Blade Runner: Fantasy or future reality?

A decaying city pelted with acid rain and teeming with isolated, lonely people - that was the future Los Angeles imagined in the 1982 film Blade Runner.

It made a big impression on a young English architecture student called Julian Gitsham. Watching it again more than 30 years later before an address to the British Film Institute, Julian, now a HASSELL Principal, saw it as a warning to architects, urban planners and political leaders the world over.

“It packed a powerful message when it was first released and it is just as potent now,” he says. “I didn’t realise at the time just what a brilliant vision it was of lost public spaces, of decaying cities, of empty buildings and abandoned spaces.

“It was a potent warning of the disaster that we risk heading towards as populations increase and our urban environments become more and more dense.”

Julian was a keynote speaker at Building Brave New Worlds: The Architectural Visions of Sci-Fi Cinema, a study day at the British Film Institute (BFI) in London. It was a day that marked a season of films and television programs called Sci Fi: Days of Fear and Wonder. The season runs from October to December 2014

Julian describes Blade Runner as a pivotal film in its portrayal of a failed society and doomed urban environment - the film that people recall when talking about cinematic exploration of dystopia. However, he admits to responding very differently back in 1982.

“I remember seeing this for the first time in the Penultimate Picture Palace in Oxford at the midnight showing and being blown away by its beauty. I found the high rise cityscape magical, the movement  from sky to ground seamless, the quality of the detail in practically every frame of the film, the crafting of crashing through endless plate glass windows and the constant bombardment of colliding images of people, streets, transport, buildings and, of course, the Vangelis soundtrack! I absolutely loved it.”

Directed by Ridley Scott, the film stars Harrison Ford as Rick Deckard as a “Blade Runner” – someone called in to hunt down and kill escaped groups of genetically engineered “replicants”, designed for dangerous or menial work in “off-world” colonies. Millions of humans are leaving to live in the colonies to escape the decaying world that is Planet Earth.

Revisiting the film in preparation for his BFI presentation, Julian asked himself how the film’s vision fit with the reality of contemporary environments. As Architect’s Journal reported, he sees analogies between the depiction of vertical living in Blade Runner with the potential problems of today’s trend for building towers in major cities.

“In one scene, Deckard drives through town via a tunnel, goes into a basement car park, takes the lift and goes into his apartment, all without talking to a single person,” he says.

“When you build tall, you can become incredibly isolated. The film also shows Deckard entering whole streetscapes that the general public can’t access. We are designing better now, but there was a period of time when we were building gated communities, where you just close your doors and talk to nobody, and that makes cities fail.

“Perhaps we should require all young designers to watch Blade Runner as part of their professional education. Blade Runner is the work of a powerful imagination. We need the same imagination today to ensure we design cities that people want to live in, rather than escape from.”

Source: hassellstudio.com