“Change the dream and you change the city.”
Nice piece on MoMA’s “Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream” on polis.
Image: “Nature-City” by Amale Andraos and Dan Wood of WORKac.
Lower Manhattan, ink drawing by Lebeus Woods, 1999.
“I wanted to suggest that maybe lower Manhattan – not lower downtown, but lower in the sense of below the city – could form a new relationship with the planet. So, in the drawing, you see that the East River and the Hudson are both dammed. They’re purposefully drained, as it were. The underground – or lower Manhattan – is revealed, and, in the drawing, there are suggestions of inhabitation in that lower region.”
Interview with Geoff Manaugh, BLDGBLOG.
Alex Ruiz, Megalopolis
James Rojas has built an 80-square-foot scale model of downtown Long Beach for people to rearrange, add to and generally envision what the future of the city could be.
“People get creative. One person uses little marks on popsicle sticks to show where parking lots are located.”
Auroville (City of Dawn) is an “experimental” township in Viluppuram district in the state of Tamil Nadu, India near Puducherry in South India. (Wikipedia) (via butdoesitfloat)
Philip Straub, Metropolis from Superman Returns
Anton Furst’s Gotham.
Tomás Saraceno’s Cloud Cities, Berlin.
More here.
![Alfredo Ghierra, “Panorama mental” (2002).
[h/t Victor Raggio]](http://alfredoghierra.com.uy/material/obras/materiallaberintos/panoramamental.jpg)
Alfredo Ghierra, “Panorama mental” (2002).
[h/t Victor Raggio]
Image by B. Börkur Eiríksson. (Via io9)
“It’s impossible to select the best fantasy cities. My list would start with Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou’s Metropolis, and its predecessor, Alexei Tolstoy’s constructivist Mars, back in the early 1920s. It would certainly include M John Harrison’s Viriconium, with its wicked deconstruction of meticulously mapped worlds such as Middle-Earth. Jeff VanderMeer’s Ambergris has to feature, alongside China Miéville’s Beszel/Ul Qoma and Embassytown, Hannu Rajaniemi’s Oubliette, and Mark Charan Newton’s Villjamur and Villiren.”
From “Cities real and imagined”, by Gwen Ansell
![Mathew Borrett, Exploring a Hypnogogic City (2003) [via Magical Urbanism]](http://www.mathewborrett.com/img/artwork/rooms02.jpg)
Mathew Borrett, Exploring a Hypnogogic City (2003) [via Magical Urbanism]
Map of Jericho in a 14th-century Farhi Bible
“The Masdar plan has been accused of being gated and exclusive. It is not, although there is something spooky in the controls it employs in the name of the environment – a touch of eco-Orwell or at least eco-Huxley. A hidden brain, for example, knows when you enter your building, so that your flat can be cooled before you arrive, while in public places flat screens broadcast uplifting news on the environmental performance of the complex.”
