Cloud Cities

Source.

Hunger by Knut Hamsun (1890)

In full.
Audiobook.

The Man of the Crowd by Edgar Allan Poe (1840)

Source.

St. Augustine's City of God and Christian Doctrine

Source.

The Treasure of Heaven by Marie Corelli

Source

Brand New Abandoned Cities in China

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City Poems

Chicago Poems by Carl Sanburg

Fleet Street and Other poems by John Davidson

Rhymes from a Suburb by Lord Dunsany

Gabriel Garcia Lorca

Madrigal for the City of Santiago
Sleepless City (Brooklyn Bridge Nocturne)

Farmscrapers

Source. One of the advantages of living in a city is that the urban environment is in many ways more sustainable than suburbia — mass transit provides easy access to different areas without cars or highways, and dense planning efficiently fits more people into less space. But the quintessential architectural unit of the city, the skyscraper, isn’t always the greenest method of building. Enter “farmscrapers,” a new creation by the France and Belgium-based firm Vincent Callebaut Architects.

“Farmscraper” is the term they invented for a plan of six skyscrapers, deemed “Asian Cairns,” created for Shenzhen province in China. The towering structures are divided into ovular, blob-like sections that look like rocks smoothed by years in running water. Each blob plays host to a miniature forest of trees and grass, along with wind turbines and solar cells. Each farmscraper measures 1,300 feet high and has 111 floors, reports New York Daily News.

The farmscrapers are designed to act as self-contained ecosystems: The water created and collected by the planted farms will be recycled for use within the building. The farms will not necessarily produce food to sustain the community, but they will improve the city’s legendarily bad air quality. Each pebble unit will also contain a mixture of office, residential, and recreational space. By mingling efficient density with green design strategies, Callebaut is developing an architectural solution for China’s booming urban expansion. “In this context of hyper growth and accelerated urbanism, the Asian Cairns project fights for the construction of an urban multifunctional, multicultural and ecological pole,” the firm explained on World Architecture News.

L.A. 2013

As predicted in 1988.

Source.

Berlin Stories by Robert Walser (In English Translation)

Good Morning, Giantess!
Full

Hugh Ferriss and the Metropolis of Tommorow: Images

The Hugh Ferriss Architectural Drawings and Papers Collection.
On Flickr.

Busy Town

"Although Busytown is more realistic than Lewis Carroll's Wonderland, Scarry's vehicles have occasionally surrealistic elements, including Mr Frumble's pickle car, a car shaped like a doughnut, and a toothbrush mobile. Scarry used repeatedly his formula in which his books did not have a plot but offered bits of information in various spheres of knowledge, on school activities, cars and trucks, counting, animals, professions, etc. "Wherever I go," he was fond of saying, "I'm watching. Even on vacation when I'm in an airport or a railroad station, I look around, snap pictures and find out how people do things. Someday it will all show up in a book." (from The Busy, Busy World of Richard Sacrry by Walter Retan and Ole Risom, 1997)

The Best Word Book Ever,1963 and 1991

Metropolis from The Human Drift - King Champ Gillette

Source.

Before perfecting his invention of the safety razor and founding what became a major American industrial and sales enterprise, King Camp Gillette (1855-1932) authored several books and pamphlets calling for radical changes in the country's economic and social system. The first of these polemical tracts, The Human Drift, called for the establishment of an ideal society to be created by The United Company "Organized for the purpose of Producing, Manufacturing, and Distributing the Necessities of Life." Except for agricultural and other rural pursuits, all activities and all the population would be concentrated in one gigantic urban complex that Gillette called "Metropolis."

Although Gillette's book has been regarded as part of the tradition of utopian romances like the better-known Looking Backward, by Edward Bellamy, it can also be looked on as a serious, if misguided, proposal for organizing the urban world. Gillette was a tinkerer and inventor, and "Metropolis" represents his verbal working model of a new kind of city. One wonders how many later planners or urban theorists knew of his book and how he thought a modern city should be ordered. He anticipates by many years Le Corbusier's concept of widely-separated, lofty skyscrapers, although it seems unlikely this Swiss-French designer would have seen The Human Drift. Much closer in time and space is the proposed hexagonal city plan by Charles Rollinson Lamb in 1904. Lamb might have found inspiration for his own less drastic vision of the city of tomorrow in Gillette's writings. Or, perhaps Walter Burley Griffin, deeply interested in city planning and seeking whatever writing existed on this subject, came across Gillette's hexagonal system. This may either have confirmed his own ideas about the use of geometric forms or set him to considering how this might be done. Griffin's design incorporating hexagons and octagons that won first prize in the competition for the plan of Canberra, Australia in 1912 may thus have had partial origins in Lamb's or Gillette's hexagonal city designs.

