Visionary architecture is a design that only exists on paper or displays idealistic or impractical qualities. The term originated from an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in 1960.Walker, John. "Visionary Architecture". Glossary of Art, Architecture & Design Since 1945, 3rd. ed. G.K. Hall, 1992. Retrieved 19 January 2012. Original retried from Wayback Machine, September 26, 2022. Visionary architects are also known as paper architects because their improbable works exist only as drawings, collages, or models. Their designs show unique, creative concepts that are unrealistic or impossible except in the design environment.
Traditionally, the term visionary refers to a person who has visions or sees things that do not exist in the real world, such as a saint or someone who is mentally unbalanced. Thus, visionary architecture as a label is somewhat pejorative and has been used to marginalize paper architects from the mainstream. However, an article in Forbes noted, "Whereas ordinary architecture literally shapes the way in which we live, unrealized plans and models provide infrastructure for our collective imagination. They are meeting places for conversation."
Visionary architecture was discussed and celebrated at the Architecture of Disbelief symposium at Cornell University in 2008. Prominent modern and pre-modern visionary architects include Etienne-Louis Boullée, Peter Eisenman, Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas, Daniel Libeskind, Antonio Sant'Elia, and Lebbeus Woods.Spiller, Neil. Visionary Architecture: Blueprints of the Modern Imagination. Thames & Hudson, 2008.
History and early works
During the Renaissance, building styles evolved rapidly because of the introduction of perspective.Harbison, Robert. The Built, the Unbuilt, and the Unbuildable: In Pursuit of Architectural Meaning. Thames and Hudson, 1991 This discovery allowed architects to experiment with imaginary architectural scenes. While many architects wrote on the subject, others articulated their concepts and ideas in their drawings. In the 16th century, a Dutch painter and architect, Jan Vredeman de Vries, produced numerous engravings that portrayed new forms of architecture.Burden, Ernest E. Visionary Architecture: Unbuilt Works of the Imagination. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1999. His architectural designs were pure fantasy and imagination—and avant-garde architectural spaces.
Most architects imagine, see, and define buildings by fabricating models that can be scaled up and down, turning abstract architectural sketches into solid three-dimensional buildings. When turned into scaled models, visionary designs were considered utopian and fantastic.The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin; Vol. 26, No. 8, April 1968, page 308. Rather than bringing the building into existence, visionary architects use scale models to make the building speak through a sense of fantasy and symbolic meanings.
Some visionary architects skipped the model process entirely, believing that drawing is "the highest form and clearest expression of architecture." Giovanni Battista Piranesi was one of the greatest printmakers of the 18th century. Piranesi made prints of his architectural drawings that show his mastery of imagined spaces. Piranesi's drawings are visionary architecture because they included unique and intricate details that were only achievable in drawings and would be lost in translation to physical structures. For example, his Carceri d'invenzione or Imaginary Prisons from 1745 depicts labyrinthine monumental spaces and mysterious machines.
Visionary architecture of the 18th century centered around projects of immense size that "defied both man's comprehension and his building techniques."Collins, George R. "The Visionary Tradition in Architecture." The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin; Vol. 26, No. 8, April 1968, page 311-312 Claude Nicolas Ledoux is known for his utopian designs, including the City of Chaux around the Royal Saltworks at Arc-et-Senans.Vidler, Anthony (1990). Claude-Nicolas Ledoux: Architecture and Social Reform at the End of the Ancien Régime. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Ledoux developed an entire master plan for Chaux, along with architectural drawings, elevations, and sections of various individual buildings. Ledoux also designed a tube-shaped house for the director of the waterworks by the Loire river, .
Jean-Jacques Lequeu is one of the more eccentric and shocking of the early visionary architects. After the French Revolution ended his chance to become a palace architect, he worked as a civil servant, cartographer, surveyor, and draftsman. However, he spent most of his time preparing an unpublished treatise, Architecture Civile, which features ornaments, fragments of architectural drawings, and a series of fanciful architectural designs. These designs typically show an elevation or section of a building but rarely an entire design.Philippe Duboy. Lequeu: An Architectural Enigma. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 1986. One of his visionary designs was a stable shaped like a cow.
Étienne-Louis Boullée was an 18th-century visionary neo-classical architect. He was also an influential architectural theorist because he taught at the École Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées and elsewhere for fifty years. Later in his career, Boullée's designs showed an abstraction of geometric forms, removing all unnecessary ornamentation and inflating geometric shapes to a huge scale. In his La Théorie Des Corps, he discussed the properties of geometric forms such as the cube, cylinder, pyramid, and sphere and their effect on the senses. He believed the sphere was the "ideal form".
The early motion picture industry impacted architecture, especially the films Metropolis and Just Imagine, with their elaborate, imaginative, and futuristic architectural sets. Hugh Ferriss is one visionary architect who was influenced by Hollywood. He included sixty of his drawings in his 1929 book The Metropolis of Tomorrow. Ferriss divided his book into three sections: Cities of Today, Projected Trends, and An Imaginary Metropolis. In the third section, he predicts a city with tall, looming skyscrapers and bridge dwellings that were impossible to build at the time.
