Your ideal city : let's just start over, again
Author: Flavio Trevisan
Publisher: Toronto : Variants of Evil for Hex Editions, 2019.
Series: Hex editions.
A compendium of drawings, models, photographs, and architectural renderings of fantasy cities (and some existing ones) from the 17th to the 21st century.
In the latest edition of the ongoing Hex Editions series—a string of publications that take inventory of various iterations of design, infrastructure, architecture, and urban planning—multidisciplinary artist Flavio Trevisan has compiled a visual archive of human history’s attempts to draft and execute an approximation of the perfect city.
The accessible, perfect-bound format and glossy, digital presentation of the book gives off the parodic appearance (although the design is in keeping with other Hex Editions publications) of a marketing booklet distributed by a smart city developer to drum up capital investment in some tech-forward eco-utopia in the Netherlands, as if IDEAL is an acronym for Intelligent Daily Ecological Alternative Living (it isn’t).
Rather, Your IDEAL City is a thought-provoking survey of humankind’s desire, and often failure, to design holistic solutions to society’s urban dilemmas. What those obstacles are, how those solutions are conceived, and what the ideal city should look like are all reflective of the draftsman’s specific sociological context and those historical variants really come through in Trevisan’s archive. Included in this book’s 132 pages are an illustrated map of a “City of Ethics” from the 17th century, aerial photographs of the ‘failed’ modernist utopia Brasilia, techno-futurist World Trade Fair dioramas, and so much more.