Gilette writes: "For many reasons I have come to the conclusion that there is no spot on the American continent, or possibly in the world. that combines so many natural advantages as that section of our country lying in the vicinity of the Niagara Falls, extending east into New York State and west into Ontario. The possibility of utilizing the enormous natural power resulting from the fall, from the level of Lake Erie to the level of Lake Ontario, some 330 feet is no longer the dream of enthusiasts, but is a demonstrated fact. Here is a power, which, if brought under control, is capable of keeping in continuous operation even manufacturing industry for centuries to come, and, in addition supply all the lighting;, facilities, run all the elevators, and furnish the power necessary for the transportation system of the great central city....

The manufacturing industries of "Metropolis" would be located east and west of Niagara River in Ontario and New York. The residence portion of the city would commence about ten miles east of Niagara River and Buffalo; and from this point to its eastern extremity, which would include the present city of Rochester in its eastern border, the city would be sixty miles long east and west, and thirty miles in width north and south, lying parallel with Lake Ontario, and about five miles from it.".

Retro-Futurism in French Encyclopedias 1945-1975

Source.

The Image of the City - Lynch, Kevin (1954-1959)

An overview.

"Overview and outline of the Perceptual Form of the City study, a research project investigating the individual’s perception of the urban landscape."

Jetsons Background Paintings

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Neon Genesis Evangelion Episodes 1-26

In full.

Scripts (in English)
Neon Genesis Evangelion episode 1
Neon Genesis Evangelionepisode 2
Neon Genesis Evangelion episode 3
Neon Genesis Evangelion episode 4
Neon Genesis Evangelion episode 5
Neon Genesis Evangelion episode 6
Neon Genesis Evangelion episode 7
Neon Genesis Evangelion episode 8
Neon Genesis Evangelion episode 9
Neon Genesis Evangelion episode 10
Neon Genesis Evangelion episode 11
Neon Genesis Evangelion episode 12
Neon Genesis Evangelion episode 13
Neon Genesis Evangelion episode 14
Neon Genesis Evangelion episode 15
Neon Genesis Evangelion episode 16
Neon Genesis Evangelion episode 17
Neon Genesis Evangelion episode 18
Neon Genesis Evangelion episode 19
Neon Genesis Evangelion episode 20
Neon Genesis Evangelion episode 21
Neon Genesis Evangelion episode 22
Neon Genesis Evangelion episode 23
Neon Genesis Evangelion episode 24
Neon Genesis Evangelion episode 25
Neon Genesis Evangelion episode 26

Lorca - Ode to Walt Whitman

In full.

The Phantom Empire (1935)

Source.

"When the ancient continent of Mu sank beneath the ocean, some of its inhabitant survived in caverns beneath the sea. Cowboy singer Gene Autry stumbles upon the civilization, now buried beneath his own Radio Ranch. The Muranians have developed technology and weaponry such as television and ray guns. Their rich supply of radium draws unscrupulous speculators from the surface. The peaceful civilization of the Muranians is corrupted by the greed from above, and it becomes Autry's task to prevent all-out war, ideally without disrupting his regular radio show."

This 12-chapter Mascot serial offered singing cowboy Gene Autry his first starring role, in what has to be one of the most sublimely, surpassingly surrealistic serials ever made. Consider the following--5 or 6 miles underground below the dude ranch owned by Gene is the long-lost superscientific civilization of Murania. Gene has not one but two juvenile sidekicks (Frankie Darrow and Betsy King Ross). Further, Gene has not one but two comical sidekicks (Smiley Burnett and Bill Moore). Gene will lose the ranch unless he shows up every day to do a live radio broadcast of western songs -- so simply being locked in a closet by his enemies (and he has many, both above and below ground-level) will result in an agonizingly suspenseful chapter ending. But there are many exciting chapter endings, including the forever classic situation in which Gene, Betsy and Frankie are left literally hanging from a cliff by their fingertips!



