I became an architect by accident. Having spent a good part of my childhood drawing, I felt that the obvious path forward was to pursue an occupation in the world of graphic novels. In the absence of a Danish cartoon academy, I enrolled in the Royal Danish Art Academy School of Architecture. I figured architecture school could teach me how to draw buildings and landscapes – the backdrops for the characters and stories I wanted to create. I quickly fell in love with designing the backgrounds for our lives and got stuck in plan B.
If the concept of a graphic novel is to structure a narrative by composing frames of scenes to build a story, then architecture is the art of creating the framework for the life we want to live. Quite similar crafts, except that the medium of architecture is reality, not fantasy. My interest in cartoons began with the Europeans René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo (the inventors of Astérix) and Tome and Janry (famous for Spirou et Fantasio). I thoroughly enjoyed The Quest for the Time Bird by Serge Le Tendre and Régis Loisel; the post-apocalyptic Jeremiah by Hermann Huppen; and the crusades of Sir Aymar in The Towers of Bois-Maury, also by Hermann. Despite my scepticism towards superheroes, I discovered Frank Miller’s noir portrayal of Batman: Year One and The Dark Knight Returns.
I was seduced by the eroticism of the Italian avant-garde – Indian Summer by Milo Manara and Hugo Pratt and Manara’s flower-power take on the Monkey King and the psychedelic Oriental adventures of HP and Giuseppe Bergman. I was in awe of Tanino Liberatore’s cyberpunk drawings of RanXerox, and the softcore space opera Morbus Gravis by Paolo Serpieri. One artist in particular fascinated me – or rather two in the body of one: Jean Giraud, who with Jean-Michel Charlier created Blueberry, a 29-album Western about the odyssey of a Southern soldier after abandoning the Civil War.
As a graphic novel, it was a precursor of the long-form fiction we now appreciate in television series like The Wire, Breaking Bad, and Game of Thrones. To write a Western odyssey experienced by a counter-establishment anti-hero in the Civil-War West is a feat that on its own would be enough to secure a position in the graphic novel Hall of Fame, but in addition to his day job, Giraud moonlighted under the alias Moebius, writing science-fiction fantasy such as Jerry Cornelius’ Airtight Garage and illustrating the six-book chronicles of John Difool in The Incal.
He was directly involved in creating the original Tron movie as well as Luc Besson’s film The Fifth Element. Moebius became my introduction to the literary genre that has had the most influence on my way of thinking about giving form to the future.
If science fiction is the genre of applying scientific concepts and ideas to the realm of fiction, then architecture is the art and science of turning fiction into fact. Where science-fiction writers create and unfold their thought experiments through narrative exploration, we architects seek to turn our visions into reality by negotiating the constraints of gravity, economy, and technical capability.
My enthusiasm for Moebius’s futuristic worlds was anchored in my love for drawings. It was the artwork and the images more than the stories that captivated me. The techniques and styles of drawings interested me more than the underlying concepts and ideas.
In high school, a friend of mine introduced me to the novel Neuromancer by William Gibson. In his trilogy and all his subsequent books, I found the fundamental insight that he captures better than anyone else: the idea that the future is already here – just not very evenly distributed. Today already holds the traces that lead to tomorrow. Somewhere in labs, on laptops, in the model workshops of a design studio are the prototypes that will constitute the world we will live in tomorrow.
Gibson is like an archaeologist digging for fragments of the future in the present. Unlike other forms of science fiction that I might dismiss as free fantasy irrelevant to the present day, Gibson’s cyberpunk extrapolates current tendencies to their extremes. Through exaggeration, he generates future projections, and in doing so, he highlights aspects of contemporary life that would otherwise be too subtle to see.
That lens of extrapolation and exaggeration is productive when you design for tomorrow.
A building project takes 5 to 15 years to complete. CopenHill took 10 years; the airport of Zurich will take 15 from start to finish. That means that we are never building today; we are always and only building the future. So we need to love and understand the future as much as we appreciate today.
William Gibson’s short story Johnny Mnemonic was made into a film with Keanu Reeves as the title character, and it is hard to imagine the Wachowski sisters’ Matrix movies without Gibson’s visionary genius. His forensic interest in dissecting the now for fragments of the future is something he shares with a fellow Vancouverite, Douglas Coupland, even if Doug never extends his scope beyond today.
But in a similar way, Coupland is capable of contemplating the contemporary condition, and in the inconspicuous everydayness of highways and emails, gas stations and Seven Elevens, suburbs and parking lots, he has an unparalleled ability to find the meaningful in the mundane, reminding us that life is what happens when we are busy making other plans, that the world in all its mediocrity is a place of untold beauty if you can be fully present, look, listen and learn unencumbered by preconceptions or clichés.
Coupland’s novels Generation X, Life After God, Shampoo Planet, and Microserfs have all had immense impact on me as an architect, because they somehow gave me the confidence that the everyday is already interesting enough. If you dive deep enough into it, you don’t need an opera house or an art museum to make a meaningful architectural contribution to the world. The ordinary can be extraordinary; a housing block can become a man-made mountain village; a parking lot can become a hillside of gardens.
