Author Description

The towns and cities that we inhabit are the survivors of a much larger world that was never built--of visions of the future that remain on paper due to lack of funds, political changes, or because they were technically ahead of their time. How might the world look today had the realities of history been different? And how close will the architecture of the future be to that already familiar from science fiction films and the fantastic virtual environments of computer games? Fantasy Architecture proposes answers to these questions by focusing on 130 imagined buildings, structures, and schemes from the late medieval period to the present. Artists and architects include Robert Adam, Archigram, Charles Barry, Etienne-Louis Boullee, William Chambers, FAT, Foreign Office Architects, Foster and Partners, Erna Goldfinger, Louis Hellman, Inigo Jones, Berthold Lubetkin, Edwin Lutyens, Eric Mendelsohn, Nils Norman, Claes Oldenburg, Joseph Paxton, Sir John Soane, Softroom and Paolo Soleri. Essayists include Neil Bingham, previously Assistant Curator of the Royal Institute of British Architecture (RIBA) Drawings Collections, London and author of monographs on Christopher Nicholson and C.A. Busby; Clare Carolin, Exhibitions Curator at the Hayward Gallery in London; Rob Wilson, Curator at the RIBA Gallery; and architect Peter Cook, professor at the Bartlett School of Architecture and former member of the group Archigram, who offers a personal text.