Every time you walk through a city, your experiences are shaped by the minds of hundreds of architects, urban planners, and landscape designers. But sometimes architects yearn to make built environments that are even more creative and so bizarre that no engineer could ever bring them to fruition. That's where the annual Fairy Tales Competition comes in.

For the fourth year in a row, sponsors of the competition have invited architects to submit drawings and short stories about architecture from other worlds, parallel dimensions, and pure fantasy. This year's theme was "environmental fables." If you're a fan of science fiction and infrastructure, the results are extremely delightful. The 2017 winners were just announced in Washington, DC, at the National Building Museum. You can look at all the winners' stories and art on the Blank Space site, but we've got glimpses of a few standouts.

Mykhailo Ponomarenko





Architecture is the real-life equivalent of what we call "worldbuilding" in fiction. And first place winner Mykhailo Ponomarenko's "Last Day" shows what happens when an architect loops back into science fiction. Ponomarenko is a practicing architect in Florida. His story is about what happens to the Earth after scientists in the USSR discover naturally occurring antigravity in the 1960s. It derails the Cold War, leading to a flowering of "Saturn" cities made from massive, floating ring platforms around mountains. You have to read the story to find out what happens next, but the pictures above capture a story told by the protagonist, who recalls his father telling him about seeing Saturn farms for the first time.

Terrence Hector

Terrence Hector

Terrence Hector

Second place winner is "City Walkers," an industrial fable by Chicago-trained architect Terrence Hector about a medieval city built with animals that resemble factory towers or giant feet. The style here is clearly influenced by British weirdo architecture collective Archigram, famous for inventing the idea of a "walking city" that would rove across the landscape. You'll also notice a kind of Terry Gilliam-like flair here, as both the Archigram group and Gilliam were influenced by a lot of the same psychedelic designers in the mid-1960s. When medieval peasants figure out that the Walkers can produce energy, they start to exploit the slow-moving animals, until extinction is pretty much inevitable.

Minh Tran, Alan Ma, & Yi Ning Lui

Minh Tran, Alan Ma, & Yi Ning Lui

I'm particularly fond of one of the Honorable Mention winners, called "iDentity: Virtual Reality Therapy for Cultural Identity Crises," by Minh Tran, Alan Ma, and Yi Ning Lui. It's a science fiction story about a future form of therapy called iDentity, which is basically VR immersion for people who grew up in two or more cultures. The main character, "Patient X," is trying to piece together a sense of self after living in two future cities: "Konghai City (Vietnamese colony of Shanghai, with many Hong Kong immigrants) and Londsfield (Huddersfield settlement of London)." Patient X revisits her memories, and the VR program helpfully mashes up all the cultures into what it hopes will be a unified space. The results, as you can see, are completely weird agglomerations of unrelated structures. It's a cool way to represent what it feels like to be from a lot of different places that don't have much in common.

If you want to spend some time immersed in gorgeous architectural fantasies, head over to Fairy Tales Competition sponsor Blank Space and enjoy all the art and stories.