Futuropia Cities — Aqua Series

About the work

The ocean did not stay at the shore. It built.

Kraken is the founding work of the Aqua series a new chapter in the Futuropia Cities universe in which architectural form is derived from the deepest vocabulary of marine biology. A great spherical mass dominates the composition, its surface perforated by elliptical openings some glazed, some open, each one framing a different relationship between interior and exterior, between the inhabited and the elemental. Lateral arms curve outward and downward with the unhurried authority of something that has grown this way over geological time. Below, bulbous satellite volumes cluster at the base like the bell of a jellyfish settling onto the ocean floor.

Inside the largest opening, green the only colour in the drawing signals life within the machine, a garden suspended inside a creature, proof that the building breathes.

Di Nicolantonio draws here from the most radical frontier of contemporary biomimetic architecture the emerging discipline that looks not to forests and flowers for structural models, but to the ocean: to the distributed intelligence of cephalopods, to the structural efficiency of coral, to the pressure-resistant geometry of deep-sea organisms that have been solving engineering problems for five hundred million years longer than we have.

Kraken is not named for destruction. In the Futuropia universe, the Kraken is the oldest resident of Verdania's coastal district a building that arrived before the city did, that the city grew around, that no one remembers not being there.

The sea has always known how to build. We are only now learning to ask it how.

An original drawing from the Futuropia Cities — Aqua 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