Review: Unbuilt Utopian Cities 1460 to 1900: Reconstructing Their Architecture and Political Philosophy, by Tessa Morrison

In 2008, Austrian architect, theorist, and scholar Günther Feuerstein published a volume titled Urban Fiction: Strolling through Ideal Cities from Antiquity to the Present Day.¹ The book combined visual evidence from historical illustrations and written evidence into a series of playful descriptions of what it might be like to wander through unbuilt places of utopian imagination. By rendering these fictional cities in a fictional fashion, Feuerstein adopted a unique strategy to avoid one of the problems that has long haunted would-be scholars of utopian architecture: how to subject the buildings of literature to the formal and historical analyses that are the tools of architectural historians. This...