Futuropia Cities — Aqua Series

About the work

This is what a civilisation looks like when it has made its peace with the ocean.

Pelagis is the most ambitious work in the Aqua series a full urban panorama in which every structure speaks the language of marine biology with the fluency of something that was never translated, only grown. Ovoid towers rise to sharp organic tips like the shells of deep-sea molluscs scaled to the height of skyscrapers. Spherical volumes cluster at mid-level, their surfaces resolved with the smooth precision of pressure-resistant organisms. Circular rings frame voids with the confidence of architectural elements that have understood the structural efficiency of the torus. To the left, mushroom-form pavilions on slender stems recall the Arborea lineage proof that in Verdania, the marine and the arboreal have been in conversation all along.

The composition spreads across the full width of the format with the density and coherence of a master-planned district not a collection of individual buildings but a single urban ecosystem in which every element relates to every other, in which the spaces between structures are as deliberately conceived as the structures themselves. Di Nicolantonio draws here as a city-builder, not just an architect thinking at the scale of the neighbourhood, the district, the civilisation.

Pelagis is the capital of the Aqua district the city within the city, the place where Verdania meets the sea and neither one wins. Where Verdania proposed a world of living architecture, Pelagis proposes its oceanic twin: equally complete, equally inhabited, equally alive.

The most complete vision in the Aqua series. A city that has always existed beneath the surface of every other city Di Nicolantonio has drawn.

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 on paper

Dimensions 29.7 × 42 cm — A3 format

Framing Unframed — framing available upon request