The Mountain City - Establishing a Direction

Preparation

As I mentioned at the end of my previous post, I was tasked with coming up with five different mountain city concepts to present to Josh so that we could establish a direction to go ahead with. My goal was for these concepts to each be quite different takes on what it could be, within the limits of my brief of a closed off city in a rocky region. I started by making notes in a document so that I had an idea of what each concept was before starting on them:

Aside from deciding on my five design variants, as you can see above, while I was making my notes I had a sudden idea for the surroundings of the city to be a vast maze of rock formations raised by the city founder around his city, rather than a naturally occurring landscape that he selected as the location for his secluded city. I have already done some rough work around this 'red forest' concept and am planning a blog post on it at some point. It also led to a chain of story related ideas that really excited me, including (at last) the catalyst for the clash between the brothers, which causes their downfalls. I was really happy about this, because in my head this has always been the inevitable outcome of their story, but I have never been able to work out the precise thing that would set their fight in motion while distributing the blame evenly between them. Though this isn't necessarily relevant to my MA practical work given that I'm not exactly looking at narrative design, for me it really felt like a moment where the pieces fell into place, since this is a world that I've had in mind for quite a while. These ideas are recorded in the bottom section of the notes above.

Anyway, back to the relevant stuff. With my five concept ideas established, I sought out some relevant references from films, games and concept art. I wanted to look outside of the historical material because I feel I already have pretty strong references there (Petra + Mesopotamian architecture), and I decided that looking at some fictional material would help in developing the fantasy of the concepts.

References from films, games and concept art

The Five Concepts

Concept 1: lone, hollow mountain with gardens outside and gated bridge access

This first concept was mostly a continuation of some of the hollow mountain sketches from my first explorations (previous post), this time with a single bridge crossing the chasm, where multiple gates control access. The city is mostly on the inside of the mountain, with tiered gardens going up its sides, accessed by entries carved into the mountainside. Water falls down from one tier to the next, extending below the main hub of the city, along its single, supporting pillar. 

Concept 2: massive, cylindrical chasm with city carved into its sides, connected by bridges

The idea for a mess of connecting bridges extending downwards was inspired by the city of Zion (The Matrix) and the Lonely Mountain (The hobbit). The city layout is similar to a colony of birds living along a sheer cliff face, and was also inspired by the sinkhole cities from the planet Utapau (Star Wars). At the centre would be a large palace/garden area, which is connected to the rest of the city (inside the cliff faces) by massive bridges that are like highways. This concept pulls away from the mountain city idea in the literal sense that it is no longer a mountain and is instead a hole, but it still incorporates the verticality at the idea's core.

Concept 3: mountain plateau city, combining architecture and crude formations

The vision for concept 3 was to combine the idea of a city placed atop a mountain plateau with the ideas employed in the colour sketch from my previous post (architectural forms [Petra + Ziggurats] extended from natural forms). The base of the mountain has a large Ziggurat-like structure extending from its side. This serves as the city's entrance, leading up through the inside of the mountain and out onto the plateau above. Even up on the plateau, the city is built around a central body of rock, which serves as a podium for some sort of palace.

Concept 4: Cave Lagoon

Concept 4 is more of a cave city, similar to what we often see for things like dwarven kingdoms in media, except with a large lagoon of the creator's water that would act as the city's hub. While this isn't as much of a mountain (although it could be the inside of one), it still successfully captures the closed off, confined feel that I want to capture with this second city, while keeping things rocky themed (obviously). 

Concept 5: 'Amphitheatre' shaped city

With concept 5 I thought it would be interesting to structure the city along the side of a curved cliff so that it looks down on some key area such as a stage, almost like the tiered seating of a theatre but on a massive scale. I went with a semi-cylindrical 'audience' layout, just like many amphitheatres of the ancient world. At the top is the king's palace, which again follows the architectural norms of Mesopotamian ziggurats. In this concept, the city has gardens/farmland just beyond its cliff walls, since this area is still completely shielded by the terrain around the city.

Outcome

After showing Josh the concepts, he recommended that I should continue on with concept 2, which I was glad about because I was secretly hoping he would like that one - my mind had started to run wild with its possibilities while I was doing these sketches. Josh particularly liked its potential for 'an infinite depth/scale' because this best reflected the great power with which these cities are created. This somewhat changed my outlook on the mountain city, since until then I had sort of subconsciously assumed that it would be considerably smaller in scale than the oasis city, in accordance with its withdrawn/secluded nature. I think you can see evidence of this mindset pretty clearly in a few of my concepts, especially 4 and 5. I now realised that as long as the city's surroundings did the job of isolating it from the rest of the world, the city itself could be as massive in scale as I wanted, in order to invoke the same sense of wonder/impossibility as the oasis city, without impacting its inward-looking identity. 

Next Steps

My task now that I have a macro-level understanding of the mountain city's structure, is to delve into the micro elements that make it up. In future blog posts I will be considering the mountain city's architectural style as a way to further emphasise the dichotomy of the two cities. Practically speaking, this means that I will be designing and producing concepts that provide the necessary information for a modeller to actually build it. As a side note, I have recently finalised this term's research essay, and one thing that was made abundantly clear by my conversations with professional concept artists was that I should be focusing more on iterative design work than flashy, final pieces, so upcoming posts will be heavily focused on this area. I have decided that I will be starting by designing the district entrances/gateways that are built into the cliff faces all around the city, as I feel these will be a good place to begin for the purpose of feeling out the city's architectural identity.