From the Wolfsonian-FIU:
Tony Garnier’s Une Cité Industrielle (1904–17) is one of the most remarkable attempts to reimagine the modern city. A prominent French architect, Garnier spent more than a decade devising and illustrating in exquisite detail a plan for an urban plan that would foster both social and environmental harmony. Visionary Metropolis includes more than twenty of the design drawings and illustrations that Garnier produced for this project, demonstrating his ideas about how rational design could mitigate the destructive impacts of industrial development.
Mr. Garnier’s plan for the ‘ideal city’ was a city of the workers, an industrial city, and a direct democracy, almost communistic in nature. Are there many parallels with South Florida? Loosely, perhaps. Over the past hundred plus years, Miami has witnessed multiple attempts at the ‘ideal city,’ created mostly by developers whose perspective on the ‘ideal’ were prosperous, capitalistic slices of reality, like Miami Beach, Coral Gables, and Bal Harbour — all vacationlands for the rich, or at least well-to-do, and yet in their own ways more realistic than a philosophizing architect’s dream, which almost required an ideal world to put his ideal city in.
The exhibit is on display now at the Wolfsonian-FIU Museum.
