Artists' impressions of the city at Washington exhibition
An exhibition in Washington of architectural designs from the 1920s to the '50s depicts some fantastical metropolises
It's curious that today, with many cities thriving once again and young people flocking to urban enclaves, "the city" doesn't conjure much in the visual imagination. The mental image of urban life is relatively anodyne, a warmly lit habitat for consumption and social bustle, but without much of an architectural profile.
After decades of neglect and misguided planning, we now focus on streetscapes, walkable neighbourhoods and architecture that is well-behaved, frugal and environmentally sensitive, without much thought to the aesthetic drama of the built environment.
How different, then, from the image of the city presented in a fascinating and potent exhibition of architectural and urban images at the National Building Museum in Washington, DC.
"The Architectural Image, 1920-1950" is drawn from the collection of local architect David M. Schwarz, recent winner of the Richard H. Driehaus Prize for architecture. No one idea or ideal emerges, yet it leaves you with the sense that the city then had more presence, more vitality and, in some cases, more danger than its diluted image today.
Buildings are seen in vertiginous perspective, searchlights rake the sky from impossibly high towers, bridges fly across vast spaces with gossamer lightness. Cities during this era were still industrial, places where things were forged and cast, where factories housed the machines of production rather than spacious lofts full of modernist furniture, stainless-steel appliances and Italian faucets, toilets and tubs.