Batman: Death by Design
by Chip Kidd (story) and Dave Taylor (artwork)
DC Comics, 2012
112 pages
ISBN-13: 978-1401234539
We managed to drag ourselves away from our “research” (read: fighting over a wonderful pile of books and the comfiest chair in the office library) just long enough to share our favourite titles related to the Walk the Line issue – in which the line between fictional tales and architectural realities is a very fine one indeed.
Wayne Central Station is to be torn down and replaced by an organic supermegastructure designed by Gotham City’s dodgy starchitect Kem Roomhaus. It’s up to Batman to dive deep into the murky world of the construction business and discover who is at fault for the derelict state of “the single best example of patri-monumental modernism in America”. Classic comic book tropes abound alongside solid glass rooftop bars, Hugh Ferris references and a device to “present 3D architectural models to clients too far away to visit”. p (fh)
Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions
Edwin Abott Abbott,
Seely & Co.,1884
124 pages
E-book: gutenburg.org
London Overground
Iain Sinclair
Hamish Hamilton , 2015
272 pages
ISBN-13: 978-0241146958
A perpetual line walker, Iain Sinclair’s most recent adventures in all things psychogeographic saw him wandering around what is locally known as the Ginger Line, a recent orbital addition to London’s public transport network. London Overground abounds in Sinclair’s effervescent prose, turning the quotidian into the mysterious, the salacious and the hilarious. He may not be an architect, but no one constructs a city quite like this. p (gk)
Dedicated to “the inhabitants of space in general” Abott’s 1880s novella is Euclidian geometry as social satire. On the last day of 1999, Flatland resident A Square dreams he visits the singularly dimensional realm of Lineland where he vainly tries to explain to its king the nature of life in 2D. Later he receives a visitor from Spaceland: a sphere, who challenges Square to comprehend a world lacking not only the restriction of two dimensions but also Flatland’s “linear” class system in which men are multi-sided polygons (more sides = higher status) whereas “our women are straight lines”. p (fs)
Citizens of No Place: An architectural graphic novel
Jimenez Lai
Princeton Architectural Press (2012)
96 pages
ISBN-13: 978-1616890629
The Mansions of the Gods
René Goscinny & Albert Uderzo
First published in English in 1973.
(Originally serialised in French in 1971 in Pilote magazine).
Orion
Paperback, 48 pages.
ISBN 13: 9780752866390
E-book: asterixonline.info
The 1970s Asterix book that got this architect hooked. Julius Caesar tries to finally conquer Asterix’s village – the last bastion in Gaul – by employing not force, but soft power: building a huge residential “Colonia” development on its doorstep packed with Roman patricians and all the luxuries of Roman life. Needless to say the attempt backfires but only after a story that’s not only a beautifully pitched critique on imperialism, colonialism and property development, but also on the workers strikes of 1968-era France and the modernist “villes nouvelles” of the time. p (rgw)
Constructions only on paper are the literal architecture of the non-place. But a lot happens in the non-existing places drawn by Bureau Spectacular founder Jimenez Lai. Ranging from a vast floating slab of a city in space (“Noah’s Ark”) to New York’s stratosphere-scraping Tower of Babel (completed in 2200) and the perils of fornicating with (the wrong) architectural forms, these ten graphic short stories highlight the limits of language when it comes to communicating – and imagining – our built environment. p (fs)
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