The Architecture of Fantasy: Utopian Building and Planning in Modern Times
Ulrich Conrads and Hans G. Sperlich; translated, edited and expanded by Christiane C. Collins and George R. Collins
Frederick A. Praeger, 1962

Hardcover | 8-1/2 x 11 inches | 187 pages | 232 illustrations | English | $16.00

PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION:
This book presents ? for the first time in English ? a copiously illustrated study of architectural fantasy in the modern world. Here in one volume is a selection of the unusual and the visionary in twentieth-century architecture, a fascinating record of the varieties in form, geometry, material, and imagery out of which architectural fantasy is spun.
In recent years, architects and city planners have become increasingly sensitive to the charge of rigidity, plainness, and banality that was so often leveled against their work in the past. Today one sees a great, and sometimes frenetic, effort on the part of contemporary designers to inject more excitement and freedom into their projects. The purpose of this volume is to show that twentieth-century architecture actually has a tradition of more daring and imaginative structure, form, and symbol than is generally supposed. The authors demonstrate the legitimacy of the works of human and technological fantasy, and trace the genealogy of modern utopian building back to the engineering triumphs and poetic aspirations that characterized imaginative building in the last century.
The principal argument of the book...