Last year, architecture students Pascal Bronner and Thomas Hillier decided they would take their degrees and, making like their student brethren, many of which have been pouring hours of work into outrageous walking cities or school bus mobile homes, wander off the familiar architecture trajectory. They founded London-based FleaFollyArchitects, a group of "spatial-storytellers who use narrative to explore, discover and invent unique architectural propositions, translating them into fantastical spaces that surround us." What's that mean? Well, take, for instance, their Grimm City Compilation, which harnesses the darkness and the near-apocalyptic beauty of the folklore gleaned and published by Jacob and Willhelm Grimm. Here they translate that fairytale bleakness into a built environment that's complex and spindly, with symbols of domesticity (tiny ovens, for example, harken to Hansel and Gretel) mixed with emblems of industriousness, like test tubes, mechanized wheels, and wire zeppelins.
Bronner and HIllier stayed away from depicting actual scenes—so do not search for Repunzel or Snow White—but rather attempted to capture the mood of the Grimm brothers' boy of work as a whole. As the architects write:
Grimm City Compilation from FleaFollyArchitects on Vimeo.
· Grimm City Compilation [Vimeo]
· Building a Dark City from Grimm's Fairy Tales [Gizmodo]
· All Student Projects posts [Curbed National]