The Visionary City
During a dive looking for late 1980s adverts for Lego, I ended up finding this New York Times story:
Onkal (Duke) Guzey used to have to ask his small children if he could borrow their Lego toys to build his model homes. Now, five years and half a million Lego pieces later, he has built his own city. Mr. Guzey, an architect in Washington, has assembled a Visionary City
I'm used to large scale displays of Lego cities now, but this was in 1989. It also sounds pretty utopian:
its design incorporates the natural topography and resources of areas including San Francisco, San Antonio, and La Jolla, Calif. The city is intended to solve the most serious problems of urban living like pollution, traffic congestion and shortages of natural resources.
There are no cars in Mr. Guzey's city and he has designed public transportation to be accessible and appealing. The canals that encircle the downtown carry boats filled with commuters. Monorail tracks pass through apartment buildings. Trains run under waterfalls that provide electricity to power the city. George Marston, a local engineer, designed a computer program to keep the trains running, elevators operating and street lamps lighted.
The city was exhibited in Washington DC and New York City, at least, if I'm reading these articles correctly. (Perhaps understandably, they assume the audience are local readers, I think.)
Unfortunately, so far, there's no sign of photography of this city in the NYT or the Washington Post coverage (they have two stories, but both are locked away - perhaps I'll go back to the newspaper archives I was searching via my SF public library card to get those).
Mind you, not everyone was a fan.
''I don't like the idea of a perfectly controlled, 1984-type city,'' said Melissa Robinson, who works for a Washington-based news service. ''I think the Legos just take the edge off the idea of a planned city.''
Source: The New York Times