Plastic Utopias: The Lost Architecture of Tomorrow uncovers a radical, half-forgotten moment in architectural history — the brief period between 1958 and 1974 when the future was imagined as soft, weightless, and infinitely repeatable. This was the age of polymer dreams: when designers believed that new synthetic materials could free humanity from gravity, permanence, and even history itself.
Through essays, recovered documents, and reconstructed photographs, the book traces the rise and fall of an international movement devoted to plastic-based living. From inflatable communes and modular domes to translucent capsules that promised total mobility, these architects of tomorrow envisioned a civilization built on flexibility and flow. They saw plastic not as cheap or artificial, but as a material of liberation — capable of dissolving the boundaries between body, dwelling, and world.
By the mid-1970s, those same utopian structures had begun to yellow, crack, and collapse. The dream curdled into an ecological nightmare. Yet in their ruins we glimpse an unresolved question that still haunts the present: what does it mean to build a future that lasts forever out of materials that never die?
Plastic Utopias revives the spirit of that vanished optimism — not as nostalgia, but as a mirror to our own synthetic century. It stands as both archive and speculation, documenting the architectures we almost had, and the futures we might still inherit.