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Hollywood at Night (2006).
Alexis Rockman’s paintings of swamped or ruined American landmarks present views which are a novelty in contemporary art galleries whilst being very familiar to science fiction readers. Many of these could well be illustrations for JG Ballard’s 1981 novel, Hello America, which imagined a depopulated United States reclaimed by flora and fauna. [...]

…or Indian palaces have the best doorways. These are from the City Palace, Jaipur, also home to what is claimed to be the world’s largest silver object.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Jaipur Observatory panoramas
• The Jantar Mantar

Mysterieux retour du Capitaine Nemo.
This week has been incredibly hectic work-wise but I’ve managed to keep these posts going, so here’s the last one devoted to an appreciation of the Cités Obscures of François Schuiten and Benoît Peeters. A week of posts barely scratches the surface of their vast and involved creation of alternate worlds, [...]

L’enfant penchée.

We’re at the penultimate post in this week-long tribute to the Cités Obscures series of François Schuiten and Benoît Peeters, and there isn’t enough space left to cover some of the more recent volumes in detail. What follows is a quick skate through three more major works.

L’enfant penchée.
L’enfant penchée (1996), or The Leaning Child, [...]

The Palace of Justice, Brussels.
Brüsel (1992) by François Schuiten and Benoît Peeters follows La route d’Armilia as the next major work concerning the Cités Obscures. As with La Tour, this is a longer story where it isn’t immediately apparent that we’re in the Obscure World at all, although Brüsel is clearly an alternate version [...]

Ferdinand and Hella look down on the skyscrapers of Brüsel.
La route d’Armilia (1988) by François Schuiten and Benoît Peeters is the next substantial story in the Cités Obscures series after La Tour; there was also a book about transportation in the Obscure World, L’Encyclopédie des transports présents et à venir, published the same year. La [...]

La Tour (1987) by François Schuiten and Benoît Peeters is the third story in the Cités Obscures series, although it’s the fourth volume if you want to be strictly canon about things, L’achivist, a guide to places in the Obscure World, having preceded it.

Carcere Oscura by Piranesi (1750).
This is another book where Schuiten and Peeters’ [...]

La fièvre d’Urbicande (1985) by François Schuiten and Benoît Peeters is the second volume in the Cités Obscures series. This was the one which captured my attention the most when I first saw it. The book opens with a foreword by the central character, Robick, chief architect of the city of Urbicande, in which he [...]

The Obscure World.
Les Murailles de Samaris (1983) by François Schuiten and Benoît Peeters is the first of the stories which explores the world of Les Cités Obscures, a “counter-Earth” on the opposite side of our Sun with a continent of separate city-states, each with their own distinct architectural style. Having discovered these stories first in [...]

Paris au XXieme Siecle by Jules Verne (1994).
Following a comment I made last week in the post about the Temples of Future Religions by François Garas, I’ve decided it’s time to give some proper attention to one of my favourite comic artists, François Schuiten, a Belgian whose obsession with imaginary architecture resembles the earlier endeavours [...]

Detail of the Water Organ (1902).
Samples from a set of pictures at LUNA Commons of the wonderful water gardens at the Villa d’Este, Tivoli, Italy. Among the 164 items in the collection are plans, engravings, and photographs old and new. I’m partial to the older photos, most of which seem to be photogravure reproductions whose [...]

Temple à la Pensée, dédié à Beethoven, vue en cours de construction (1897).
Another artist discovered whilst searching for something quite unrelated. The Musée d’Orsay are custodians of this drawing by François Garas (1866–1925), and they also have the most substantial appraisal of his career.
François Garas remains a mysterious architect, whose artistic pantheon included Baudelaire and [...]

A photograph of the control room of Battersea Power Station, London, by Michael Collins, one of a series which will shortly be on display at the Royal Institute of British Architects.
The images show Battersea Power Station as what Collins describes as a “twentieth century ruined castle” – a building that was built to last, with [...]

Dream House #3 (2009).
Many of Michael Dotson’s vivid acrylic paintings would make good illustrations for JG Ballard books or for some of his more hallucinatory short stories. Not all of these stylised urban landscapes and empty sports arenas have the requisite latent menace to be truly Ballardian but the anomalous black pyramid in Dream House [...]

A cosmic pendant lamp by New York lighting manufacturer, Caldwell & Co, created for the Rockefeller Center in 1932. The company’s Art Deco-styled designs for that building feature a number of other flying saucer pendants although none as striking as this one. The photo is one of many made available by the Smithsonian Institute on [...]

The Fishing Complex (2008).
Canadian artist David Trautimas re-purposes household and other objects into fantasy buildings by exaggerating their scale then montaging them into landscapes. This example is from his Habitat Machines series; there’s also an Industrial Parkland series. Many of the former group are pleasantly convincing, and their weathered appearance adds to the impression of [...]

An obscure occult artist even among catalogues of obscure occult artists, Julien Champagne (also listed as Jean-Julian) is known principally for his associations with the persistently elusive 20th century alchemist Fulcanelli. Champagne provided a frontispiece (below) for Fulcanelli’s examination of architectural symbolism, Le Mystère des Cathédrales (1926), and is continually rumoured to have been Fulcanelli [...]

Ancient Cities Lost to the Seas | Dunwich and others.

You can always rely on expositions and world’s fairs for architectural extravagance. This monster globe was an unrealised proposition for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago and would have required potential visitors to be conveyed “by lift to the Equator, and thence by spiral railway to the North Pole.” What Columbus’s ship is doing [...]

A stunning architectural video installation produced by Apparati Effimeri for last month’s Itinerario Festival, in which the stolid Rocca Malatestiana in Cesena, Italy, is painted with stripes, then mutated, melted and finally blown apart in slow motion. I’d love to see this effect applied to large city-centre buildings but the results are so striking they’d [...]