Art: The Dream Builders

Frank Lloyd Wright once looked with distaste at the sprawl that is Pittsburgh, and gave the city fathers his solemn advice: “Abandon it.” Architects with the king-sized imagination of a Wright have always let one corner of the mind dwell on the impossible. Their most grandiose schemes often end up in the wastebasket, either stymied by technology or vetoed by those who regard themselves as more practical (and sometimes are). But the visionary architects go on dreaming of mushroom-shaped houses, glass pyramids and spiral cities. Last week, in a lively show called “Visionary Architecture,” Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art had on display some famous designs that never got built.

They are not the work of crackpots but of reputable men, some of them geniuses. Leonardo himself designed an “ideal city,” and Piranesi planned a “cultural center” of moats and courtyards that seemed to fit inside each other like Chinese boxes. More recently, the visionaries have been apt to reflect Le Corbusier’s warning that “the problem of the century is the problem of the city.” Dismayed by blight and overcrowding, Kiyonori Kikutake designed a city over water consisting of a huge floating deck that would be pierced by great concrete cylinders lined with dwellings. Buckminster Fuller planned a dome to shelter Manhattan, and Hans Poelzig a towering, terraced metropolis reminiscent of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.

After denouncing everybody else’s skyscrapers, Frank Lloyd Wright in the latter days of his life wished to turn cities into grand parks surrounding a few mile-high office buildings that would lodge the city’s entire work force. Each rapier-like 528-story building would have atomic-powered elevators, would accommodate 130,000 people. Philadelphia’s Lou Kahn, dramatically ignoring the necessity of rectangular symmetry, modeled a skyscraper that suggests a tottering, concrete Erector set. Other projects offer radical new solutions for transportation and land use: Le Corbusier’s plan for a road that is itself a building, and Paolo Soleri’s tubular concrete bridge that eliminates ascending and descending roads.

Unlike Leonardo and Piranesi, contemporary architects are not inhibited by technological restrictions. Even their most outrageous architectural fantasies are usually technically possible. But for them, the question of what to build has taken precedence over problems of how to build. Says Arthur Drexler, director of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art: “Social usage determines what is visionary and what is not. Visionary projects cast their shadows over into the real world of experience, expense and frustration. If we could learn what they have to teach, we might exchange irrelevant rationalizations for more useful critical standards. Vision and reality might then coincide.”