In the 20th century, visionary architects surfaced in repressed societies where young architects had little hope of realizing their designs. Early 20th-century Visionary architecture is divided into three main movements: German expressionism, Italian futurism, and Russian constructivism.Collins, George R. "The Visionary Tradition in Architecture." The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin; Vol. 26, No. 8, April 1968, page 313-316 The Germans turned to visionary paper architecture after World War I. One example is the Bruno Taut design for the Cosmic Carousel in 1920, a spherical structure with radar-like propellers. Antonio Sant'Elia was an influencer of the futurism movement in Italy; although most of his work was on paper and was never built. He designed mountainous buildings with bridges and towers connecting spaces.
Russian constructivism also emerged after World War I, and leaned toward "openwork, pavilion-like structures with strident placards and public-address systems." Russian constructivist designs relate to 18th-century visionary architectural designs in "the overt symbolism of their various elements" and a tendency toward immense buildings. One outstanding example of this style is the Vesnin brothers' design for the Palace of the Soviets, with its immense size and mechanization through projections at each level. Another example, also by the Vesnin brothers, was the proposed building for Pravda covered in signboards and news communication instruments. In addition, Vladimir Tatlin designed a monument for the Third International or Communist International, a tall rotating spiral that wraps around Vera Mukhina’s Monument to Worker and Farmer. Tatlin's design recalled the metaphor for the Russian Revolution as a spiral.
In 1960, Arthur Drexler curated an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City that showcased the designs of visionary architects. Drexler not only gave a name to visionary architecture, but he also called attention to the importance of this work. He organized the exhibit based on three themes: geometry, mountains and caves, and roads or bridges. The exhibition included architectural drawings of Le Corbusier, Louis Kahn, William Katavolos, Frederick John Kiesler, Hans Poelzig, Paolo Soleri, and Michael Webb.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art hosted the "Visionary Architects" exhibit in 1968. Jean Adhemar and J. C. Lemagny of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris, curated this exhibit. It included 147 architectural drawings of late 18th-century French architects who "rebelled against the traditional ideas of their contemporaries."
Post-World War II Visionary architecture expanded after World War II. During this time, visionary architects tended to create designs that either anticipated the future or exaggerated and distorted existing structures.
The Archigram Group
The Archigram Group was a British art collective that explored avant-garde and visionary architecture from 1961 to 1974. It included Warren Chalk, Peter Cook, Dennis Crompton, David Greene, Ron Herron, and Michael Webb.Rosenblatt, Arthur. "The New Visionaries" The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin; Vol. 26, No. 8, April 1968, page 324. Their work focused on the future of urban development without the restraint of a client. A visit to Cape Kennedy inspired many of their designs.
One of Archigram's most outlandish designs was Cook's Plug-In City from 1964. Cook envisioned moveable living units or pods easily relocated via communal cranes. The owner could move their pod around the city and plug it into the infrastructure at will. Herron came up with the Walking City, a city that did not have a fixed location because it could easily relocate by moving on its legs. Archigram's work was almost exclusively visionary; its only constructed designs were a swimming pool for Rod Stewart and a playground in Buckinghamshire.
Douglas Darden
After receiving a master's degree from the Harvard School of Design and attending the Parsons School of Design, Douglas Darden began his career by teaching and publishing works of paper architecture.LaMarche, Jean. "Review of The Life and Work of Douglas Darden: A Brief Encomium." Utopian Studies 9, no. 1 (1998): 169-171. . His visionary designs showed what he referred to as narrative architecture—designs inspired by works of literature. One example is his design for Melvilla, inspired by his love of Moby-Dick by Herman Melville.LaMarche, Jean. "Review of The Life and Work of Douglas Darden: A Brief Encomium." Utopian Studies 9, no. 1 (1998): 162–163 . Because his designs were often executed by working from anti-theses of architectural principles, Darden described his work as exploring the margin or the "underbelly." One of his best-known projects was the 1993 book, Condemned Building: An Architect's Pre-Text.
Peter Eisenman
Peter Eisenman is a deconstructivist theorist who believes that architecture should be disharmonious or even nonfunctional because this would "make people think rather than feel". He called his work "cardboard architecture" and once said, "I would never live in anything I design." He designed a series of experimental houses—several that were built—that showed the reality behind his statement. For example, House IV had a column that abutted the dining table and it was impossible to fit a double bed in the main bedroom because a glass strip ran through the center of the room.
His most ambitious design was the City of Culture in Santiago de Compostela, a huge cultural complex that echoes the forms of the nearby mountains, appearing to roll up from the landscape. Another project incorporating his visionary, deconstructivist style is the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, Germany.
Hermann Finsterlin