Utopia," Abraham Ortelius
These imagined societies can never exist. Still, the concept of a utopia has been very influential in the arts, especially for architects. At the beginning of the 20th century, the world was facing the devastation and destruction wrought by World War I. In architecture, the modernist movement was beginning to take shape, and architects believed that their buildings could help solve the world's problems. With new materials like glass, iron, and steel made available by the Industrial Revolution, modernist architects took to their drafting tables to imagine entirely new cities that supported utopian ideals and were devoid of the corrupted bourgeois sentiments often blamed for many of society's dilemmas.
Some utopian visions focused on new technology, others on open, untouched landscapes, and still others were based on new social orders, but all were united under radically avant-garde and cutting-edge architecture. While each architect's ideals varied, they all held one thing in common: they could never be built. Only able to exist in theory—the basis of a utopia—the architecture in the following utopian visions is carefully planned and highly systematic. Each detail is included to help reach a larger goal. While these visions suffered from a megalomaniacal belief that one person's ideas could change an entire society, each architects' plans are admirable in their experimental efforts. For the first part of our utopian architecture series, we take a look at five highly influential plans that fall under a modernist mindset. Read through to see these aspirational visions that never took off.
The Futurists and the Machine