ABSTRACT
Architects produced many manifestos on urban design during the twentieth century. The most imaginative of their illustrative designs consist of the proposals of the rationalists of the years between the world wars, as well as those of Buckminster Fuller, the Metabolists, the Archigram Group, and other megastructure proponents in the postwar era. Their bold ideas received many accolades, but yielded no implemented urban designs. They were based on perceptions of societal problems as their proponents saw them. Implicit, yet seldom articulated in the proposals, were also models of people, their lives, and aspirations. Much in the proposals was driven by the application of exciting, advanced structural technologies. Understanding the problems that the various design proposals address and the functions that they serve enables us to comprehend their implications for urban design today. If one accepts Abraham Maslow’s model of a hierarchy of human motivations as the basis for understanding the functions that the built environment can serve, then the conclusion is not that the designs were too functional, but they were not functional enough. While the designs make us think, they fail to capture the potential richness of the lives of humans and other species.
