A Few Utopian Impressions - Page 2

over the face of the building, and when I look
out of my window in the early morning--for the usual Utopian working
day commences within an hour of sunrise--I see Pilatus above this
outlook, rosy in the morning sky.

This quadrangle type of building is the prevalent element in Utopian
Lucerne, and one may go from end to end of the town along corridors
and covered colonnades without emerging by a gateway into the open
roads at all. Small shops are found in these colonnades, but the
larger stores are usually housed in buildings specially adapted to
their needs. The majority of the residential edifices are far finer
and more substantial than our own modest shelter, though we gather
from such chance glimpses as we get of their arrangements that the
labour-saving ideal runs through every grade of this servantless
world; and what we should consider a complete house in earthly
England is hardly known here.

The autonomy of the household has been reduced far below terrestrial
conditions by hotels and clubs, and all sorts of co-operative
expedients. People who do not live in hotels seem usually to live in
clubs. The fairly prosperous Utopian belongs, in most cases, to one
or two residential clubs of congenial men and women. These clubs
usually possess in addition to furnished bedrooms more or less
elaborate suites of apartments, and if a man prefers it one of these
latter can be taken and furnished according to his personal taste. A
pleasant boudoir, a private library and study, a private garden
plot, are among the commonest of such luxuries. Devices to secure
roof gardens, loggias, verandahs, and such-like open-air privacies
to the more sumptuous of these apartments, give interest and variety
to Utopian architecture. There are sometimes little cooking corners
in these flats--as one would call them on earth--but the ordinary
Utopian would no more think of a special private kitchen for his
dinners than he would think of a private flour mill or dairy farm.
Business, private work, and professional practice go on sometimes in
the house apartments, but often in special offices in the great
warren of the business quarter. A common garden, an infant school,
play rooms, and a playing garden for children, are universal
features of the club quadrangles.

Two or three main roads with their tramways, their cyclists' paths,
and swift traffic paths, will converge on the urban centre, where
the public offices will stand in a group close to the two or three
theatres and the larger shops, and hither, too, in the case of
Lucerne, the head of the swift railway to Paris and England and
Scotland, and to the Rhineland and Germany will run. And as one
walks out from the town centre one will come to that mingling of