Review: Unbuilt Utopian Cities 1460 to 1900: Reconstructing Their Architecture and Political Philosophy, by Tessa Morrison

Abstract

Tessa Morrison Unbuilt Utopian Cities 1460 to 1900: Reconstructing Their Architecture and Political Philosophy Farnham, England: Ashgate, 2015, 262 pp., 30 color and 55 b/w illus. $124.95, ISBN 9781472452658 In 2008, Austrian architect, theorist, and scholar Gunther Feuerstein published a volume titled Urban Fiction: Strolling through Ideal Cities from Antiquity to the Present Day .1 The book combined visual evidence from historical illustrations and written evidence into a series of playful descriptions of what it might be like to wander through unbuilt places of utopian imagination. By rendering these fictional cities in a fictional fashion, Feuerstein adopted a unique strategy to avoid one of the problems that has long haunted would-be scholars of utopian architecture: how to subject the buildings of literature to the formal and historical analyses that are the tools of architectural historians. This problem has encouraged past historians to concentrate on ideal cities that have been visually rendered in some capacity, as with Ruth Eaton's copiously illustrated Ideal Cities: Utopia and the (Un)Built Environment (2002) and Helen Rosenau's narrower but more rigorous The Ideal City: Its Architectural Evolution (1972).2 One of the issues with utopian images, however, is that they often suffer from a lack of fidelity to the texts they are meant to illustrate, perhaps most famously in the case of Thomas More's germinal Utopia (1516), early editions of which featured a frontispiece depicting conventionalized representations of Renaissance cities bearing almost no likeness to the Utopian towns described in the book. Tessa Morrison attempts to tackle both the methodological problem of formally analyzing written architecture and the analytical problem of reconciling illustrations with texts in her new book, Unbuilt Utopian Cities 1460 to 1900 . She does so by creating digital models for ten ideal cities (four from the Renaissance and six from the age of industry), all of which, she …