architectureinhentai:If I made the rules, I can break them. This update focuses on the architecture

architectureinhentai:If I made the rules, I can break them. This update focuses on the architecture from Fist of the North Star, or Hokuto no Ken (HnK (even the acronym sounds like the sound a goon might make when punched)). Although it’s not a hentai manga, its character dynamics are about as stupid as any H-doujin. What distinguishes HnK’s architecture is that it’s rendered in such a scrupulous level of detail but never stops being a really weird, naive medley of styles, ranging from ancient Sumerian to German-Baroque to speculative techno-futurism culled from movies. I stop short of classifying it as mannerism because mannerism expresses a learned, particular, connoisseur-appealing subversion of classical tropes (it is perhaps partly for this specialized wittiness that the Palace of Charles V may never be more than a cultural outlier). Tetsuo Hara’s illustrations look rather like source material was amassed then slung together to fit a given scene. The effect here is purely cumulative and blunt.Architectural weirdness is relative to HnK’s own fiction, too, though. This isn’t a story that takes place on an alternate Earth; not blatantly, anyway. Really, if it weren’t for the dungeon-palaces housing each Bad Guy, poking up higher than any other settlement structure in a manner similar to the cathedrals of old Europe, most of HnK’s distant urban views would look like a default post-apocalyptic scene: frayed skyscrapers creaking over barren lands. But it’s these fortresses and the closer looks we get of city streets that are centrally, almost singularly, responsible for throwing off a sense of continuity from regional reality. You might assume that, well, maybe the Bad Guys appropriated corporate buildings and had laborers and slaves graft “classical” pieces onto the existing frames. The problem with this assumption is that the civic design is comparably bizarre – just with less glitz. It doesn’t matter that HnK never specifies where it takes place; the more you read, the more you suspect, or realize, that its setting has no real parallel.I honestly don’t think much thought was put into any of this by either Hara or author Buronson. You might as well also ask why there are so many impossibly enormous men wandering around (and no, the answer isn’t “nuclear radiation”). The architecture’s qualities exist as such for dramatic effect. There are evil huge men with evil huge ambitions, and they are complemented with evil huge buildings. Everything beneath that which follows suit does so for the sake of atmosphere and consistency. It’s theater. With the emphasis on muscular men, why not have them inhabit muscular environments? It’s just interesting to me that Hara settled on something so Byzantinely patchwork.When Hara references another fictional location, he doesn’t do a whole lot to mask the imitative process. Which, you know – fine. This isn’t a subtle work. An interior shot of Bladerunner’s Tyrell Corporation building becomes the throne room of Shin, HnK’s first antagonist. Later on, the palace of Jabba the Hutt from Return of the Jedi serves as the model for a mountain dwelling, albeit on a smaller scale, right down to the adjacent bulbous-domed tower.These sorts of examples are barefaced. If you want, however, you can go much further back and compare some of HnK’s sites to the imaginary architecture of Erlach, Ledoux, Piranesi, Boullée, etc. It’s true that sometimes you’ll see what you want to see. But when it comes to an object like the Holy Emperor Cross Mausoleum, a pyramid-tomb built for an antagonist’s dead master, the spirit of Boullée’s funerary gigantism couldn’t be closer at hand (if this topic interests you, take an hour out of a day to watch this excellent talk by historian Erika Naginski on French visionary architecture). It’s similarly feasible – again, just visually – to compare the least inhibited palatial designs to the cake-like assemblages in plates by Piranesi which reimagine roads of the ancient Roman republic as being lined with eccentric monumental antiquities.Click the link below if you want to see other images from the manga. Keep reading -- source link
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