In humanities right now we are doing a unit on revolutions. We are making our metaphor machines which I will explain in a post soon. The metaphor machines, needs done in a steampunk aesthetic. To help us understand steampunk a little better we are doing a novel study on the Leviathan by: Scott Westerfeld.

For this post we were told to create an inquiry question about the steampunk aesthetic. My question:

How has architecture impacted the steampunk aesthetic?

To answer this question we need to look at the architecture at the time steampunk conceived and the time it is set in. Steampunk was made in the 1960’s-1970’s and one of the favourite architectural styles at that time was brutalism. Brutalist buildings were massive, minimal and very bold concrete structure that had a very industrial feel.

The steampunk genre is set in the Victorian Era which is also the name of the architectural style of the the time. This style of architecture is usually very ornate and usually made out of wood.

So how I think architecture impacted the steampunk aesthetic is that they took the industrial nature and some of the materials of brutalism from their time and merged it with the ornate styling of the time period that the genre it set in. They also made everything out of metal. They probably didn’t know they were doing this because architecture is everywhere and we interact with it so much that it can impact us in huge ways with out us even knowing.