Awards

• Winner of Winner of SESAH's 2021 Publication Award of Excellence for Best Book Honorable Mention, the Kenneth Jackson Award for Best Book Published on North American Urban History in 2020.
• Winner of Winner of SESAH's 2021 Publication Award of Excellence for Best Book.

Overview

Many years before it was possible for a family to buy a suburban house with a garden and a car for driving to work, school, and big-box shopping centres, Victorians dreamt of such a world. Dozens of British and American visionaries in the 1800s published visions of a future when chaotic, slum cities were destroyed and replaced with suburban utopias, describing blissful country drives with automobiles or aircraft commutes long before such machines had been invented. They stirred generations of readers to work for the day when Babylon, Boston, and Birmingham could be abandoned for a high-tech, mechanized, glass-and-metal life in cottages and flowers.

Full Product Details

9780198861447

Table of Contents

Reviews

In this prodigious study of architecture, literature and dreams, Nathaniel Walker takes his readers on a marvel-filled tour of Victorian Visions of Suburban Utopia and shows that the line dividing real architecture and fantasy is thin indeed. Walker reviews a plethora of strange, wonderful, and terrifying texts, images, and buildings that represent the dreams of utopian visionaries. It is in this discourse of dreams that he finds the DNA of the Anglo-American suburb and of Modernism itself, even as he also shows us how the urge to pursue Jerusalem while fleeing Babylon has pervaded the whole history of architecture and urbanism. There can be little doubt that his findings will inspire and inform ongoing conversation about the role of utopian and dystopian fantasy in the design and construction of our buildings and cities. * 2021 Publication Awards Committee, SESAH (Southeast Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians) * This is a book that was waiting to be written. The fundamental point of Victorian Visions of Suburban Utopia may seem obvious, but never before has it been worked out so thoroughly, on this scale or in such depth, across disciplines and in both Britain and America (and even further afield). Better still, it is written with enthusiasm and clarity, and generously illustrated. * Jacqueline Banerjee, Victorian Web *

This is a book that was waiting to be written. The fundamental point of Victorian Visions of Suburban Utopia may seem obvious, but never before has it been worked out so thoroughly, on this scale or in such depth, across disciplines and in both Britain and America (and even further afield). Better still, it is written with enthusiasm and clarity, and generously illustrated. * Jacqueline Banerjee, Victorian Web *

Author Information

Nathaniel Robert Walker is Associate Professor of Architectural History at the College of Charleston. He earned his PhD at Brown University, and studies the relationships between architecture, aesthetics, public space, urban design, political power, and dreams of the future, both utopian and apocalyptic. He has published essays in ARRIS, Buildings and Landscapes, the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review, Utopian Studies, and a number of edited volumes, including Suffragette City: Women, Politics and the Built Environment, which he co-edited with E. Darling. He has curated two exhibitions dealing with the connections between architecture, urbanism, and human dreams: Building Expectations: Past and Present Visions of the Architectural Future (Bell Gallery, Providence), and The City Luminous: Architectures of Hope in an Age of Fear (City Gallery, Charleston, co-curated with J. Streit).

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