![]() ![]() Many impossible structures are oriented towards the future. The endless cathedral spires and buttresses of places like Anor Londo, Yharnam and Lothric are very much reminiscent of this late work. In private, his architectural fantasies took on darker shades. However, as World War 2 loomed and Stalin tightened his grip on the Soviet Union, Chernikhov was forced away from the avant-garde. His early work was all sleek, coloured lines and elegant abstractions - a million miles away from ornate Gothic revivalism. The environments of Dark Souls and Bloodborne also bear a resemblance to the work of Soviet constructivist Yakov Chernikhov. Some of the Prison etchings are spatially impossible - stairs and walkways ending abruptly or coming together in weird ways. With traps and lifts powered by ancient machinery and maze-like areas where platforms criss-cross and intersect within a cavernous space, FromSoft's environments mesmerise and disorient in familiar ways. It's not hard to pick out the similarities between Piranesi's oppressive prisons and your typical FromSoftware gauntlet. Whilst Team Ico's Fumito Ueda has acknowledged Piranesi as an influence, the architect's visions extend further. These were the Gothic nightmares opium-addled Romantics would dream up centuries later. A labyrinthine catacomb filled with all kinds of infernal-looking machinery: wheels, cables, pulleys, levers. Unleashed from history, the etchings depict a vast subterranean network of walkways, bridges, arches and stairs. Piranesi is most famous for his "Imaginary Prisons". Piranesi was Italian, which likely meant he had a bit of a soft spot for the Romans! In a similar way, Ico's castle is impossibly large, the camera zooming out in order to overwhelm you and build up the unfathomable mystery of its origin and purpose. Piranesi's imaginary Roman reconstructions were absurdly big - so colossal you could get lost in just the foundations. It is the etchings of Giovanni Piranesi that best capture what it's like to explore the castle's winding stairs and bridges. While the box art of Ico is famously inspired by Giorgio de Chirico, the long shadows and sun-bleached stone walls only make-up a portion of the game's mood. During the Renaissance, Europe was obsessed, not with future utopias, but with ancient Greece and Rome. The castle in Ico is one example of this. Whilst many impossible formulations are orientated towards the future, there are also plenty from the past. ![]() Porsena - the tomb is like Terry Pratchett's Discworld a planet-sized disc balances upon four elephants, which sit atop the shell of a cosmic turtle. These are strange buildings that ask us to imagine worlds radically different to our own. There's no shortage of visionary structures within the virtual spaces of video games. If paper liberated minds, the screen can surely open up further possibilities. On paper artists were free to realise its potential. The tomb was an enigma, and yet the difficulty in conceptualising it, and the vision behind it, was fascinating. Despite this, Varro's fanciful description sparked the imaginations of countless architects over the centuries. The image painted by Varro, one of shapes stacked upon shapes, seems like a wild exaggeration. Above this was a brass sphere, four more pyramids, a platform and then a final five pyramids. A giant stone base rose 50 feet high, beneath it lay an "inextricable labyrinth", and atop it sat five pyramids. 400 years after its construction, the Roman scholar Varro gave a detailed description of the ancient structure. The Tomb of Porsena is a legendary monument built to house the body of an Etruscan king. Their forms bend and warp in unthinkable ways dream-like structures that push spatial logic to its breaking point. It is not an issue that they could not exist, but that they should not. However, there are also buildings that defy the physical laws of space. Structures may be impossible in the here and now, but have the potential to exist given enough time or technological development: a futuristic cityscape, a spacefaring megastructure, the ruins of an alien civilisation. There is a saying in architecture that no building is unbuildable, only unbuilt. ![]()
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