Winner Entry - 120 Hours International Competition (Oslo School of Architecture)
A two-part illustrated series exploring concepts of "utopia" and "dystopia" through visionary architecture
I know why the caged bird sings
VISUALIZATION THROUGH VISIONARY ARCHITECTURE
Visual Storytelling · Narrative Design · Visionary Architecture ·
Spatial Semiotics · Graphic Composition · Illustration
Design Brief
What happens when architecture is not bound by gravity, budget, or the need to be built?
This project responds to a conceptual prompt exploring visionary architecture - where drawing becomes a tool for speculation, resistance, and imagination. Participants were to explore fictional societies, fantastical environments, or speculative futures that reflect personal, political, or poetic ideals.
The brief specifically asked participants to illustrate two contrasting urban realities on paper:
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A dystopian society, defined by its systems of control, restriction, or despair.
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A utopian transformation of the same context to reimagined social conditions.
The goal was not to design a physical building, but to use architecture as a narrative and critical lens - expressing routine, confinement, freedom, or transformation through visual storytelling.
Designed Response
This piece explores the emotional architecture of routine - where repetition, confinement, and familiarity collide. It interprets the thin and often shifting boundary between utopia and dystopia, asking: When does captivity begin to feel like comfort? When does structure start to soothe?
Using layered patterns, muted color palettes, and cyclical compositions, the design examines the psychological terrain of institutionalization - a life shaped by monotony, where control becomes predictability and freedom starts to feel unfamiliar.
Rather than drawing a place, the project draws a condition. It suggests that utopia is not always idyllic, and dystopia not always cruel - it depends on whose perspective we’re looking from, and how much time we’ve spent inside the frame. Ultimately, its how we adapt to the spaces we occupy, and how - over time - the spaces we resist may become the ones we rely on.
i know why the caged bird sings
dystopia
This prison, wedged between freedom, is the jailbird’s dystopia. The outside, so tantalisingly close, he is stuck within a lifeless cell. Walking the same stairs, pacing the same room- the same colourless walls stare back at him.
Yesterday. Today. Tomorrow.
Outside, someone stops and smells the roses. Inside, the endless monotony weighs him down. The grass is, in fact, greener.
They send you here for life, and that’s exactly what they take away.”
Sisyphus is still pushing his boulder up the hill. Hoping to inch closer every day. Nearby, Tantalus wades through water, his hunger hoping to be satiated by the fruit held above him.
“Hope is a dangerous thing, Andy. Hope can drive a man insane.”
But then, who is Sisyphus without his boulder?
sometimes our cages are what free us
utopia
“These walls are funny. First you hate ’em. Then you get used to ’em. Enough time passes, you get so dependent on them. That’s institutionalized.”
He stared at those walls long enough that he became them. Absorbed into routine, the clatter of his chains now lulls him into sleep.
Freedom, as he once thought of it, is an unfamiliar, terrifying concept.
Wake up, push the boulder, bring it down, repeat. A life measured out in coffee spoons. Dotted i’s and crossed t’s; the cycle stands. That’s the way this wheel keeps working now.
This monotony is predictable, and makes sense. It is all he knows.
Institutionalised, the cell that once confined him, feels like Utopia.
Just like the origins of the word “Utopia” is contested, so is the dichotomy of utopia and dystopia. We have chosen to express this liminality through references of pop culture, history, and mythology.