Will Insley – Dystopic Architect, City of the Future

What caught my eye was his piece entitled /Building/ No. 36. Passage Space Hinge.

Insley’s use of monotonic lines to create an isometric-perspective work of art is a bit overwhelming in areas. The patterns of lines work together to create a three-dimensional structure which appears to be moving underneath the surface. The use of pointillism is quite plentiful; it is more pronounced in the areas outside of the structure.

It is quite obvious that Insley felt his work as a potential architect would be more appreciated on canvas instead of rolled away on a blueprint. After finding this piece, I decided to dig around some to find the real meaning behind his work. The artist described his own interests as having “very little to do with advanced planning theories of the present” and no relation really at all to the “utopias of the future, but rather with the dark cities of mythology, which exist outside of normal times in some strange location of extremity.”

Insley’s monolithic project, ONECITY, took around forty years of his time, starting in the 1950s. His Building 36 has been on display at the North Carolina Museum of Art.

The idea behind ONECITY was to have the United States encompass “one city” that spread from the Rocky Mountains to the Mississippi and would be the home of 400 million people. The city was composed of 14,000 city-square buildings, each two and a half miles wide and each containing 100 rooms. The grandiose structure is designed to divide the “day people,” or normals, and the “night people,” aka weirdos, between upper and lower sections, respectively.

Insley’s contemporary, seemingly endless lines and points are truly hypnotizing and bring on a world of wonder.

Will Insley, 1929–2011