with a hand developed into a set of versatile instruments, precision and delicate instruments, with an index and thumb capable of transmitting thousands of pounds of pressure." …
