Visionary Architecture

Étienne-Louis Boullée, in Visionary Architects: Boullee, Ledoux, Lequeu.



Jean-Jacques Lequeu.

Lequeu was also something of a pornographer, so exercise caution when looking for his images online. (Cue frantic searching for "lequeu prints".)

Brodsky and Utkin:



The one below doesn't enlarge on clicking, but the rest do:

Is it me, or do most of those look somewhat maniacal?

Reminds me of the recent Le Corbusier book I picked up, Towards a new architecture. Chilling, man.

>do most of those look somewhat maniacal?

L'enfer, c'est l'architetture!

I remember seeing this somewhere as a child. It left quite an impression on me (click to see it larger.)



Archizoom's Aerodynamic City, 1969

Also from the 60s, Ron Herron's Walking City:



An architectural illustrator called Joe Robson made a model in homage:

Lebbeus Woods (click to enlarge the top three):

Lower Manhattan:



Havana:                                                                           Aeroliving Lab:



Berlin Free-Zone 3-2:

That Archizoom concept reminds me of vertical cell culture racks.

Walking city--yeah right. Look at those puny little legs on the creature. What material were they supposed to be made of--turbo-titanium from Krypton?

Havana--hmmmm. Someone else enjoys watching copulating insects.

What's going on in Berlin Free-Zone, pure decoration, or...? What are those coloured... railings?

Lower Manhattan: I'm afraid the reality's going in different direction, with the island eventually completely submerged.

You know, it strikes me that, as I spent most of my life in coastal cities (or sub-coastal, in the case of New Orleans), ALL the places most dear and near to my heart are slated for destruction in foreseeable future (some, like Venice, possibly within my lifetime).

If only I could come up with a good reason to move to Lhasa...

>What material were they supposed to be made of--turbo-titanium from Krypton?

Comparing sizes, they seem more like buildings than cities, so it's plausible they'd work more like suspension springs. A+ for effort, according to architects in any case.

>Lower Manhattan: I'm afraid the reality's going in different direction, with the island eventually completely submerged.

Excerpted from a recent interview with Woods:

I think the main thought I had, in speculating on the future of New York, was that, in the past, a lot of discussions had been about New York being the biggest, the greatest, the best – but that all had to do with the size of the city. You know, the size of the skyscrapers, the size of the culture, the population. So I commented in the article about Le Corbusier’s infamous remark that your skyscrapers are too small. Of course, New York dwellers thought he meant, oh, they’re not tall enough – but what he was referring to was that they were too small in their ground plan. His idea of the Radiant City and the Ideal City – this was in the early 30s – was based on very large footprints of buildings, separated by great distances, and, in between the buildings in his vision, were forests, parks, and so forth. But in New York everything was cramped together because the buildings occupied such a limited ground area. So Le Corbusier was totally misunderstood by New Yorkers who thought, oh, our buildings aren’t tall enough – we’ve got to go higher! Of course, he wasn’t interested at all in their height – more in their plan relationship. Remember, he’s the guy who said, the plan is the generator.

So I was speculating on the future of the city and I said, well, obviously, compared to present and future cities, New York is not going to be able to compete in terms of size anymore. It used to be a large city, but now it’s a small city compared with São Paulo, Mexico City, Kuala Lumpur, or almost any Asian city of any size. So I said maybe New York can establish a new kind of scale – and the scale I was interested in was the scale of the city to the Earth, to the planet. I made the drawing as a demonstration of the fact that Manhattan exists, with its towers and skyscrapers, because it sits on a rock – on a granite base. You can put all this weight in a very small area because Manhattan sits on the Earth. Let’s not forget that buildings sit on the Earth.

I wanted to suggest that maybe lower Manhattan – not lower downtown, but lower in the sense of below the city – could form a new relationship with the planet. So, in the drawing, you see that the East River and the Hudson are both dammed. They’re purposefully drained, as it were. The underground – or lower Manhattan – is revealed, and, in the drawing, there are suggestions of inhabitation in that lower region.

So it was a romantic idea – and the drawing is very conceptual in that sense.

But the exposure of the rock base, or the underground condition of the city, completely changes the scale relationship between the city and its environment. It’s peeling back the surface to see what the planetary reality is. And the new scale relationship is not about huge blockbuster buildings; it’s not about towers and skyscrapers. It’s about the relationship of the relatively small human scratchings on the surface of the earth compared to the earth itself. I think that comes across in the drawing. It’s not geologically correct, I’m sure, but the idea is there.

There are a couple of other interesting features which I’ll just mention. One is that the only bridge I show is the Brooklyn Bridge. I don’t show the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, for instance. That’s just gone. And I don’t show the Manhattan Bridge or the Williamsburg Bridge, which are the other two bridges on the East River. On the Hudson side, it was interesting, because I looked carefully at the drawings – which I based on an aerial photograph of Manhattan, obviously – and the World Trade Center… something’s going on there. Of course, this was in 1999, and I’m not a prophet and I don’t think that I have any particular telepathic or clairvoyant abilities (laughs), but obviously the World Trade Center has been somehow diminished, and there are things floating in the Hudson next to it. I’m not sure exactly what I had in mind – it was already several years ago – except that some kind of transformation was going to happen there.

Har, damming the Hudson and the East River! Makes you want to keep all architects country miles away from any kind of urban planning...

Flight of fantasy, I know, I know--and nothing else excuses the sheer chuckling stupidity of it. Cities "competing" in size? What competition? Is there a prize for being the biggest city on earth? Manhattan establishing a new "relationship with the planet"? Cute that about the WTC. (Some irreverent friends of mine, with regretful memories of the pre-WTC Manhattan, commented soon after The Event that the skyline had been vastly improved.)

He sounds a right dumbass, I must say. Isn't it a relief when visions remain strictly visionary? Whew.