Gonzo Green

[Image: Preflooded Wetlands by Liam Young and Darryl Chen].

Unexpectedly apropos of the previous post, Liam Young of Tomorrow's Thoughts Today, together with Darryl Chen, has created a series of quite beautiful images called "Postcards from a Green Future" – one of which, seen above, uses the Maunsell Sea Forts as a gantried foundation for suburban anti-flood design in an idyllic southeast England.

The entire suite of images is almost farcically green – it's sustainability redone as Grand Guignol. These speculative scenes of "a green future" show us an over-the-top, solar-powered utopia of detached single-family houses and wind turbines, woven together with light rail and renewable energy technologies; it's an Eden of sprawl spreading out into London's most distant scattered cityscape.

[Image: Waste and Biogas and Permacultural Hinterland by Liam Young and Darryl Chen].

But the images also betray an interest in the murky borders between the synthetic and the geological, the organic and the mass-produced. What if those verdant fields of green out there are actually cloned and genetically-modified? What if that well-trimmed nature is simply an exhibition on display?

[Image: Primordial Garden Sanctuary and Incarceration Tower by Liam Young and Darryl Chen].

You can read about the entire project in new four-part series of blog posts over at Tomorrow's Thoughts Today – just go to the righthand column ("Slow Thoughts") and keep scrolling down...