Perhaps we’re witnessing an instance of Marx’s famed adage, “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce,” with The Line emerging as a derivative work, an echo of an echo of linear cities of yore. But what does it mean to have something like this arrive on our collective doorstep today, so bereft of any critical reflection, so unknowing of its own origins among the maneuverings of history? The Line’s gleaming, sterile renderings seem to confirm how architecture celebrates its Candide-like optimism in technology, a conscious detachment from worldly realities. The rush to draw parallels and connections between The Line and other outlandish schemes from the past is understandable, sometimes requisite. After all, this is a project that reflects some of the worst impulses in contemporary architectural practice and, because of this, it promises to live in our historical consciousness neither as embarrassment, failed scheme, or bad architecture but rather as an exemplar of that most convenient and hence overused category—the dystopia.

This is tempting, problematic, even inaccurate, for dystopia’s opposite, utopia, shares many of its characteristics. Utopia too aims for an architecture deliberately removed from the textures of reality, yet utopian projects are hardly spared the imperfections and controversies that inspired them. Perhaps it’s more apt to categorize something like The Line as speculation freed from the burden of utopia. An alternative vision is just that—a departure, a willingness to extract a project from the intricate web of social, political, and economic contexts that threaten its existence.

A 1930 Soviet magazine depicts Ivan Leonidov’s linear proposal for Magnitogorsk, an industrial hub in the Ural Mountains. Image courtesy Sovremennaia Arkhitektura, click to enlarge.

The history of architecture is replete with urban proposals characterized by explicit, purposeful linearity, many addressing genuine concerns. Some, like The Line, are marked by a sense of inevitable failure. Consider the Spanish engineer Arturo Soria y Mata’s Linear City proposal from 1882—an elongated spine facilitating the expansion of housing and manufacturing zones while minimizing physical and ecological impact. This concept resonated in subsequent schemes, notably Kenzō Tange’s 1960 Tokyo Bay project, whose spines extended into the water to accommodate additional housing modules. These proposals blurred the line (so to speak) between architecture and infrastructure, presaging Reyner Banham’s 1970s concept of “Megastructure”—inhabitable infrastructure writ large. Linear projects have also often served ideological agendas, particularly in the Soviet Union. Mikhail Okhitovich’s “disurbanist” proposals found new life in Nikolay Alexandrovich Milyutin’s linear Sotsgorod (1930). Concurrently, Ivan Leonidov, collaborating with the Organization of Contemporary Architects (OSA), developed a formally similar plan for the city of Magnitogorsk in the Urals. All embraced linear organization as a novel spatial response to rapid industrialization. While many remained theoretical, some concepts materialized—the southwestern Russian city of Volgograd’s expansive system of infrastructural trunks and branches bears the unmistakable imprint of these Soviet schemes. This rich tapestry of linear urban planning underscores The Line’s place in a long-standing architectural tradition, albeit one that in the past grappled more substantively with real-world challenges and ideological imperatives.

Linearity can be burdensome, to paraphrase architectural theorist Catherine Ingraham. And it tends to underscore existing realities rather than transcend them. Take, for instance, Peter Eisenman and Michael Graves’s 1965 Linear City—a proposed 22-mile urban megastructure linking segments of the Interstate 95 corridor. While ostensibly flexible and infrastructural, it inadvertently mirrored trends in urbanization and industrialization, echoing developments along the U.S. Highway 1 corridor between Trenton and New York, and the industrial dystopias immortalized in Robert Smithson’s 1967 Artforum piece, “The Monuments of Passaic.” The burden of linearity becomes particularly acute when, at the level of critique, these concepts descend into reductio ad absurdum. This realm is exemplified by speculative linear projects like the Continuous Monument or Archizoom’s No Stop City (1969–72), which push the concept to its logical—and absurd—extremes, illuminating the inherent limitations of megastructural linear design.

Peter Eisenman and Michael Graves’s 1965 Linear City proposal (above) prefigures the geometries of The Line (top of page). Image © Life Magazine

The Line compels us to evaluate whether the very concept of linearity can make sense in a world wracked by environmental crises, social injustice, and economic inequality. It certainly does not help that The Line exists mainly as exquisite renderings—slick, technical images whose very purpose is to secure an influx of capital. The result is alienating. The Line is so confounding because it appears as a megastructure-sized incision that treats the delicate desert ecosystem as though it were a smooth, isotropic space, devoid of obstacles and primed for the realization of pure geometry. This approach reflects a voracious appetite for terrestrial alteration in service of a grandiose vision. The image that captures it best is Walter De Maria’s “Mile Long Drawing” (1968), with its prostrate figure at the terminus of two lines, seemingly yearning for infinity yet constrained by the ultimate human limitation that is death itself.