1. An architecture of hiding; in which rooms always have niches, tunnels, cupboards that swivel round to reveal staircases, hatches to under-floor spaces. There are no large rooms, only the illusion of them created with mirrors. There are no lines of sight that do not pass through an illusion. Buildings in this style may indicate a civilisation where the game of hide-and-seek has achieved the status of high art; or one which fears an imminent and hostile invasion.
2. A reed-bed architecture, erupting from the ground in millions of tiny spires. Lighthouses next to lighthouses, making rainbows with tinted glass. Monuments that can be slept on as dead saints once did, but with the convenience of a bed and an internet connection. Everyone becomes a princess in a tower. Step carefully from one window to the next, and never touch the ground, which is made of princes.
3. An architecture built upon the dead, the ashes of whose flesh are mixed with clay and baked into bricks that are added to the ancestral home, and whose bones decorate the rooms inside. The most treasured homes are those with the longest history. Those which have to add an extra floor to accommodate the parade of skulls up the stairs, two per step, the names of their original inhabitants etched on their foreheads in sepia ink. In turn, houses whose ancestral line has died out sit empty and gradually decay. And be sure there is no leaving the village where you were born.
4. An architecture of perpetual motion, or its illusion. Driven by perpetual sunlight and the old dream of endless growth and success beyond success and races eternally won again and again and again and again. Of these, the perpetual sunlight is the most important. The city closes down in the perpetual night of Winter. But in Summer when the solar trees open up there is no pathway that does not run with articulated links, no restaurant that does not swivel to take in the view, no home that does not unfurl to better accommodate its guests. And of course every home swings around the city’s outer tracks, broadcasting its dynamic address for the postal service to chase. Stillness of death and sleep and the horror of the oncoming Winter. Move whilst you still may.
5. A sound-architecture. Not only the auditorium is designed for how voices carry there. Each space in the building is a separate sound-space. The hallways muffle voices, making everything distant and dreamlike; there is a sharp echo to the kitchens with a cold danger to it. Snores echo impossibly through the bedrooms as if the sleepers themselves were drifting in boats down the nave of a flooded cathedral. And the bathrooms are dead places, anechoic, cocooned. Stepping outside you hear suddenly the unfiltered sound-architecture of the open sky, all at once unavoidable.
6. An architecture of transience. This city makes a silvery trail across the inhospitable landscape it occupies. At one end, fabricating machines noisily convert the bare rock to grey modules, fortified against storms, piled on top of each other like stacks of stones in a mountaintop cairn. At the other end, the oldest modules gradually crumble back into dust and blow away. The process takes perhaps ten years. It is a harsh place to live, but in the central modules there is a transient calm.
7. A theatrical architecture. As in other places, all spaces are divided into stage and backstage; however, in this case there is rather more stage and rather less backstage. In fact almost any space, inside or out, may be designated a stage. The areas are divided by coloured tape on the ground and of course by the type of lighting, which is brighter and hotter on stage. There is no absolute requirement to be acting on stage. Many of these areas are corridors, or staircases, or cupboards, or car parks, and of course many stage works are non-fictional. But if you wish to perform, there is a great deal of stage to do it on. Better get cracking with that play.
TheProcgen Mansion Generator produces large three-dee dwellings to toy with your imagination, offering various architectural styles and other options. Each mansion even comes with floorplans:
