I’m not that creative, but I’m sure there are some people that can help me with that
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I’m starting to build parts for a futuristic city and i can’t really thing of much.
Any Ideas are appreciated ![]()
I’m not that creative, but I’m sure there are some people that can help me with that
.
I’m starting to build parts for a futuristic city and i can’t really thing of much.
Any Ideas are appreciated ![]()
I’d take the city of Dubai as some inspiration. Perhaps the most futuristic looking current city in my opinion.
I’ll put a little disclaimer at the end of this.
Is this a current city depicted in the future (whether a real city or not) or a city that only exists in the future?
The reason that I ask is that one thing that makes a lot of cities interesting is that architecture tells the story of the city. Buildings are built and torn down. Old buildings are modified to accommodate technological changes. New buildings are designed to reference architectural styles that originated for purposes that no longer have bearing. This trend will probably continue even more in the future as designing buildings to last longer becomes important for reasons of sustainability. So perhaps you could start designing your city of the future by thinking about some components from today (or the near future). Then, going forward, think about what changes (social, technological, ecological, etc.) influence how buildings are built. Is driving within the city prohibited and replaced with some kind of people movers? If so, there would be a profound impact on the urban landscape. Has climate change created strong storms? How might the architects of tomorrow engineer a building to survive natural disaster? Without the risk of cars, was a technology for automatic city cleaning easier to deploy early leading to ultra-clean cities? Did financial desperation cause laws regarding advertising to be relaxed leading to all surfaces being high definition video screens? The thing is, cities seem to be built in layers, and everything that I’ve suggested could have been true at some point and changes create layers of new buildings and new ways of doing things.
Here is an example using the things I’ve already said. We start with a city from today. Environmental change leads to strong storms. Combined with high costs for transporting building materials, the city goes through growth involving low buildings designed to resist storms. Placement of buildings and multipurpose spaces are important - tall existing buildings are an environmental consideration (we are building new structures in their shade). Low buildings that can have the same occupancy as a tower requires a large footprint. Fortunately for building designers, severe laws are passed prohibiting all traffic in the city. Transportation terminals are expanded around the edges and at key points. Streets are less useful with no vehicles, and most become pedestrian walks. The city relaxes laws on building to allow structures to spill over into the streets. The city’s grid is broken. Without cars, we can assume some technology has to exist for things like trash removal – maybe solar powered robotic vehicles. Variations of this are deployed for city cleaning. The lower pollution and higher efficiency cleaning lead to a high degree of civic pride. This ties to an overall period of economic prosperity. Monuments to this prosperity are built - concert halls, etc. The transportation terminals are renovated. These new buildings tower above a generation of low-rise structures. Many older towers are finally imploded to make way for this new construction. We now have a city that is a patchwork of low-rise structures with glass towers rising from it. High-tech mass transit wraps around the city, rising above the streets. But good things don’t always last - economic hardship drops land value and occupancy drops in the low-rise structures. As they transition into slums, the building owners put pressure on the mayor to abolish the no-advertising laws that were passed when the city was at its peak so that they can earn additional revenue. Without cars, pedestrians are the target - and technology allows for high definition advertising video to be projected on every surface. The city is forced to drop taxes, and cleaning robots go without repair. The advertising and dirty streets encourage people to turn a blind eye to rising crime. People living in the newly formed slums can no longer afford to take mass transit. There become two cities – one on the ground, with low-rise structures covered in 24/7 advertisements. Narrow walking streets with crowds operating a black marekt. The other city exists above - transportation hubs allow the mobile elite to go to events in their glass city. Walking platforms are extended so that people don’t have to go down to the ground where it is less safe. This polarization leads to worse conditions below and eventually the police stop caring that people are bringing vehicles back in to operate on streets that haven’t been wide enough for anything but pedestrian traffic for more than a century.
Ok, so just given that, there are a ton of building types and components to model - each with their own visual style based on the period in which they were built. You could reference architecture built during periods in which public sentiment was similar to see trends. Remember that even really creative things don’t exist in a historical vacuum.
Now the disclaimer: I don’t know what you are building this for, but I would guess it is a game. So, I’ve got a good idea for the best way to model these things: primitives. Cubes and cylinders. Get the gameplay worked out. Make it fun - then focus on detail. You need a general idea of how your city will work if the city is more than a setting (and it should be – a city is as much a character as the protagonist) so some of this still applies, but building assets shouldn’t be your first priority. Just use blocks for the buildings as placeholders so that you can prototype your gameplay.
My two cents, anyway.
Instead of just building random things wouldn’t you wan to plan it all out?
That is kind of what I was getting at – but I was trying to articulate that planning what something will be like in the future involves thinking about the chain of events that could lead from now to then. That said, even though my disclaimer was the smallest part of my post, I think it is the most important.
I have some ideas for the city, like the era was going to be about 900 years from now. I don’t have many ideas for how the buildings will look like.
well you might want to plan it all out, not the buildings just the 2d surface of the city (top down) just plan some roads etc where specific landmarks would be etc.
yea i should start with that
900 years in the future is a long way away.
There will be no oil, and we are not likely to ever have an energy like it. So consider that there will be less waste than is exhibited in places like North America or Australia.
AUSTRALIA FTW