Poll Does the Discovery look good?
- Thread starter uniderth
- Start date
you mean phat?
My main problem with the design is simply, that it is brutalistic. That is the design of sociopathic cultures like communistic/nationalistic dictatorships. This "Discovery" fits to cultures like the former Soviet Union, the Third Reich or North Korea. But not to a humanistic Starfleet, which uses elegant ship designs to represent its culture.
The "Discovery" is a ship of a culture which also supports architecture like this:
But that's not Starfleet/UFP.
The "Discovery" is a ship of a culture which also supports architecture like this:
But that's not Starfleet/UFP.
That's...reading an awful lot into a ship design of questionable aesthetic appeal.
Plus those buildings above are pretty cool!
Production design is a story telling device. Those who design props, costumes and make up, say: "I am a story teller." When you see the 1701-D, the set design, the LCARS design, you know what this show is about. Every little design element of a TV show and film is about telling the story and has the only purpose to support the story telling without using words but visual keys to the audience. What story does the Discovery design tell? If it is a positive story, it fails completly flat.
Example read about this topic:
http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/production-design-for-screen-9781472580672/
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It's one thing to think that it doesn't convey the spirit of Trek to you...quite another to see Stalin and Hitler in it.
These are the voyages of the S.S.U. Diskoveritsiye, her five year plan, to bring socialist architectural principles to the interstellar proletariat.
"Brutalism" is actually quite commonplace in Western architecture and design -- the belief that it's somehow totalitarian in nature is just ignorant -- and also I don't think that ship design is an example of it. (If there's anything the Discovery reminds me of it's Art Deco art and design and of the Futurist movement -- which influenced that and many other styles -- and its emphasis on speed, power and technology. But it's more than a bit premature to go trying to dissect its "story" since we don't have the finalized design.)
Plenty of brutalist architecture here in the UK, including my city.
I'm not convinced the Discovery was even inspired by brutalism either - it's just modernism.
I.E. the Salk Institute building, designed by Louis Kahn, in California - very futuristic.
I'm not convinced the Discovery was even inspired by brutalism either - it's just modernism.
I.E. the Salk Institute building, designed by Louis Kahn, in California - very futuristic.
Oh yes, sexy beast. Something about thst ship just checks so many boxes for me.
It's hard to comment on the ships style when it is a mish-mash of others. A traditional round saucer mated via an exceptionally thin neck to an odd and painfully old fashioned hull all finished off with some almost modern style curvy nacelles but seemingly packaging old components... It's a mess.
Well, let's be reasonable here: Fascist architecture had quite a distinctive look. Hell, I like a lot of fascist italian architecture from the Mussolini era. That doesn't mean the show therefore must be fascist in it's ideology as well. But there's nothing wrong with pointing the similarities out.
And I have to agree: The Discovery looks quite brutal at the moment. It's not the many long and flat lines that are the problem (IMO), but the rather 'brute' and clunky details and design elements. It's not a coincidence many people pointed out the similarity to "klingon" designs in the ship.
I'm not a designer, but even I see the similarities to brutalist architecture. There's nothing necessarily wrong with that (Star Wars pretty much runs on fascist-era design elements, and still conveys rather a message about individuality), but even I would prefer the Discovery to be redesigned to be a bit more graceful and elegant.
It's a mutt built from scrap, fitting my thoughts about its likely story as a character.
But there are "crews," so which ship have we seen? A mercenary ship? A stolen ship? A starfleet ship? Something 100 years old from the starship junkyard, restored for a purpose by a collapsed Federation with few resources? It seems to me a lot of people are still too solidly in the mode of thinking one main shiny new ship per show. It could be any one of several in an ensemble, and we were shown the fugly one crewed by antagonists. There's no limit to how we could be getting trolled by that teaser.
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That's an interesting thought that hadn't quite occurred to me...a rebuilt starship. Maybe NCC-1031 was just the registry of the saucer they happened to get ahold of. (Or does it appear somewhere on the seondary hull?)
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