Visionary architecture

Visionary architecture is a style of building design that exists only on paper or that displays idealistic or impractical qualities. The term originated from an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in 1960. Visionary architects are also called 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, the term visionary architecture is somewhat pejorative and is 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, and Daniel Libeskind, Antonio Sant'Elia, and Lebbeus Woods.

History and early works

During the Renaissance period, the differing building styles evolved and grew rapidly through the introduction of perspective. 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. His architectural designs were pure fantasy and imagination but were also regarded as avant-garde architectural space.

Most architects imagine, see, and define a building through the process of fabricating models. These models are scaled up and down, and bring an architectural design from the abstract sketch to a concrete three-dimensional building. In short, scaling help bring a building into existence. When turned into scaled models, these visionary designs were considered utopian and fantastic. Rather than bringing the building into existence, these early visionary architects used scaled 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 and his prints of architectural drawings show his mastery of imagined spaces. These drawings fit the definition of visionary architecture because his buildings would lose their magic and meaning if they were built in real life—Piranesi's drawings included unique and intricate details that were only achievable in drawings and, therefore, would be lost in translation to physical structures. His print, The Prisons (Carceri d'invenzione) or Imaginary Prisons, depicts labyrinthine monumental spaces and mysterious machines.

Most visionary architectural movement of the 18th century centered around projects of immense size that "defied both man's comprehension and his building techniques." Claude Nicolas Ledoux studied under Jacques-François Blondel and Pierre Contant d'Ivry before designing projects ranging from private residences to the entire complex of the Royal Saltworks at Arc-et-Senans. He is also known for his utopian designs, including a visionary design for Chaux, an entire town around the Royal Saltworks. Ledoux developed an entire master plan along with architectural drawings, elevations, and sections of various individual buildings for Chaux. The fantasy of Chaux formalized Ledoux's ideas in urban planning, architecture, and society. One of his designs was a tube-shaped house for the director of the waterworks at the source of Loiie river, c. 1773 to 1779.

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 an 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 and fragments of architectural drawings and a series of his fanciful architectural designs. These designs typically show an elevation or section of a building, but rarely an entire design. One of his designs was a stable shaped like a cow.

The early motion picture industry also created an impact on architecture, especially the films Metropolis and Just Imagine which showed elaborate, imaginative, and futuristic architectural sets. Hugh Ferriss is one visionary architect who was influenced by Hollywood.

In the 20th century, visionary architects surfaced in repressed societies where young architects had little hope of seeing their designs realized. Visionary architecture of this era is divided into three movements: German expressionism, Italian futurism, and Russian constructivism. 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 that had radar-like propellers.

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 tended to related to visionary architectural designs from the 18th century in "the overt symbolism of their various elements" and a tendency toward the immense. 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 levels. Another example, as by the Vesnin brothers, was the proposed building for Pravda which was covered in signboards and news communication instruments. In addition, Vladimir Tatlin designed a monument for the Communist International as 1,300 feet (400 m) tall rotating spiral, literally recalling the metaphor for the Russian Revolution as a spiral, and wraps around Vera Mukhina’s Monument to Worker and Farmer.

Exhibits

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 organized the exhibit based on three themes: geometry, mountains and caves, and roads or bridges. He included work by the architects Le Corbusier, Louis Kahn, William Katavolos, Frederick John Kiesler, Hans Poelzig, Paolo Soleri, and Michael Webb.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art hosted the exhibit "Visionary Architects" in 1968. Curated by Jean Adhemar and J. C. Lemagny of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris, this exhibit included the147 architectural drawings of late 18th-century French architects who "rebelled against the traditional ideas of their contemporaries."

Post-World War II

Visionary architecture's heyday was in the post-World War II area. During this time, visionary architects tend to either anticipate the future or exaggerate and distort existing structures.

Hermann Finsterlin

Hermann Finsterlin is considered to be one of the most radical of the German expressionist architects, known for producing carbuncular studies of unbuildable and obscure buildings. His visionary drawings focused on perspectives, playing with unusual, organic shapes. Finsterlin's architectural drawings are among the purest paper buildings ever developed and would require the most ingenious engineering to construct as the designs go against their form.

Rem Koolhaas

Rem Koolhaas moved to Manhattan, New York in 1972. There, he developed a fascination with the city, leading to his close examination of the dynamics which constructed it. His manifesto of the city, Delirious New York, outlines his theory of Manhattanism and the structure of the city. The book is also a spatial project, using the narrative sequence and typographic layout to mimic the space effectively.

Lebbeus Woods

After working with the Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen in the 1960s, the American architect Lebbeus Woods turned to visionary architecture around 1976. He produced a body of drawings and models that reimagine cities like Berlin, Paris, Havana, Sarajevo, and Vienna. Until his death in 2012, he was a professor at Cooper Union and other institutions, growing a "cult" of followers. He said, "Architecture should be judged not only by the problems it solves, but by the problems it creates." He also maintained a blog for his ideas and reflections. The Guardian noted that Woods created, "Dynamic compositions of splintered surfaces and twisted wiry forms, his fantastical scenes depicted alternative worlds, glimpses into a parallel universe writhing beneath the earth's crust." One of his visionary paper designs was for Einstein's Tomb that would "travel on a beam of light around the Earth." Only one of his designs resulted in a physical building—the Light Pavilion within a vast complex of towers in Chengdu, China by Steven Holl, completed in 2012. The Light Pavillon includes huge beams of light that are entered by walking on glass that is suspended by steel rods.

