Architecture and Utopia

This fascinating little book (4 by 6 inches) begins by asking the most basic of are the concepts of architecture and utopia truly irreconcilable? In response, author Franco Borsi, a professor of history and architecture at the University of Florence, examines some famous and obscure examples of fantastic architectural ideas. He covers a wide range of material, from 9th-century illuminated manuscripts depicting paradise in the form of an ideal city, to Renaissance projects in perfect three-point perspective--such as Leonardo da Vinci's plans for a two-stories city--to ideas from modern times. Included are Larent Vaudoyer's 1784 plans for a house in a sphere; Albert Speer's plan for the reconstruction of Berlin based on Hitler's ideas; Frank Lloyd Wright's drawings and 1935 model for his visionary city-garden, Broadacre City; R. Buckminster Fuller's 1950s project for a rotunda dome over Manhattan; and drawings for the sets of Fritz Lang's seminal 1926 film, Metropolis.