The lecture will look at linear perspective and distant horizons in the 1909 urban plan for Chicago and Le Corbusier’s Cité radieuse; people in nature in the cities of Ebenezer Howard and Frank Lloyd Wright; absurdist scale and laughter and tears in the projects by Superstudio and Archizoom.
Big utopian projects by the architects of the twentieth century are usually evaluated as something that could actually be built. Would it be better to live in a garden city or a city of skyscrapers?
Today such questions are no longer pertinent since none of the projects in question have been built according to the architect’s plan. What if instead we looked at them as if they were works of art that suggested a particular perspective on our world—as if they were particular genres of hoping and dreaming?
