Impossible Worlds

This book explores the ways in which real buildings have resulted from visionary ideas, and assesses the extent to which these buildings have changed the way people live. In three sections, the editors Stephen Coates and Alex Stetter have arranged key texts together with a selection of projects which illustrate the ideas, and the built realities which followed on from them.In the first part, Hilary French explores the development of communitarian ideas, and the ways in which utopian thinking has generated new ideas for housing. The second section, with a major text by Joe Kerr, argues that the supposedly ideal housing devised by the proponents of Garden Cities has been Disneyfied and sold to wealthy Americans in a bizarre subversion of the American Dream. In the third section, Francois Penz and Maureen Thomas explain the influence of film on the development of visionary architecture, arguing that unbuilt projects have been just as important as those realised in three dimensions.