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I'm a bit of an architectural design geek IRL, and would love to eventually build some dioramas based on 'standard' Imperial design. There is not a lot of official GW art that I can find for references. A lot of what is available for the smaller scale.
Your input would be greatly appreciated in architectural design elements I may have overlooked.

From what I can tell, each world is a bit different, however there are themes that are kept throughout the Imperium.

Civilian and governmental architecture:
The design is overwhelmingly High Gothic with added steam-punk inspired elements. Iconography relating to religion and death is everywhere ( even if it's not practical ). Hab-blocks seem to be Brutalist in tone, with heavy High Gothic influence, while governmental facilities are designed more towards cathedral style buildings .
More rural areas seem to take on a simpler design, and favoring smaller buildings with less iconography.

Industry:
This area seems to be a drastic change in design. Gothic architecture and iconography is still present, however everything shifts tones to 1940's industrial design mixed with many steam-punk inspired elements. Iconography is toned way down, and metal replaces much of the stone seen elsewhere. The overall layout seems to be semi-organic ( build structures as you need them, wherever ).
Overall it seems like it's very chaotic in the Manufactorum .

Military:
The military likes basic shapes, and complexes seem to be simple Brutalist . Squares, rectangles and right angles seem to dominate military complexes. Iconography seems to be almost totally missing, as the only symbol on most buildings is the Imperial Aquila and the standard of the planet.

Whilst i'm afraid i am not qualified to talk about the intricacies of the architecture itself. What i do reccomend is that you play through or watch someone elses playthrough of the (now, quite reasonably old) "space marine" game.

It's a third person shooter and not technically an official games workshop product, it spends most of its time wandering at human level around imperial civillian buildings and factories.

I know when i was playing through it myself, i caught myself more than once admiring the backgrounds and buildings rather than getting stuck into the fights. The train station is an area that particularly stands out in my mind.

I’d imagine the 30k architecture look more like the STC ruins, and the 40k look more like the current or OOP ruins.

 GeckoDragon wrote:
Whilst i'm afraid i am not qualified to talk about the intricacies of the architecture itself. What i do reccomend is that you play through or watch someone elses playthrough of the (now, quite reasonably old) "space marine" game.

It's a third person shooter and not technically an official games workshop product, it spends most of its time wandering at human level around imperial civillian buildings and factories.

I know when i was playing through it myself, i caught myself more than once admiring the backgrounds and buildings rather than getting stuck into the fights. The train station is an area that particularly stands out in my mind.

I echo this- the Dawn of War games are also excellent for Imperial architecture, especially DoW2. DoW2 nicely shows the differences between sparsely populated, rural worlds and great hive cities. The rural worlds have local architecture, with a few touches of Imperial technology and iconography tying them in to the wider empire. The hive city is full-on gothic awesomness, in a variety of building types. Worth looking at.


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The area of architecture I feel is not adequately explored is hab blocks. There have never been official models for them, so we only really have snippets in artwork (and the Relic games) to go on. So it is somewhat unknown what the default STC hab looks like, how much iconography, how Gothic in style etc.

I'd love to have a hab block kit for the new Sector: Imperialis to settle this question.

I skimmed through a couple let's plays for the Space Marines games ... a lot of the architectural style matches what is available in the official GW codexes and other official books.
THQ designed the games to be a liner corridor shooter with arena shooter elements .
A few areas areas don't seem to visually match the 40K style ( the pipe systems for example ), and I think are placed there just because it was easy to design a video game level around.

I'll look at Dawn of War whenever I have the time

I have watched some LPs of Dawn of War 1, 2 and 3.
1 and 2 do not have a lot of details. They do give some idea how "lightly populated" areas would be arranged, and shows some details of the building design.
DoW 3 shows a lot more building detail and area layout.

I have read a lot of folks think the game is lore breaking ... should I consider the content Relic designed as non-canon, or it is it pretty close to official GW artwork in your opinion ?