A thesis analyzes the image of the city of the future through comic strips from the 19th century to the present day.
"The very history of modern architecture is linked to the projection of the future city", says Koldo Lus
Koldo Lus Arana has defended in the academic year 2012-2013 the doctoral thesis 'Futurópolis: the comic and the transmedia construction of the city of the future'. The research is framed in a line of the department Projects of the School of Architecture of the University of Navarra.
As the new doctor explains, the work "constructs a genealogy of the image of the city of the future from the end of the 19th century to the present day, and does so by looking at comics, whose production of future urban imagery throughout the century has been enormous, and whose role in the continuous (re)generation of the image of the future has had an unsuspected relevance".
"The very history of modern architecture," he adds, "is linked to the projection of the future city. It is not surprising, therefore, that architects have been fascinated by the urban visions of the future presented by the mass media average: today Metropolis or Blade Runner are part of the architectural visual culture, the visual humus that feeds the imagination of architects, like Le Corbusier's Ville Contemporaine, or Frank Lloyd Wright's Broadacre City".
Koldo Lus comments that the origins of his thesis go back to a series of articles grouped under the epigraph 'Desde el Noveno', published in the magazine Aequus between 2005 and 2006. "They were part of an initial interest in analyzing the structural relationships between architectural projection and graphic narrative," he says.
Research at Harvard
"The turn to the research of the urban," he recounts, "took place during my years at the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, between 2006 and 2009. There he completed a project of research, François Schuiten: Constructor of Utopia? under the direction of Antoine Picon, and of a series of essays produced under the tutelage of Michael Hays, Daniel Scherer and Antoine Picon.
"They took the research to another level, revealing a depth of the phenomenon that linked it to a broader cultural and intellectual spectrum," he says. At the end of the program, Koldo presented the thesis of Master's Degree The Dreamt Cities: constructions of the imaginary - Notes for a study of city, comics and architecture. Notes for a study of city, comics and architecture).
Koldo Lus Arana holds a degree in architecture from School of Architecture of the University of Navarra (2001), and a Master in Design Studies from Harvard University (2008). In addition, he has made complementary programs of study at the Istituto di Architettura di Venezia (2000) and teaching and research stays at the School of Architecture of the National University of San Juan (2001) and at the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (2008-2009).
Among other distinctions, he has received the First National End of programs of study award (Ministry of Education, 2002), the award Extraordinary End of degree program (2002) or the Dimitris Pikionis Award for Outstanding Academic Performance (Harvard GSD, 2008).