We ended 2009 with an imaginative blurring of District 9 and Dharavi with the help of some extra-terrestrial help and found ourselves stimulated by the power of fiction to visualize context, space and location in the most unexpected ways. The relationship of aesthetics to design related practices is obvious, the fact that imagination is the fountainhead for architectural practices is even more so – but the capacity of fiction to infuse that relationship with a full-blooded, wholesome stream of subjective connections is something that tends to get overlooked. We pay light-hearted tributes all the time to the power of speculative fiction to influence the architectural imagination but dont always acknowledge how deeply cross-influential those forces really are in the way we think of urban futures. That is why we were so happy to come across the work of Lisbon based writer, curator and architect, Pedro Gadanho who has started a bookazine called Beyond – Short Stories on the Post-Contemporary (through Sun Architecture) which is dedicated to the relationship of fiction and architecture, where architectural projects are conjured through writing, where builtforms can be seen as fiction and much more.

Look for more Airoots writing celebrating this relationship in 2010… A Happy New Year!