Los Angeles 2019: Book Preview
/The following piece is a preview for the new book, Los Angeles 2019: The City of Blade Runner, written by Oliver Carmi. The book is available now on Amazon.
Blade Runner is more than a film, it is a universe.
Inspired by Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, it is a story about humanity. Far from Hollywood’s binary oppositions of good and evil, Blade Runner does not give any answers, rather, it asks questions: what makes us human? In a world environmentally and socially devastated, annihilating capitalistic consumerism reigns uncontested. Things, however, start to change when four Replicants, bioengineered androids, descend on earth, where they have long been ruled illegal, from the Off-world colonies. In the quest to meet their maker, Eldon Tyrell, the most powerful man of Los Angeles 2019, they will face Rick Deckard, a Blade Runner, a cop specifically trained to hunt them down. He, in turn, will face Rachael, a Replicant different from all others. Each character, in his own existential plight, grows conscious of himself and of those around him, contributing to a collective awakening.
The world of Los Angeles 2019, so real and so true, is genuinely designed in all its aspects, it is not simply a proscenium for the story, it is the story. Environmental apocalypse has left behind a world drenched in perpetual darkness and acid rain. Architectural neglect has left behind a world of decaying ruins and explicit patches. And finally, mass extraterrestrial migration has left behind a world of little people. A world, visually, emotionally and intellectually, as authentic as our own.
From a distance, the city appears to be a living hell, forever sprawling in the dark horizon. As in a Dantesque vision, slowly rising up towards the heights of the sky, the spaces become purer, cleaner, emptier, in what seems a heavenly ascent. So as Virgilio guided Dante from the depths of hell, to the heights of heaven, passing through purgatory, the book acts as a guide in this similar journey, from the apparently infernal underworld, to the apparently sacred over-world, passing through the “land” in-between.
However, only after a closer look, in the crevices of the textured reality that Los Angeles 2019 really is, do we realize that everything is upside down. The gold and white heaven is really an aseptic hell, and the fiery Inferno is simply earth, as it has always been, alive, delirious, chaotic. As fallen angels, from the sky above, the Replicants land upon the fiery earth in a desperate search for more life, but all they seem to find is death. However, their mortal descent is not in vain, for their vital force has shaken the base of the technocratic power and has brought a spark, or better, a drop, of life to the infernal city.
Now more than ever, in a world of violence and fear, can the urban vision of Blade Runner, serve as an insight of our own society, of the direction we are taking, and of the architectural implications that will arise. An architectural and social analysis of the spaces of the city of Blade Runner.
Oliver Carmi is the author of Los Angeles 2019: The City of Blade Runner.