That image is OMA’s proposal the Hamburg Science Center. And I think it perfects a strain of architecture I’ve been noticing lately: Sci-Fi Brutalism. Namely, it’s the highly formal, Brutalist architecture of the 1950s-1970s, but updated with a post-utopian (post-apocalyptic?) feel—these are buildings worthy of Bladerunner. But don’t take my word for it. Check out the backstory…

What originally hooked me on OMA’s work was their early collage aesthetic—which leaned heavily on the collage drawings of Mies Van Der Rohe. And for a while there—maybe in the late 1990s—it looked like OMA would towards a surface-heavy, texture-based architecture, maybe a little like Herzog & De Mueron—maybe even take it to another blistering extreme. I could never square that with what they eventually started turning out, in the past 10 years. But really, what it feels like now is a tribute tour of the International style, as it developed from the 1920’s to the 1970’s. To wit:

The beginning of it all: A drawing of the 1921 Berlin-Mitte project by Mies Van Der Rohe:

Mies inspired a whole school of followers, some of who eventually developed into practitioners of “Brutalism” (granted, a gross over-simplification). Here’s a Brutalist classic: A housing complex in Montreal by Moshe Safdie:

But if you crossed that development back again with Mies’s original sense of geometry and composition, you might get these images from an OMA tower proposal for Paris:

Or you might get this tower in Russia:

Or perhaps the Museum Plaza, done by REX (formerly OMA NYC):

Or, if you stripped things back down and kept the right angles in check, maybe you’d get this tower project in Mexico City: