These Inception-like cityscapes were designed autonomously by a computer program

It’s easy to spot fractal forms in nature, but it’s damn near impossible to create them architecturally. Still, Islamic geometric tilings manage to mimic the recursive patterns to create stunning architectural accents, and it’s these tilings that inspired London-based programmer Daniel Brown’s virtual cities. Brown’s project, Danilton: The Brutal Deluxe, takes brutalist architecture to impossible ends.

To create the incredible structures, Brown fed images of standard apartment buildings into fractal equations, plugged some random numbers into an algorithm, and generated sci-fi cityscapes reminiscent of The Fifth Element.

Plants are absent. Just one or two souls can be seen in the windows, on the balconies. The air is remarkably clean, but we doubt many people would want to call these metal and concrete structures home.

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“I was interested in the idea of ‘creating’ a virtual city, but realized I could never design such an amount of detail,” Brown told Tech Insider. So instead of meticulously crafting the imaginary world, Brown let a computer do it, creating an algorithm that used fractal mathematics to multiply patterns indefinitely.

Brown works part-time at Amaze, a company that develops virtual reality worlds using generative software. So, although Danilton: The Brutal Deluxe is for now just a hobby, he noted the importance of designing virtually explorable worlds using code instead of 3D modeling.