Customer Reviews

Beyond Architecture: Imaginative Buildings and Fictional Cities

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Editor Feireiss's reference to Alice in "Alice in Wonderland" being led by a white rapid into a different world is apt. For "[t]his book sees itself as a portal into an unpredictable and marvelous realm" of experimental and futuristic architecture.

The direction to the more than 100 artists whose works are shown might have been, "Let your imagination run wild." Only a few are architects. From such a bevy of graphic, commercial, and fine artists working in a neighboring field of art, yet one in which the purposes, scales, and challenges are radically different from architecture, come ideas and works which have the intriguing blend of habitability and exoticism of cities in science-fiction movies.

The works range from the dystopian to the utopian; from rough immediacy to sterile remoteness; from the everyday to the visionary. Most of the works are individual buildings or clusters or parts of a city's network such as bridges and transportation sites. Some are chairs and tables and other objects for interior design. All, even the ones referring to the familiar and proletarian, seek to revise and in most cases enlarge the necessities and possibilities of architecture.