Design
A Science-Fiction Fairy Tale Imagines a Dark Future for Seattle
“Welcome to the 5th Façade” tells a grim story about historic preservation as cryonic preservation—with severed heads.
For three years running, Blank Space, an online design platform based in New York and Rome, has hosted an open design contest. It’s not a typical call for entries. Fairy Tales asks architects to come up with new tales about myths and magic. It’s an architecture storytelling contest.
This year’s winner is Olson Kundig, a Seattle-based architecture firm, which took the contest’s prompt in an unexpected direction. Led by principal Alan Maskin, the firm’s project team turned in a science fiction-inflected, graphic-novelized story about the rooftops of Seattle and cryogenic regeneration.