Friday 2 November 2012

FICTIONAL FRIDAY: PUSHWAGNER'S SOFT CITY












In the early 1970s, the Norwegian artist Hariton Pushwagner created a dystopian vision of the modern city, with cars, monotony and soulless architecture, called Soft City. In this amazing series of drawings, he showed a day in this horrible society where identity is history, variation is fault and likeness the prime virtue. In many ways, this was probably nor only a reflection of Pushwagner's political views, but just as much a reaction to how Norwegian architecture was developing at the time.




















































One example can be found in Fantoft student hostel in Bergen, where repetition, uniformity, lack og scale and boring and ugle materials are combined with boring setting to create something that could easily have inspired Pushwagner.




















The artist kept returning to Soft City, and not all of these drawing come from the original series. A book with the first edition of Soft city was published some years ago. I own a copy, but I'm not sure if it can be bought online. The ISBN number is 9788291187785, and the book is very much recommended.



















Finally, a short film version of Soft City:

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