The citizens of Farmville hated their life. They lived in such an awful, low quality, orthogonal environment.
They desperately wanted to escape, but were terrified to leave their home. Google Earth was all they knew of the outside world.
Nevertheless, a group of punk outcasts banded together to plan what would be their new home away from home: a spectacular utopian dream place. They called themselves the Farmville Five.
The Instant City, 2012. Twenty-three second urbanism
They collectively drew the plan of their new city in a remarkable twenty three seconds. It didn’t take long, but they all agreed it was a timeless and monumental design. They dubbed this radical vision the Instant City, and dreamed of its geometrical purity in the most romantic of ways.
With new web-site cities popping up everywhere, the group decided to make their city as fast as possible...
...but something had gone terribly wrong. The purity and crispness of their plan was missing. They soon caught the mistake, but it was too late. Someone had saved their Instant City for Web & Devices in Photoshop, as a Low (0) Quality JPEG. It was to too late. The City was already rendering, ever so slowly.
The razor sharp glass towers the ‘Five had envisioned were replaced by the sloppiest of forms. Pixels began to spatialize unpredictably, some protruding three or more stories into the cold damp air of the rendering. The Farmville Five were excited by the unexpected messiness of the city they had so hastily created. They slept under the stars as their Instant City slowly rendered...
The Instant City (continued...)
The sun rose the next morning. The buildings of the Instant City were still rendering, but now their disturbed massing was more evident: ten-story behemoths articulated with potholes, wavy depressions, and a relentless - almost maddening - softness. The crispness and orthogonality of Farmville was nowhere to be found.
Curiosity filled the streets as the mistakeridden plan was cautiously explored. Never before had the preciseness of the computer yielded such unpredictable results...
It was a strange and terrifying place. Buildings shook and shuttered in the wind, which came whipping down massive boulevards. The buildings were all rendered in some weird type of glass or heat formed acrylic. Whatever it was, the surroundings of the Instant City were simultaneously reflected and warped to a dizzying degree.
One of the Farmville Five was found disoriented atop one of the highest buildings, occupying a rather unruly pixel. He was quiet and contemplative, and seemed disturbingly at home among the bloopers.
The Instant City (continued...)
Some of the Others had began setting up furniture and claiming territory in the newly discovered landscape. The Instant City was coming alive in the most unplanned of ways.
The outskirts of the Instant City were a mess. Nothing was planned. To make matters worse, the landscape was full of hastily defined Grasshopper scripts and Google Sketchup components. These follies appeared as quickly as they vanished, however, until one accidentally became baked into the infrastructure of the city.
These fringe areas were a maze of parametric complexity, stripped of the borrowed nostalgia from the Farmville Five’s past. Oh, how to escape from this uselessness!!??
They made their way back to the VRay Core, where the City was at its most spectacular.
The Instant City (continued...)
Here, the buildings were still empty, but full of energy. Hastily made skins of steel and glass all generated from a 23 second Sharpie marker line sketch. Just as new cars have their distinctive “new car smell,� the buildings of the Instant City smelled of iPhone and document scanning apps, Rhinoceros commands (especially Heightfield from Image & Contouring), Grasshopper Piping definitions, Google Sketchup Warehouse components (21st century readymades), and default VRay Materials...a very plastic-y smell.
Farmville seemed endlessly far away and the group was homesick...and lost amidst the ruins of the future...
The Instant City [ END ]