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In meetings with landowners and real-estate agents, Musk has reportedly described his idea for the estate — which he envisions building on thousands of acres of property he purchased on the Colorado River — as a utopia, so that his employees can live, work, and play without ever leaving. — New York Magazine
The community, named “Snailbrook” after the Boring Company mascot, would be the first new town in Texas since Ellinger was incorporated in 2020. Pre-fab homes are the most likely housing option, with rents as low as $800 and a Montessori school campus to serve employees' children, according to... View full entry
The movement wasn't about living in isolation. Residents of these communes didn't seek an escape from society so much as the chance to create it anew: a generous, civic-minded, highly social culture with regular potlucks and solstice blowouts. — GQ
Unfortunately, society went the other way to greed and ignorance."Constructing a home with next to no money demands feats of creative resourcefulness. Back in the 1970s, free building materials were everywhere—if you knew where to look. Jon Turner's house, a two-story, gable-roofed structure... View full entry
Lawrence Chua, an assistant professor at the Syracuse University School of Architecture, has been awarded a 2020-21 Getty Scholar Grant from the Getty Research Institute (GRI) to study "transregional histories of utopia and the architecture and urban culture of southeast Asia." According to the... View full entry
Liberland’s earthly domain is a constellation of locations and events that gravitate around the unoccupied Gornja Siga. These props, in various stages of construction, share a fundamental quality of ephemerality and mobility, as if recalling their origins as a dream spawned on the internet. — Volume
The self-declared libertarian micronation of Liberland has vanished somewhat from the media's spotlight since its founder and current President, Vít Jedlička, planted the utopia's state flag on Gornja Siga, an unoccupied Danube island between Serbia and Croatia, in 2015. Liberland instantly... View full entry
Cristiano Toraldo di Francia, co-founder of the radical Italian architecture group Superstudio, has passed away at age 78. Di Francia, born in 1941, started Superstudio in 1966 with Adolfo Natalini; Eventually, the group grew to include Piero Frassinelli, and Alessandro and Roberto... View full entry
Archigram, the architectural studio known for its avant-garde theoretical projects, has sold their archive for £1.8 million to the soon-to-open M+ museum in Hong Kong. Set to open later this year, the museum designed by Herzog & de Meuron will focus on 20th and 21st century design and... View full entry
The 1960s, a time when possibilities and technologies in many areas — artistic, political, scientific — seemed broader than ever, remain a seductive decade. Fifty years on from the first moon landing we need to remember that the most striking image from space (and the one that had the most real impact) were not those of the dusty, dead surface of the moon but those of our own planet, glimpsed as something delicate, whole and beautiful. — Financial Times
The future used to look brighter. This may be the feeling gained when looking back at some of the most radical visions from familiar names in architecture. Archigram, Superstudio, Archizoom and Cedric Price each took their shot at a future based on post-war rhetoric, and we continue to marvel at... View full entry
A plan to build a platform in a tropical lagoon caught heat from locals, and a campaign stoked by opposition politician Valentina Cross swept away their proposals for an inaugural colony. In February, the Tahitian government stated publicly that an agreement with the Seasteading Institute in 2017 was now outdated and non-binding. [...]
That leaves the Institute, and their movement, once again at sea, shopping for a new host nation willing to take on a partnership.
— CityLab
In her article for CityLab, writer Hettie O'Brien looks into the Seasteading Institute's promise of a libertarian offshore utopia in Polynesia and the challenges the movement has been facing recently. View full entry
The postwar passion for highway construction saw cities around the world carved up in the name of progress. But as communities fought back many schemes were abandoned – their half-built traces showing what might have been — The Guardian
What are dreams made of? More importantly, how are these dreams executed, and how do we live in the corresponding gap between vision and reality? For the residents of the U.K. towns Basildon and Essex, who dwell in post-World War II "New Towns" designed to be social utopias, their struggles to... View full entry
This September the first ever London Design Biennale will take place at Somerset House with featured projects from over thirty countries. The inaugural show is themed 'Utopia by Design' and celebrates the 500th anniversary of the publication of Sir Thomas More's classic, Utopia (1516).Turkey's... View full entry
Sorry, I’m not able to send this directly through SnapFace since your iPhone 6 doesn’t support neural chat. Old-fashioned text pixels will have to do. Remember the movie “Her”? That’s what Los Angeles is like in 2056. L.A. is the densest city in the U.S., with a population that’s about a third larger than it was in 2016. Taller buildings are everywhere, including New DTLA — a corridor of super-talls that runs the length of Wilshire all the way to Santa Monica. — Los Angeles Times
The speculative fiction details a "utopian" city primarily characterized by efficient, far-reaching public transport and fewer cars. There's no longer a drought, and buildings are wrapped in "solar skins" designed by Elon Musk.For more speculative visions of a future California, check out these... View full entry
There would be homes and industry surrounded by trees, hills and lakes. Above all, there would be no prejudice, poverty or slums, according to a Soul City brochure...Despite its name, Soul City was never intended to be an all-black town, but rather, a multi-racial community built and managed by black people.
[But] Portions of the area resemble a ghost town, rotting – or perhaps waiting. Could Soul City ever be resurrected?
— The Guardian
Read up on the rise and halt of Soul City, a suburb that attorney and civil rights activist Floyd McKissick envisioned for North Carolina's Warren County in the late 1960s-70s.More on Archinect:"Quintessential America" at play in the Museum of African American History and CultureFor Libertarian... View full entry
‘El mejor anuncio de la historia’, or ‘the best ad in history’ is a picture taken in February 2008, which neatly encapsulates several aspects of the city’s urban landscape: the formal, the informal and the promotional.
'[...]Around and in between the super bloques a carpet of slums has grown, an organism that now seems to bind the blocks together in some symbiotic relationship. These are the kind of hybrid forms that are developing in Latin American cities [...]’
— failedarchitecture.com
Related in the Archinect news:Venezuelan Government Evicts Residents From World's Tallest SlumWithout Housing Reform, is a "Tower of David" Coming to Your City?Housing mobility vs. America's growing slum problem View full entry
We closed 2014 by taking a delegation of architects and engineers to an undisclosed location where we hope to locate the first floating city in the sea nearby. We believe there could be a market on our floating city for residences, tourism, aquaculture, a business park, a research institute, and a powerplant to sell energy and clean water back to the host nation. — Floating City Project
The Seasteading Institute continues to work towards their goal of establishing the first floating city with significant political autonomy by 2020. Currently they are focusing on - enhancing novel seastead designs, which includes wave tank testing and acquiring more detailed financial... View full entry
