Sociopolis: Project for a City of the Future

by Vicente Guallart

These designs for a "low speed," "rurban," neighborhood in Valencia, Spain, created by 13 international architecture firms (Toyo Ito, MVRDV, FOA, Fran ois Roche and others) under the direction of Vicente Guallart, look again at public housing as a site for architectural utopianism. Each contributor was asked to bring an agricultural sensibility to the high-density project, and to use as a guide the inhabited orchards and gardens that had once anchored local communities. The results include both open meadows and Toyo Ito's stacked lawns, a parking structure of vegetation. While these plans and drawings were gathered in time for the Valencia Biennial and shown there, hey are not just art; the community plans to build them and thus to influence development elsewhere.

250 pages, Paperback

First published December 30, 1899

Reviews

[Dimitra Tsoumpri · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found this book in a library and decided to read it out of pure curiosity. It is about a project taking place in Valencia where different teams of architects try to design a city for the "future". The project started at 2003 and taking into account how far we've come in technology it is a bit behind. It is a very interesting project though with interesting mappings of Valencia and its population. There are different takes on the designed communities by known architects such as Toyo Ito and Francois Roche. The only problem with it is that the diagrams are in Spanish and the letters and really small so you might need the help of a lens to read them.