Justin Plunkett’s “Con/struct” Series Imagines Future of Urban Sprawl

South African designer Justin Plunkett’s “Con/struct” series has more in common with the digitally-fabricated renderings of speculative architecture than documentary photography, but it illustrates an eerie collision of both formats. The images are built from a combination of photography, 3D modeling and substantial post-production editing, to form street-level perspectives of futuristic urban fantasies.

The logic of unplanned settlements and slum housing, of conglomerated building materials and integrative global advertisements, suggests both snapshots from developing nations and storyboard sketches from films like Blade Runner or A.I. Renderings of the buildings take on a glossy veneer, as if formed from the distorted aggregate imagery of satellite photography, coated in a layer of post-production vaseline. “Con/struct” then depicts both the symptoms and representative methods of contemporary architectural discourses, built upon the scenarios of “man on the street” photography.