Archphoto 2.0, VISIONARY THINKERS, 2017

The post-war years were a very intense period of experiments, visions and imagination. The end of such a tragic period for the world enabled intellectuals and architects in particular, but also film-makers to rethink the future and imagine new situations with an optimistic use of technologies. For some of them, such as Buckminster Fuller, technology was the resource that was to save the world, as in the case of covering Manhattan with a glass dome, almost to preserve it like an ancient ruin. Thus, this new issue of archphoto2.0 is dedicated to the Visionary Thinkers, to those who turned their minds to imagine new scenarios.

A visionary has a striking imagination and thinks of the city’s future. In some cases, the vision transforms into actual utopia, as in the case of Yona Friedman who, in the fifties, imagined a certain transformation into technological, mobile cities for temporary use, only to see what he had designed become reality. Few intellectuals have managed to leave behind their visionary hallucinations to transform them into actual utopias.
The Anna Rita Emili’s essay creates a rift between a positive, concrete, visionary concept like the majority of essays in this issue, and a marked distinction between the terms visionary and utopian in the relationship between Boullée and Fuller.

In these times of crisis in architecture, all architects can do is to pick up again from the Visionary Thinkers!