Traces, fantastical futures and the crystalline

© 2020 Brendan LeeTraces, Fantastical Futures and the Crystalline employs digital modelling and analogue drawing process to propose speculative utopian architectures. The thesis examines the relationship of the creative works to the German Expressionist and Crystalline movement that arose in the early 20th Century. Key figures like the architects and artists Bruno Taut and Wenzel Hablik, envisioned crystalline cities and architectures and proposed societal transformation through the use of glass in architecture to create utopian cities and buildings. The presented multi-discipline work exploits and interrogates the interplay between the physical and non-physical and postulates a biography and abstraction of the body beyond materiality through the generative constructive art process. Drawing upon a variety of precedent strategies, the creative work ultimately presents a speculative, fantastical, crystalline architecture as a digital projection of virtual space in an actual installation