Progresso e Utopia: la ‘Metropolis' di King Camp Gillette e la ‘Universal Architecture' di Richard Buckminster Fuller

The utopian visions of Metropolis (1895) imagined by King Camp Gillette during the Brown Decades at the end of ninetieth, and the Universal Architecture (1932) proposed by Richard Buckminster Fuller in the twenties of twentieth century, are discussed and compared as being paradigms of community and urban planning programs. Both visions share indeed an absolute faith in science and technology progress as privileged vectors of an equally distributed wealth, while diverge on the institutional forms required in order to make effective their proposals. These urban visions – though different from the temporal and ideological point of view – not only give evidence to the impact of the utopian literature on the improvement and the transformation of the physical context, but constitute the theoretical foundation of technological utopianism and of iper-realism till the post-modernity.