“From the ideal cities of the Renaissance, to Ebenezer Howard’s garden city movement, to Le Corbusier’s modernist City of Tomorrow, with its “single society, united in belief and action”, design was seen as a critical tool with which it was possible to transform both political reality and the quality of life. Architecture, the most utopian of the arts, was interpreted as a harmonising force, able to shape not only space, but to use technology to mould attitudes and beliefs for the better.”
“As modernist architects and designers pursued social perfection with uncritical zeal, utopian ideals often degenerated into dystopian realities. Writers such as Orwell, HG Wells and Aldous Huxley illustrated the dangers inherent in utopian thinking, and questioned the utopian faith in science and technology as an industrial lifeboat that promised to banish scarcity and waste.”
