Futuropia Cities — Botanica Series

About the work

The flower decided to become a city.

Corolla is the founding work of the Botanica series a new chapter in the Futuropia Cities universe in which architectural form is derived entirely from botanical geometry. Five great petal-like structural shells rise from a low curved base, each one ovoid, ribbed from within like a leaf under magnification, angled outward and upward in the universal language of a flower opening toward light. At the base, sepal-like forms curve along the ground, sheltering entrances through which small human figures move dwarfed, unhurried, entirely at home inside something that has grown around them.

Di Nicolantonio draws here without colour pen only, the line doing everything. And the line is exceptional: the interior ribbing of each petal shell is rendered with the patience of a botanical illustrator, the structural logic of each curve followed to its conclusion with the rigour of an engineer who has studied how plants distribute load across a curved surface. This is not architecture that looks like a flower. It is architecture that thinks like one.

Corolla proposes a building that has resolved the oldest question in organic architecture not how to make a structure appear natural, but how to make it perform naturally. The petal form is not ornament. It is structure, envelope, and identity simultaneously.

In the Futuropia universe, Corolla is the cultural centre of Verdania the building that every resident recognises from a distance, the one that appears on every map of the city, the one that has been growing, slowly and deliberately, since before anyone can remember.

The first flower of the Botanica series. The one that made the others possible.

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 on paper

Dimensions 29.7 × 42 cm — A3 format

Framing Unframed — framing available upon request