Futuropia Cities — Botanica Series

About the work

Everything that will grow is already inside.

Seed is the most formally audacious work in the Botanica series a building that has taken the most fundamental unit of botanical life and scaled it to the ambitions of a civilisation. A great compound sphere rises from an X-shaped structural base, its surface composed of multiple ovoid lobes pressed together with the density of a pomegranate cross-section or a cluster of grapes at the moment before they separate each lobe a self-contained inhabited volume, each one ribbed and hatched with the structural logic of a seed casing that has been designed to protect something irreplaceable.

Two satellite buildings flank the central structure at ground level a curved pavilion to the left with the horizontal elegance of a greenhouse, a colonnaded rotunda to the right whose arched openings speak a more classical architectural language. Between them, a small burst of green marks the only living vegetation visible at ground level. Everything else is structure, envelope, and the promise of what grows within.

Di Nicolantonio draws here with the dense, committed line of someone who has found the most complex form in the series and decided to resolve it completely. The hatching of the lobes is exceptional each curved surface built up through successive layers of parallel marks that simultaneously describe form, suggest transparency, and imply the presence of light sources within. This is a building you want to enter. The question is which lobe to choose.

In the Futuropia universe, Seed is the botanical research centre of Verdania the building where the plant species of tomorrow are being developed, where the genetic library of every organism that has ever grown in this climate is stored and studied and, slowly, returned to the world in forms it has never taken before.

The most important building in Verdania that no one talks about. Everything else depends on it.

An original drawing from the Futuropia Cities — Botanica series by artist-futurist Sébastien Di Nicolantonio.

Edition Unique original — one of a kind

Signature Hand-signed by the artist

Authentication Sold with certificate of authenticity and gallery invoice

Technique Original drawing — pen and watercolor on paper

Dimensions 29.7 × 42 cm — A3 format

Framing Unframed — framing available upon request