Dissatisfied with the world we live in, we have been longing sincetime immemorial for two opposing topoi: the peaceful garden -a carefree paradise - and the New City - a harmonious community.Thomas More described this New City: it is Utopia, no-place, orEu-topia, the fortunate place, and it is located on an island. Butlong before More philosophers, saints, artists, and travelers describedthe ideal city. And after him hundreds of architects, writers,reformers, and dreamers sought to find Utopia and not only describedbut also depicted the fortunate cities - which were oftenterrible as well - and occasionally tried to turn them into a reality.Take Palmanova, Freudenstadt, Guise, Brasilia, Lingang. Yet thesecities, too, then as now, have turned out to be imperfect, deeplyrooted in their own period.For Günther Feuerstein, all these cities and towns, though onlyfictitious, have long since been built, and he strolls through themtogether with the architects, planners, writers, and philosophers,just as Thomas More, Antonio Filarete, William Morris, and manyothers once led us through their cities.Though the routes through various periods and continents arearbitrary, the tour of 350 cities, many of them made visible in over500 illustrations, and overflights of 800 additional dream cities resultin a kind of lexicon of the ideal city, which admittedly does notclaim to be complete.Günther Feuerstein, who was a professor at the Hochschule fürGestaltung in Linz and also a lecturer at the Akademie der bildendenKünste and at the Technische Universität in Vienna until his retirement,must be considered the catalyst in the Viennese post-wararchitectural scene, as almost all architectural avant-garde groupsof the town have come from his circle. As an author, Feuersteinaddresses areas where art history and sociology intersect with architecture.Edition Axel Menges has published Androgynos - DasMann-Weibliche in Kunst und Architektur / The Male-Female in Artand Architecture and Biomorphic Architecture - Menschen undTiergestalten in der Architektur / Human and Animal Forms in Architecture.Feuerstein is one of the earliest critics of functionalism andpleads for an 'expanded architecture'.