The serial's real focus is on the city of Murania, represented by a surprisingly detailed miniature, and by some great, huge-looking futuristic sets. You can count on the fingers of one hand all the super-scientific future cities we ever got a glimpse of in the early 1950s, either on film or TV, and Murania is at the top of the list. As presided over by the regal Queen Tika (icy blonde Dorothy Christy, who also portrays Stan Laurel's terrifying wife in SONS OF THE DESERT), Murania is a hotbed of cardboard robots, scheming noblemen, mad scientists, and labs full of giant levers, spinning dynamos, gigantic pistons, spheres emitting large sparks, bubbling chemical retorts, flickering gauges, giant rayguns, huge TV screens, welding torches that emit 6-foot flames, and other high-tech wonders. Almost every detail of Murania is surpassingly strange. One aspect that delighted me and my brother when we saw it in the early 1950s is that whenever a recently-dead corpse is returned to life, by the marvelous medical technology of Murania, he speaks incomprehensible words --"The language of the dead," as the chief scientist helpfully explains! (doctors in Murania wear black instead of white surgical outfits!)


For reasons unknown, Murania has an armored cavalry, the "Thunder Riders," who every once in a while take the miles-long elevator trip to the surface and ride around Gene's ranch. And as a wonderful example of how this serial always piles it on, Frankie and Betsy are leaders of a gang of kids who call themselves the "Junior Thunder Riders," and ride around Gene's ranch too, with water-pails on their heads in imitation of knight's helmets! Frankie even has a workshop/lab just as many kids dreamed of having in 1950, where he dabbles with radio and a chemistry set. Above ground, some gangsters plot to seize Murania for its mineral wealth, while in Murania itself, revolutionaries plot the overthrow of Queen Tika, and the last chapters feature a Muranian civil war with large numbers of exotically-costumed extras! This is truly a serial that touches all the bases, each more than once.

In the leading role, Gene Autry is extremely likable and unassuming. The audience cares deeply what happens to him, despite the often absurd goings-on that surround him. For him, it was the auspicious beginning of a long, richly successful movie, radio, TV and recording career. Note too the very subtle chemistry between Gene's character, and Queen Tika. In Gene's later singing westerns, he would win over even the most feisty females just by singing them a little song; probably the serial's only lapse is that he never gets to sing for the Queen!

• Phantom Empire - Chapter 1: Singing Cowboy
• Phantom Empire - Chapter 2: Thunder Riders
• Phantom Empire - Chapter 3: Lightning Chamber
• Phantom Empire - Chapter 4: Phantom Broadcast
•  Phantom Empire - Chapter 5: Beneath the Sky
• Phantom Empire - Chapter 6: Disaster From the Sky
• Phantom Empire - Chapter 7: From Death to Life
• Phantom Empire - Chapter 8: Jaws of Jeopardy
• Phantom Empire - Chapter 9: Prisoners of the Ray
• Phantom Empire - Chapter 10: Rebellion
• Phantom Empire - Chapter 11: Queen in Chains
• Phantom Empire - Chapter 12: End of Murania

Masdar City: A Desert Utopia

Source.

Abu Dhabi's Masdar City is intended to support 40,000 residents and 50,000 commuters. It will be car free relying on an individualized sort of public transportation, comparable to riding your private metro car.

Masdar City: A Desert Utopia

Masdar City Model I (4/7)

The 22 billion dollar initiative to build a brand new, zero-emissions city for 50,000 people was planned by the British Firm Foster + Partners.

It is one of the first ecocity projects to receive widespread coverage in the press, and is supported by, among others, the World Wildlife Fund. (Photo: Reuters)

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Masdar City: A Desert Utopia

Masdar City City Hall (2/7)

The city, which will accommodate private residences and businesses, is intended to be the world's first zero-carbon, zero-waste city fully powered by renewable energy. (Photo: Reuters)

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Masdar City: A Desert Utopia

Masdar City Model II (5/7)

A model of Masdar City is seen at the Masdar exhibit during the Cityscape exhibition in Abu Dhabi in May 2008.

The city will also include a new university, special economic zones, and an Innovation Center. (Photo: Reuters)

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Masdar City: A Desert Utopia

Masdar City Model (1/7)

Abu Dhabi's Masdar City is intended to support 40,000 residents and 50,000 commuters. It will be car free relying on an individualized sort of public transportation, comparable to riding your private metro car. (Graphic: Foster+Partners)

Image 1 of 7