Skyscrapers With Bioluminescent Mushrooms Growing Out

The arresting move in this image is the composite. Conventional rectangular skyscrapers stand against a night sky. Out of the sides of those skyscrapers — at varying heights, scaled bigger than balconies but smaller than the buildings themselves — bioluminescent mushroom-coral forms have grown, glowing soft white-purple. They aren't structures attached to the buildings. They look more like the buildings have been infected, or hosted, or seeded. At ground level, smaller pink-stemmed mushroom-trees grow between conventional streets and shops. Two moons hang in the sky.

The metaphorical reading is biological-symbiosis. Real lichen forms — like the Cladonia (the 'British Soldier' lichen of Eastern American forests) and the bioluminescent Mycena chlorophos of Brazil — grow as composites of fungi and algae living inside the same body. Coral reefs are similarly composite — the polyp animal, the zooxanthellae algae, the calcium structure they collectively grow. The image's argument seems to be: what if buildings and biological organisms could form similar composites? The skyscraper provides structural mass and water access. The mushroom-coral provides photosynthesis (or its bioluminescent equivalent), waste processing, biological materials.

The pink-stem mushroom-trees at ground level reinforce the reading. They aren't urban planters. They aren't decorative gardens. They've grown up out of the city floor in the same way wild mushrooms grow up after rain. The implication is that this city has, deliberately or accidentally, become substrate. Whether the human inhabitants planned this is the question the image is willing to leave open. The two moons in the sky are the small reminder that whatever this is, it isn't Earth — but the principle (city as substrate for biology) could conceivably arrive here too, if anyone decided to let it.