Imaginary Cities
Influx Press
Pb, 560pp, illus, £12.99, ISBN 9780992765590
FORTEAN TIMES BOOKSHOP PRICE £11.69
What happens when we build our dreams? Darren Anderson shows how over-reaching visions led to the micro-managed dystopias of the 20th century and the palimpsest cities of today – impossible unbuilt structures live on in those that became reality. There are no pictures, and few footnotes, but it’s a page-turner, and there’s always Google.
We whizz from Xanadu to Gotham City via Jetsons futurism – you can still see it in air-traffic control towers and suburban churches. We meet many of the usual suspects: John Martin, Lovecraft, Boullée, Le Corbusier, even our old friend the “parrot who was the last speaker of a lost language”, encountered on a quest for Eldorado.
Why think small? “Ziggurats, Gothic crags, proto-space age and proto-brutalist monoliths” were proposed as London’s unbuilt Eiffel Tower. Adolf Loos forbade all ornament. Leon Trotsky aimed to perfect mankind. Bruno Taut saw the entire Alps as a “radiant city of glass”, and yearned to “unite humanity through architecture in peace”, his crystalline structure replicating until it covered the Earth.
But makers, not dreamers, reached the future first. Corb stole from – sorry, “was influenced by” – ships and grain silos; Buckminster Fuller nicked ideas
62 from “automobile chassis, ship rigging and bicycle design”. The cramped Frankfurt galley kitchen was modelled on train buffets.
There was a common urge to tidy humanity away: house everybody in termite mounds, and destroy any trace of the past. Personal space would go: we’d live in barracks, eat in canteens, share bathrooms, train in the gym, swim in the lido. Sounds like boarding school (or the current crazy vogue for hot desking), except space would be provided for “some procedure which contributes to population increase”, per Russian writer Ilya Ehrenburg.
But without landmarks, how would you know where you were? How would you find your friends? You’d need 3D satnav. And how would the planners persuade the workforce to build their own hell?
In the 1960s we were told that the entire built environment would be flattened and replaced. Modernism was the future for ever and ever. We couldn’t stand in the way of “progress”. Now the uprush of Walkie-Talkies and the social cleansing of the working classes don’t even have this pseudomystical excuse.
The trouble with utopia, says Anderson, is that the perfect life means a total loss of freedom. “The puritan urge to mould and monitor the lives of others is both futile and dangerous. The goal of cleansing and perfecting the human is not just improbable but undesirable.” Utopias don’t just decay into dystopias: lies “collide with illogic – Catholic cosmology, Puritan sexuality, Stalinist economics...”. Let’s hope he’s right.