Watch this Japanese city turn into a very literal concrete jungle

Talk about organic forms in architecture and you tend to talk about curves – Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Zaha Hadid’s Galaxy Soho centre in Beijing. You’re probably not referring to about buildings that branch uncontrollably over the city like malignant growths.

Tokyo-based artist AUJIK has envisioned a version of Osaka full of these sorts of buildings. The results are beautiful in an oh-god-why-did-we-lace-plutonium-into-the-walls-of-our-offices kind-of way.

In a short film titled Spatial Bodies, AUJIK has used drone footage, Google Maps and 3D rendering to create surreal landscapes in which buildings grow outwards like freshly watered vines.

“Spatial Bodies depicts the urban landscape and architectural bodies as an autonomous living and self-replicating organism,” AIJIK told Vice’s The Creators Project. “Domesticated and cultivated only by its own nature. A vast concrete vegetation, oscillating between order and chaos.”[gallery:3]

Because of Tokyo’s laws against filming with drones, AUJIK shot the footage in Osaka, close to Japan’s tallest skyscraper – Abeno Harukas. From there he made models for the buildings, using textures created with the help of Google Maps and the software 3D Studio Max.

AUJIK writes that Spatial Bodies was inspired by the video game Katamari Damacy, Italian futurism and Taiwanese architect Lee Guō’s ideas about the multiplicity of architectural clusters. He hopes that the methods used in his video will one day be possible in real time using augmented reality.

Walking down the street and seeing the city propagate above your head may seem like a headache waiting to happen, but it offers a glimpse into the ways artists and hackers could use augmented reality to distort and subvert the way we see our cities. AUJIK has previously touched on these ideas with his Polygon Graffiti project, which imagines the use of new technology to bring hallucinogenic sculptures into a real world.

Watch the full video below.