L’oscuro mondo di Tsutomu Nihei, cyberpunk e architettura attraverso le tecniche grafiche e i caratteri stilistici del manga contemporaneo

The paper examines the work of Tsutomu Nihei, focusing on the concept of representation of Architecture conceived as a narrative media. Nihei, architect as well as recognized artist, develops architectural scenarios within his works capable of generating complex narrative environments through a representation of hyper-urban spaces in which human characters, although always well characterized, are reduced to explorers, while the scenarios reveal themselves as the true protagonists of the narrative, acquiring a distinctive role and profile in the story. Exploiting the multimodal nature of manga and the potential of visual architecture to build complex narrative structures, Nihei tells of cities and megastructures that embody a deeply distorted and apparently contradictory vision with respect to any design logic, he tells of a future loss of knowledge and rationality that implies a lack of any form of regulation and norms. The city, becoming an extreme representation of the most widespread cyberpunk topic, grows in chaos and does so at a ‘natural’ rhythm not unlike a living organism. The implications with the utopias of the 1960s, the Solerian Arcologies, Japanese Metabolism, and the post-apocalyptic fantasy cinematic scenarios can be seen in full in his first manga BLAME!, published monthly between 1998 and 2003 for 66 issues (called Logs), then collected in 10 volumes (tankōbon).