New Building, New Bills, originally uploaded by bryanboyer.
Bryan Boyer’s master of architecture thesis project blew me away when I came across it today.
It’s called “Reclaiming Utopia” – an imagined new Capitol for the US government. It seems well-considered and suitably imposing – but the killer part is not the building I think.
For me it’s the almost science-fictional level of world-building touches around his project of new currency featuring the building, folk art and even commemorative plates.
Puts you in mind of Paul Verhoven’s ad breaks in RoboCop and Starship Troopers in terms of really convincing peripheral visions of a world.
It puts you in a future-fictional America where something or someone has caused and completed a reboot of the Union’s sacred symbols.
Petafloptimism 
Glad you enjoyed it, Matt! One thing to clear up, though… Reclaiming Utopia was actually the title of my girlfriend’s thesis. Yusun Kwon, along with five other students, produced Reclaiming Utopia as a study on the city of Nairobi under the direction of Herzog & de Meuron at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.