Brave New Worlds

At some point in the late 15th Century, three large paintings were created in Italy. These strange paintings depict still scenes of calm, opulent civic centres. With little human life pictured, they show architecture dominating largely empty spaces. They are ordered, geometric and sparse. The three paintings are housed in Italy, Germany and the USA. All are referred to as the Ideal City paintings....

The writer and cultural thinker John Berger once wrote: “The zoo to which people go to meet animals, to observe them, to see them, is, in fact, a monument to the impossibility of such encounters.” For Berger, the ancient relationship between humans and animals had been broken. But what if we tried to fix that? In the mid-1970s, the architecture and media collective Ant Farm envisioned a floating r...

The industrial revolution saw Britain turn into the ‘workshop of the world’. Productivity and wealth for those in the upper echelons soared. But this came at a very human cost, with many of the working class people that powered the revolution facing awful conditions, poor pay and a grim future. And without the ability to vote, there was little hope that things could get better.  But in the 18...

Magnitogorsk is a factory city in Russia. It has often been considered one of the most polluted cities in the world, with health problems rife. But there were some who dreamed of a different Magnitogorsk.  In the late 1920s and 1930s a number of Western architects were employed by the Soviet Union to realise what a socialist city could be. At a time of great change in Russia, they were tasked...

In 1959, a British landscape designer, town planner and architect named Geoffrey Jellicoe dreamed up a town of tomorrow. He called it Motopia. It imagined a radically different version of the British town. His big idea: a city built of glass where roads travelled across the tops of buildings. Artist, writer, curator and educator Will Jennings joins to discuss Jellicoe's design. We talk about why i...

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