Familiarity with the work of William Gibson and Douglas Coupland led me to discover Philip K. Dick, Kim Stanley Robinson, Vernor Vinge, and Iain M. Banks. Philip K. Dick formulated the best explanation for why I find science fiction so meaningful, why it transcends the boundaries of literature to become applicable as a thought process in architecture and other fields. Allow me to paraphrase his words:
Science fiction is not a story from the future even if it often happens in the future. It is not a space opera even if it often takes place in space. It is a story where the plot is triggered by some sort of invention, often a technological one, but sometimes a cultural, social, environmental, biological, or political innovation. The story unfolds as a narrative pursuit of the potential consequences that cascade from that one invention. It will show you a world exactly like the one you know, but where one altered aspect sets off a chain reaction. Both writer and reader are invited to peruse this idea and its many consequences in their minds.
Essentially, our best work as architects happens when we manage to ask one question, and then modify one of the givens. Suddenly the design process becomes an exploration of all the consequences of that one altered fact. Architecture is essentially science fiction turned into fact. Rather than speculating on the future, we shape it and make it.
Kim Stanley Robinson rejects the term science fiction in favour of “future history.”
His books are fact-based and realistic to the point of prioritising realism over entertainment. The result is a genre of science fiction that is riveting because of the granular detail with which it projects future scenarios. Robinson’s book The Ministry for the Future is a critical yet optimistic account of a near future when a catastrophic heatwave in Central India awakens first the Indians and then the world to drastic climate action including terrorism and terraforming.
His Mars Trilogy takes you through the first 200 years of colonising and terraforming that planet, from the initial engineering challenges of settling, building and mapping Mars, to the arrival of the mining companies and the multinationals, the ideologists and the religious leaders, to the advent of the inevitable desire to break free from the United Nations and Earth in order to pursue an independent future free from the constraints of the old world.
Robinson’s ideas in the trilogy Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars have shaped my thinking around interplanetary architecture and urbanism, and grounded the perspective of off-world colonisation as something attainable within my lifetime. The idea is that the moon and Mars are simply large islands reachable by ship across oceans of space, just like our ancestors reached Australia with canoes or Alaska over bridges of ice.
In New York, I met Jonah Nolan. I knew of Jonah since he wrote the short story that inspired the movie Memento (2000). He co-wrote the script that became a masterpiece directed by his brother Christopher, probably one of my top five movies ever. Jonah and his wife Lisa were busy resurrecting Westworld as a series for HBO. I fondly remember the 1973 film Westworld it was based on, written and directed by Michael Crichton. I saw it as a boy; it was a sort of Jurassic Park with sex, guns, and robots. I viewed it again recently but found it unwatchable.
For the reboot, the Nolans took the viewpoint of the robots. Rather than sticking with humans using robots to vent their dark desires on an abusive holiday (Las Vegas on steroids), the series invited us into the minds of the machines, a new non-organic subspecies of humanity with bodies made of polymers and silicone circuits instead of flesh and neurons. The approach allowed us to empathise with a new form of consciousness – robots that could soon evolve from being our tools to being our agents, our peers.
As I write, the science fiction in the Nolans' Westworld is edging closer to reality now that large language models have been unleashed into our world and are becoming increasingly potent, responsive, and presumably self-aware. Fact follows fiction.
Finally, there is Iain M. Banks, inspired by Vernor Vinge to think of artificial intelligence as a major element in the future of humanity. His books about The Culture, an interstellar humanoid civilisation empowered and liberated by powerful AI called Minds, is the most brilliant, uninhibited, compelling vision of a likely far future for humankind I have ever encountered.
It is the kind of free-form fantasy anchored in fearless creativity and intelligent imagination that opens your mind and broadens your mental horizon. Gender fluidity, man-machine interfacing, radical longevity, drug-glands, hedonism, emancipation, interspecies relations, virtual-reality recreations of various religious visions of heaven and hell, virtual-reality conflict resolution as an alternative to real shooting wars: the list of bold and brilliant ideas is endless.
He was also a successful writer of so-called serious fiction. One day, asked if he was writing science fiction to fund his serious writing, he said: “On the contrary, I write ordinary fiction to help sustain my passion for science fiction.”
Iain M. Banks’ vision of The Culture contains inventions and concepts that seem to be the conceptual underpinnings of Elon Musk’s ecosystem of companies – xAI, Neuralink, SpaceX, Tesla Motors, Starlink Services, and The Boring Company. Banks laid out a coherent holistic vision for a far future that is not only intelligent and ingenious, but also inspiring and enticing enough to serve as a North Star for entrepreneurs, engineers, and designers, allowing them to make sure that all the little decisions they make day-to-day will be consistent with a future that may transcend their own timeline but that they can still contribute to reaching if the sum of all their choices adds up to a greater future above and beyond what can be reached today.
Our choices as designers need to be rooted in values and principles that transcend the practicalities of the client’s programme, budget, and schedule. Our work needs to be based on our humanistic and philosophical foundations. If philosophy and ethics can serve as our foundation, then science fiction can serve as our aspiration.
The work of great creative thinkers like Gibson, Coupland, Dick, Robinson, Vinge, and Banks can serve as vectors of thought to guide our specific visions. Our work must be rooted in our heritage values while aimed towards our visions for the far future – where we come from and where we are going. If history helps us understand and appreciate how we got here, then future history helps us articulate where we need to go.
And suddenly you understand that science fiction is not merely a pastime or form of entertainment. It is the fundamental practice of formulating possible futures, and, through narrative, unfolding the problems and the potential of such futures, so we can benefit from failing or succeeding in our collective imagination countless times fictionally before we as architects engage in giving form to one of those futures and turn fiction into fact.
Opening image: Bjarke Ingels. Foto Sofie Mathiassen