Tag Archives: Exhibition

This body of work is inspired by “The dream of King Camp Gillette.” and his proposal for the ideal city. Before perfecting his invention of the safety razor and founding what became a major American industrial and sales enterprise, King Camp Gillette (1855-1932) authored several books and pamphlets calling for radical changes in the country’s economic and social system. The first of these polemical tracts, The Human Drift, called for the establishment of an ideal society to be created by The United Company “Organized for the purpose of Producing, Manufacturing, and Distributing the Necessities of Life.” Except for agricultural and other rural pursuits, all activities and all the population would be concentrated in one giant and hyper-designed mega-city, using high-tech materials and systems, to build an urban complex that Gillette called “Metropolis.” Although Gillette’s book has been regarded as part of the tradition of utopian romances like the better-known Looking Backward, by Edward Bellamy, it can also be looked on as a serious, if misguided, proposal for organizing the urban world. Gillette was a tinkerer and inventor, and “Metropolis” represents his verbal working model of a new kind of city.