The same impulses that energized abolition and labor activism in the 1830s and 1840s produced a set of reformers in subsequent decades more interested in inward or individually oriented ideas, often expressed through unconventional architecture or realized in experimental communities. To convince Americans to join their causes, these reformers published plans of hexagonal, octagonal, and circular buildings and towns designed to shape more just or healthier living—or so they argued. These reformers included Orson Fowler, a leading phrenologist; Henry S. Clubb, who started the Kansas Vegetarian Settlement Company; and spiritualists Simon Crosby Hewitt and John Murray Spear, whose ideas arrived from the other side of the living-dead divide.
Discounting them as amusing dissidents or cranks has been a mistake. Irene Cheng, associate professor of architecture at the California College of the Arts, devotes overdue scholarly attention to several of these radicals and their architectural and urban visions in an illuminating book, The Shape of Utopia. Cheng’s thesis is that the drawings produced for what she describes as “geometric utopias” solidified amorphous ideas and served as a vital tool of argument and publicity, or “visual rhetoric.” Many reformers “believed illustrations had a unique power to sway viewers by cutting through the printed word and speaking directly to hearts and minds,” she writes.
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