Books
Imagining and Making the World: Reconsidering Architecture and Utopia
Nathaniel Coleman Eds.
This collection is a must for anyone interested in attempts to make the world a better place. Drawing together the work of key scholars in the multi-disciplinary field of utopian studies and leading thinkers in the field of architecture, Nathaniel Coleman argues for a symbiotic relationship between utopia and architecture. (Lucy Sargisson, University of Nottingham) The great variety of work considered here - from Ildefons Cerda's visionary but very successfully realized Barcelona plan to Patrick Geddes's methods for the urban planner - suggests a fresh and enormously varied panorama of realistic thinking about city form. Perhaps the buildings of the future may be the product of a new dialogue between designer and inhabitant in which the utopian thinking this book so ably advocates will inevitably be an essential factor. (Joseph Rykwert, University of Pennsylvania) A fine collection of essays that makes an important contribution to the complex and undertheorized relationship between utopianism and architecture. Providing a uniquely cross-disciplinary approach, the essays explore architectural theory and praxis in literary and social utopias, and, vice versa, utopian theory and praxis in architecture. (Nicole Pohl, Oxford Brookes University)