Sections of Congestion

Sections of Congestion

In the culture of congestion the formal architectural language is proved irrelevant. In Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, set in a dystopian future set in 2019, perspectives of stairwells that go on endlessly shed memories of Art Nouveau in their formal language. In the closing scene a fight evolves inside Neo-Classical rooms with marble fireplaces and double height ceilings, where this type of architecture would be commonly found on a hilltop in Italy, it was instead sandwiched between the floor plates of  a giant smog-scraper. In the Globe Tower in Coney Island, it looks as if the Eiffel Tower had been inflated to hold an entire circus, botanical garden, and at the lop a level of 250 feet in the air a hippodrome accommodating 5,000 people. In the culture of congestion, the architectural language is derived from any dream the client may have, whereas the section shows the program as a result of the needs purely extruded onto the site.

Blade Runner, Ridley Scott, 1982

Globe Tower, Coney Island, 1908