Imagining and Making the World

Nathaniel Coleman is Senior Lecturer in Architecture at Newcastle University, UK, and the author of Utopias and Architecture (2005). He has also contributed chapters to Constructing Place and The Hand and the Soul, and has published articles on utopia and architecture, the history and theory of architecture, and pedagogy in journals such as Architectural Research Quarterly, Interfaces: Image, Texte, Langage, Morus: Utopia e Rinascimento, Cloud-Cuckoo-Land: International Journal of Architectural Theory, and The International Journal of Art and Design Education.

«This collection is a must for anyone interested in attempts to make the world a better place. Drawing together the work of key scholars in the multi-disciplinary field of utopian studies and leading thinkers in the field of architecture, Nathaniel Coleman argues for a symbiotic relationship between utopia and architecture.» (Lucy Sargisson, University of Nottingham)«The great variety of work considered here – from Ildefons Cerdà’s visionary but very successfully realized Barcelona plan to Patrick Geddes’s methods for the urban planner - suggests a fresh and enormously varied panorama of realistic thinking about city form. Perhaps the buildings of the future may be the product of a new dialogue between designer and inhabitant in which the utopian thinking this book so ably advocates will inevitably be an essential factor.» (Joseph Rykwert, University of Pennsylvania)«A fine collection of essays that makes an important contribution to the complex and undertheorized relationship between utopianism and architecture. Providing a uniquely cross-disciplinary approach, the essays explore architectural theory and praxis in literary and social utopias, and, vice versa, utopian theory and praxis in architecture.» (Nicole Pohl, Oxford Brookes University)

• Contents: Nathaniel Coleman: Introduction: Architecture and Utopia – Jonathan Powers: Building Utopia: The Status of the Ideal in Filarete’s Trattato – Greg Kerr: Gautier, Boileau, and Chenavard: Utopian Architecture of the Temple in Mid-Nineteenth-Century France – Valérie Narayana: Du Génie en Utopie: The Figure of the Engineer in Balzacian and Zolian Utopias – Ufuk Ersoy: To See Daydreams: The Glass Utopia of Paul Scheerbart and Bruno Taut – Malcolm Miles: An Orderly Life: Ildefons Cerdà and the Northern Extension of Barcelona – Ellen Sullivan: Drawing Blood: Patrick Geddes’s Sectional Thinking – Nathaniel Coleman: Utopia on Trial? – David H. Haney: Spaces of Resistance and Compromise: The Concrete Utopia Realized – Diane E. Davis/Tali Hatuka: Transcending the Utopian-Pragmatic Divide in Conflict Cities: Applying Vision and Imagination to Jerusalem’s Future – Phillip E. Wegner: «The Mysterious Qualities of This Alleged Void»: Transvaluation and Utopian Urbanism in Rem Koolhaas’s S,M,L,XL – Nathaniel Coleman/Ruth Levitas/Lyman Tower Sargent: Trialogue.