VISIONARY CITIES: THE ARCOLOGY OF PAOLO SOLERI WITH text by Donald Wall and Paolo Soleri

Praeger Publishers, 1971, First edition, 210 pp., 9 3/4" X 9 3/4", Hardcover

Very good+ in very good jacket with some handling / rubbing and wear to extremities.

When Donald Wall made this book about Italian architect Paolo Soleri, he uncannily projected a vision of 1990s typography in its most radical form. "When future design historians go looking for precursors to the "new" typography of the 1990s, architecture critic Donald Wall's extraordinary monograph about the architect Paolo Soleri, published by Praeger in 1971, will require some careful attention. Just to list a few of the book's most striking typographic features is to recall the mannerisms of some of contemporary design's more celebrated figures: text blocks that run into the gutter; words reversed out of columns of type, obliterating the text; words that shoot off the edge of the text area and continue mid-letter on the next line; overlapping messages that merge in dense overlays with Soleri's photos and drawings; a giant Helvetica sentence that rolls on like a juggernaut for nineteen pages; a duplicated passage cancelled with the instruction "VOID THIS PAGE". "It is routine in the late 1990s for designers to stress the "process" of making their designs. The idea owes much to 1960s artists such as Fluxus, who emphasised the impermanence of performance and used a range of strategies, such as written instructions, to ensure the fluid character of the "work." An even more specific debt to Fluxus typography and to concrete poetry can be seen in Visionary Cities' encrusted jigsaw assemblages of words. This marathon feat of rub-down lettering exposes the process of its own making as a structural and theoretical principle. Here is a book that appears to have been freeze-framed in a state of becoming. "Where Visionary Cities differs markedly from so much recent experimentation is in the way that its manipulations are inseparable from its written content. Wall, a former professor of architectural theory, design and history at Catholic University, Washington DC, gave typographic shape to his own critical ideas, and the book is fully aware of the uniqueness of the project. Recalling El Lissitzky's famous maxim that "The new book demands the new writer," the dustjacket blurb describes Wall as "among the first of a new breed of authors."