Visionary architecture

Visionary architecture is a style of building design that can exist only on paper or which has idealistic, impractical or Utopian qualities. Visionary architectural drawings give insight into unique perceptions that are impossible except through the imaginary design environment. In this context, imaginary means unrealistic or impossible, and the ability to deal creatively with an unseen reality. Visionary architects are also called paper architects because there works only exist in this medium. Visionary architecture was discussed and celebrated at the Architecture of Disbelief conference in 2008. Prominent visionary architects include Peter Eisenman, Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas, and Daniel Libeskind.

History

Architects are able to 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 the concrete three-dimensional building. In short, scaling help bring a building into existence.

In the 18th century, some architects indulged in projects of vast size or bizarre concepts that had a visionary nature. When turned into scaled models, these designs were considered utopian and fantastic. Rather than bring the building into existence, the architect used a scaled model to make the building speak through a sense of fantasy and symbolic meanings. Some visionary architects skip the model process entirely, believing that drawing is "the highest form and clearest expression of architecture."

Early designers and artists

During the Renaissance period, the differing building styles evolved and grew rapidly through the introduction of perspective. This discovery allowed architecture to experiment with imaginary architectural scenes. While many architects wrote on the subject, others articulated their concepts and ideas through drawings.

Jan Vredeman de Vries

During the sixteenth century, a Dutch painter and architect, Jan Vredeman de Vries, produced numerous engravings that portray new forms of architecture. His architectural designs works were pure fantasy and imagination but were also regarded as avant-garde architectural space.

Giovanni Battista Piranesi

Giovanni Battista Piranesi was one of the greatest printmakers of the eighteenth century. His prints of his 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.

Claude Nicolas Ledoux

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 renowned for his utopian designs, including an entire town around the Royal Saltworks, which he called Chaux. He developed an entire master plan along with architectural drawings, elevations, and sections of various individual buildings for Chaux. Chaux formalized his ideas in urban planning, architecture, and society.

Jean-Jacques Lequeu

Jean-Jacques Lequeu is one of the more eccentric and obscene 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 own fanciful architectural designs. These designs typically show an elevation or section of a building, but rarely an entire design.

Hugh Ferriss

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

Late 20th century

Peter Zumthor

Swiss architect Peter Zumthor is a significant figure who worked in unbuilt and paper architecture. Writing in his architectural manifesto Thinking Architecture, Zumthor discusses the significance of emotion and experience as measuring tools of the architecture, thus being an important part of the process of the design. He believed that building design should relate directly to our emotions. His work was mostly unpublished because of his philosophical belief that architecture should be experienced firsthand.

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.

Hermann Finsterlin

Hermann Finsterlin is considered to be one of the most radical of the Expressionists, and is notably known for having produced carbuncular studies of unbuildable and obscure buildings. Although he never built anything, his visionary drawings focused on perspectives, playing with the forms of unusual, organic shapes. Finsterlin's architectural drawings would require the most devious methods to physically build as they go against their form, beginning with careful dissection and separate molding of each part, only emphasizing and confirming that they are among the purest paper buildings ever developed.

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.

Sheila Sri Prakash

Sheila Sri Prakash was the first woman to start and operate her own architectural firm in India. She is known for her visionary architectural design methodologies where she visualizes and imagines spaces through her practice of classical Indian dance and music. She was regarded as a child prodigy for her talents as a dancer, musician, painter, sculptor, and performing artist. She gave a critically acclaimed Bharatanatyam Arangetram on stage in Mumbai when she was six years old. As a prolific designer, she has completed more than 1,000 architectural projects over an ongoing career that spans 35 years. She is considered the greatest architect from the Indian sub-continent, known as a breakthrough practice of Indo-centric reciprocity or holistic sustainability architecture and urban design as a solution to global socio-economic issues. She serves on the Global Agenda Council on Design and the Role of Arts in Society Committee of the World Economic Forum.

Russian paper architects

In the 1980s a group of Russian architects emerged, united by the paper architecture phenomenon. These visionary architects include Yuri Avvakumov, Mikhail Belov, Alexander Brodsky, Mikhail Filippov, and Ilya Utkin. At a time when Soviet architecture was limited by ideological controls, unfavorable economic conditions, and standardized construction, paper architecture offered freedom of expression. Inspired by the works of Piranesi and the Russian avant-garde, these architects designed visionary projects that were conceived from the start as drawings that would never be constructed.

Douglas Darden

After taking a studio class with Stanley Tigerman at Harvard University, Douglas Darden began his career by teaching and publishing works of paper architecture. He was largely inspired by Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Jean-Jacques Lequeu, and Marcel Duchamp. His visionary designs showed what he referred to as narrative architecture—designs inspired by works of literature, such as Moby-Dick, As I Lay Dying, and The Drunken Boat. Since his designs were often executed by working from anti-theses of architectural principles, as well as social and functional ideologies in design, he described his work as the "underbelly." One of his efforts was the book, Condemned Building.

Others

Criticism of visual architecture

Within the field of architecture, there are two perceptions related to visionary architecture. One position is that there are no unbuildable buildings, only unbuilt ones. The other is that some architectural drawings are of buildings that are impossible for humans to inhabit. Lacking professional agreement, the categorization of each visionary architectural design is arbitrary.

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 these drawings and images portray the true meaning of architecture and design. Visionary architects believe that the field of architecture must include both the built and the unbuilt environment.

See also

• Futurist architecture
• Metabolism (architecture)

External links

• Forbes article on visionary architecture