Utopia
Ideal cities, perfect societies and visionary architecture imagined by artists and architects, and the doubts that shadow them.
No works indexed yet · 10 related artists
No open-access works for Utopia are in the index yet. They will appear here as more collections are indexed.
About
Thomas More coined the word utopia in 1516, a pun meaning both good place and no place, and artists and architects have been drawing such places ever since. In late 18th-century France, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux built a royal saltworks at Arc-et-Senans on a semicircular plan and published designs for an ideal town around it, while Étienne-Louis Boullée designed a hollow sphere as a Cenotaph for Newton (1784), never meant to be built.
Revolution brought new visions. Vladimir Tatlin's model for a Monument to the Third International (1919–20) proposed a leaning spiral tower taller than the Eiffel Tower, with rotating halls for the Communist International. After the Second World War, Constant Nieuwenhuys spent nearly two decades on New Babylon (1959–74), models and drawings of a playful city raised above the ground, and the Italian group Superstudio's Continuous Monument (1969) imagined a single white grid wrapping the planet, half dream and half warning.
Related artists
More in Subject Matter
Vacant and Vacated Spaces
Violence
Virtue and Vice
Visual Perception
War and Military
Water
Waterscapes
Work and Workers
Zoomorphism
Abstract Landscape
Adolescence
Advertising and Brands
African Diaspora
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Allegory
Alter Egos and Avatars
Americana
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Anatomy
Animal Portrait
Animals
Anthropomorphism
Antiquity as Subject
Architecture's Effects
Artist as Ethnographer
