Eleri Harris has a new comic on Medium about the utopian plan for Australia’s capital city of Canberra. Two idealistic American architects, Walter Burley Griffin and his wife Marion Mahoney Griffin, won a competition to design what they believed could be the greatest planned city in the history of the world.
As utopian visions are wont to do, this one imploded nearly from the beginning. Changes in government and a young nation that still identified strongly with its ties to the British Empire kept The Lucky Country from building the beautifully planned city that the Griffins had imagined.
“It’s still the Griffin’s city,” Harris writes. “But it’s a mutant echo of what was proposed.”
You can read the entire comic over at Medium.
Picture: Illustration showing how the Griffins were inspired by the Garden City movement by Eleri Harris