Future Cities
Featured Project: Montsechia
MLL ATELIER designs Future Cities that explore how architecture and technology can harmonize to shape visionary worlds. Each cityscape is a narrative environment — rich with cultural logic, spatial emotion, and speculative innovation. Whether for design conceptualization or sci-fi cinema, this approach blends beauty with plausibility to inspire new ways of living, building, and imagining the future.
Montsechia:
First City On Mars
The Montsechia: Adaptive Sensory City on Mars project pioneers urban design from a completely new lens. This concept design for the first city on Mars sets forth a vision for a city that blossoms like a flower to help humans thrive even in Mars’ extreme atmosphere. This futurological design project seeks not only a first vision of what human urbanization from zero to one million in population would become on Mars, but it also serves as case study by which to reverse-engineer lessons from this first Martian city to guide the evolutionary urbanization of cities on Earth to adaptively optimize for sustainability and thrivability.
Click above to play this visionary film.
Concept Ideation Sketching Process
This Concept Ideation Sketching Process begins with exploratory drawings that translate abstract ideas into preliminary visual form — capturing atmosphere, function, and narrative through gesture, light, and spatial rhythm. These sketches are not just studies of form, but tools for discovering the soul of a place. For animated films like Montsechia: The First City on Mars, this process becomes the foundation for visual storytelling — allowing the city’s identity, symbolism, and technological spirit to emerge organically before it evolves into cinematic motion.
Maria Lorena Lehman has received the above awards and has been seen in the following publications:
