Sky Cities: Futures in Flux
A solo exhibition by Elgin Rust
Front Gallery: 15.10.26 - 26.11.26
In 2018, during my travels in Ghana, I became captivated by the architecture that surrounded me. The buildings I encountered existed in a state of flux; some were simultaneously under construction and nearing completion, while also showing signs of decay. This interplay of past, present, and future seemed to converge in a single moment, prompting me to reflect on the future of architecture. What will the spaces we inhabit look like in 2065? As climate change increasingly threatens the places we inhabit, I began to imagine what architecture might become in the future: Sky Cities.
Drawing on my archive of architectural photographs, I began experimenting with these images on my phone, envisioning new forms of floating buildings as spacecraft. The allure of these imaginative constructs led me to develop them further using digital software, converting the results into digital negatives of fictional floating architecture. I intentionally incorporated flaws and glitches into my designs, embracing these imperfections as markers of human experience. This approach introduces a sense of vulnerability to the work, transforming each piece into a visual manifestation of architecture that drifts and floats in the atmosphere. Collectively, these creations form what I call Sky Cities.
The idea of imagining cities suspended above the ground has a history within speculative architecture and contemporary art, from the visionary structures of Archigram to Tomás Saraceno's Cloud Cities. My Sky Cities emerge from a related impulse, but are rooted in the architectural realities I encountered in Ghana and through my travels over the past eight years.
I began experimenting with the cyanotype printing process to translate my digital images into physical form. Developed in 1842 by Sir John F. W. Herschel, this technique was initially used for reproducing mathematical tables and technical drawings, and later became closely associated with architectural blueprints.
The process itself is entirely hands-on: coating paper or fabric with light-sensitive chemistry, exposing it to sunlight, and washing it by hand to fix the image. Nothing about it is instant. The image does not simply appear; rather, it manifests slowly, over time, through direct physical labour and exposure to natural light. This durational, unmediated way of working stands in deliberate tension with the digital origins of the imagery, grounding a speculative, screen-born architecture in a process that is unhurried, tactile, and bound to the rhythms of the sun and the hand.
The deliberate choice of the cyanotype process infuses my prints with a temporal dimension, positioning them as time machines that hover between past, present, and future. The digitally generated fictional skyscapes propel the images toward an imagined future, while the cyanotype process, which results in shades of blue, grey, or sepia, draws them back into history. These prints act as bridges in time between memory and speculation. These light-sensitive bridges leave the image vulnerable to its environment, giving the work a material instability that mirrors the unstable futures it depicts.
I retained the square format I first used to explore these past-future architectures as a nod to the Instagram square for the works on paper, while allowing the prints to expand beyond that format for the floating Sky City on fabric.
Ultimately, Sky Cities asks us to look at the future through the architecture of the present. The cities we imagine are shaped by the world we know, the materials we discard, the environments we alter, and the futures we choose to believe are possible.
There is extraordinary beauty in the world we have inherited. These works ask what it would mean to recognise that beauty before it becomes something we can only imagine.
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