Peter Zumthor

Swiss architect Peter Zumthor is a significant figure who works in visionary architecture. In his 1998 architectural manifesto Thinking Architecture , Zumthor discussed the significance of emotion and experience as measuring tools of successful architecture. He believes that a building's beauty is not in its shape, but in the sensations and emotions it creates. His work was mostly unpublished because of his philosophical belief that architecture should be experienced firsthand.

Archigram

The Archigram Group is a British art collective that explored avant-garde and visionary architecture from 1961 to 1974. Its members were Warren Chalk, Peter Cook, Dennis Crompton, David Greene, Ron Herron, and Michael Webb. Their focus was on the future of urban development without the restraint of a client; many of their designs were inspired by a visit to Cape Kennedy. One of Archigram's most outlandish design alternatives was Cook's Plug-In City from 1964. Cook envisioned moveable living units or pods that were easily relocated by communal cranes. The pod's owner could move around the city and plug into the infrastructure at will. Herron came up with the Walking City, visualizing a city that did not have a fixed location because it could easily relocate by moving on its legs. The only designs from Archigram that were constructed were a swimming pool for Rod Stewart and a playground in Buckinghamshire.

Walter Jonas

Walter Jonas is a Swiss-German painter who designed Intrapolis for West Germany in the 1970s. These housing units were shaped like funnels and consisted of stacked concentric circles. Jonas maintained that his funnel-shaped buildings minimized ground contact and "save valuable soil". However, Intrapolis was never constructed because West Germany lacked the funds. One writer notes, "Jonas's funnels question the assumption that urban residences ought to be refuges from the cities in which we live, and encourage us to consider more holistic options. The Intrapolis captivates us precisely because it's so bizarrely different from anything in our experience. It belongs to an alternate reality that we can visit to escape the built-in assumptions of our everyday environment."

Russian paper architects

In the 1980s, group of Russian architects emerged from the Moscow Institute of Architecture, united by what Yuri Avvakumov had previously dubbed the paper architecture. The slang name "paper architecture" was meant to be negative, referring to projects that were unfit for construction. These visionary architects include Alexander Asadov, Evgeni Ass, Yuri Avvakumov, Alexey Bavykin, Mikhail Belov, Alexander Brodsky, Mikhail Filippov, Sergei Kiselev, Evgeni Krupin, Boris Levyant, Andrei Miroshin, Ilya Utkin, and Evgeni Velichkin. At a time when Soviet architecture was standardized and limited by economics and the ideological controls of the state, paper architecture offered freedom of expression and individualism. The paper architects were Inspired by Giovanni Battista Piranesi and the Russian avant-garde. They created visionary designs that they knew were never going to be constructed. Nevertheless, they were considered escapists, deserters, and dissidents.

In 1981, they worked with new leadership at the Union of Architects, receiving permission to compete in international competitions for the first time. When the paper architects won fifty competitions between 1981 and 1989, their visionary architecture began to be applauded within the Soviet Union. In 1992, the Moscow Institute of Architecture hosted the exhibit “Paper Architecture. Alma Mater”. After the exhibit, the works were sold to the SBS Bank; ten years later, they were in a Russian museum. One work by the paper architects is Avvakumov’s 1990 Tower of Perestroika, an ironic reminiscence of Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International, created for an exhibit at the Russian Museum called “Temporary Monuments”.

In the early 1990s, the Soviets fired forty percent of its architects. Many were able to establish a private practice and were able to add their creativity to actual buildings.

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. His visionary designs showed what he referred to as narrative architecture—designs inspired by works of literature, such as Melvilla which was inspired by his love of Moby-Dick by Herman Melville. Since his designs were often executed by working from anti-theses of architectural principles, he described his work as exploring the margin or the "underbelly." One of his best known efforts was the 1993 book, Condemned Building: An Architect's Pre-Text.

Related architectural forms

Visionary architecture overlaps with fantastic architecture, utopian architecture, and conceptual architecture. Fantastic architectural designs are built, whereas visionary designs are not built. Visionary architecture is more individualistic in its creation than utopian architecture. Conceptual architecture, or architecture based on imagination and visions, dissociates the physical nature of the architectural design. However, visionary architecture gains its significance in the belief that unbuilt drawings and images portray the true meaning of architecture and design.

See also

• Conceptual architecture
• Fantastic architecture
• Futurist architecture
• Utopian architecture

Additional sources

• Cooke, Catherine and Belov, Mikhail. Nostalgia of Culture: Contemporary Soviet Visionary Architecture. Great Britain: Architectural Association, 1988. ISBN 9781870890175
• Feuerstein, Gunter. Visionäre Architektur : Wien 1958/1988. Berlin, Ernst & Sohn, 1988. ISBN 9783433020401
• Lampugnani, Vittorio Magnago. Visionary Architecture of the Twentieth Century: Master drawings from Frank Lloyd Wright to Aldo Rossi. Thames & Hudson, 1982. ISBN 978-0500340912
• Lemagny, Jean-Claude. Visionary Architects: Boullée, Ledoux, Lequeu. Houston, University of St Thomas, 1967. Reissued 2002. ISBN 9780940512351
• Sky, Alison and Stone, Michelle. Unbuilt America: Forgotten Architecture in the United States from Thomas Jefferson to the Space Age. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976. ISBN 978-0896593411