Cybertopia: The Digital Future of Analog Architectural Space

2. Cybertopia. Death of analogous cities. Image © Egor Orlov

Written by Finn MacLeod
Published on December 07, 2014

"Cyberspace, filled with bugs and glitches – the components of its natural habitat – will form a completely new and previously unknown location when released into a real city – Cybertopia," says Egor Orlov, a current student at the Strelka Institute in Moscow. According to Orlov, the physical world is on the brink of a major technological breakthrough that will revolutionize the way architects conceive of space – closing the gap between analog and digital.

Cybertopia - completed while he was a student at the Kazan State University of Architecture and Engineering under tutors Akhtiamov I.I. and Akhtiamova R.H. and nominated for the Archiprix Madrid 2015 - exists as another dimension for Orlov, where fairy tales come to life and science harmonizes with engineering and architectural design. "Future of an Architecture Space. Cybertopia. Death of Analogous Cities," delves into a fantasy world where the "possibility to fly or walk from one planet to another" becomes an illustrated reality using a combination of drafting-based techniques and a wild imagination.

Enter the hybrid technological-analog world of Cybertopia after the break

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10. Model of the future city. Image © Egor Orlov

In Cybertopia, the threshold between imaginary and logical ceases to exist. According to Orlov, "technological development gives these worlds an opportunity to blend more naturally, transforming cyberspace into a component of the city, enabling a new environment for human life." Orlov's drawings reveal a four dimensional world where imagination and the built environment collide in a maelstrom of urban detritus. Cybertopia is home to an amalgam of communities featuring readily recognizable monuments juxtaposed with heroines lifted from fables and fairytales, all planted in a limitless colourful urban grid.

3. Paths from grain crumbs. New topography of the future city. Cyberlandscapes. Image © Egor Orlov

8. The mechanized habitat. Image © Egor Orlov

Entire neighbourhoods and cities are built and deleted, moved, transformed, and morphed in Cybertopia where limits are inconceivable and reality is undefined. Cybertopia serves as an anti-masterplan of sorts, designed to "Rethink the future" of urban centres that Orlov believes have undercapitalized on available technological resources. In the plan, all traditional components of an urban centre are satisfied but are reimagined to foster new uses for existing elements. Scale is irrelevant in the utopian dreamworld where misplaced objects dominate the skyline and recognizable forms bear not relation to their original functions. It's a world of intentional melancholy that requires no solutions or organization, serving as a call to action for urbanites to question their known boundaries.

6. Housing of the future city. Program section. Image © Egor Orlov

7. Model of potential transformations of a housing estate. Image © Egor Orlov

“Tomorrow,” Orlov says, "we expect a completely different topography of the city. It will be a map which includes cyber worlds with intrinsic geography, laws of physics, and even its own residents." Cybertopia represents an early adaptation of a future inevitably dominated by technology in a society struggling to abandon analog methods. The hybrid futuristic world of Cybertopia recalls Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion House, an unorthodox dissection of the standard American home that shared Orlov's futurist ideals. As technology progresses the divide between physical and digital universes will disappear, making the cyber future undeniable, says Orlov: "It is as though landscapes of computer games have become an integral part of the city."