*How much visionary architecture-fiction was lost in the World Wars, one wonders...
http://weimarart.blogspot.com/2010/08/wenzel-hablik.html
*Wenzel Hablik, "Planets," 1913:
"Between 1909 and 1913, Hablik created wall-sized utopian visions of an outer space populated with phantastic planets and stars. These belong to the first cosmos paintings of the 20th century....
"In 1912, the Italian futurist Antonio Sant'Elia had proposed a giant airplane station for the center of Milan. His plan was a bold foreshadowing of what an airport might actually look like one day, but Sant'Elia would never see it realized. He joined the Italian army in 1915 and was killed during the Battles of the Isonzo, near Monfalcone. On the opposite side of the trenches, the architect Erich Mendelsohn, huddled in a bunker and, between mortar rounds, sketched a kind of dream city. Among his drawings were plans for a large-scale airport.
"That same year, Hablik who, strangely enough, also served at the Isonzo front as a drafted war artist, proposed a utopian community that would hover in the sky. His drawings for a "flying settlement" (below a first sketch from 1908) depicted a cylindrical airship encircled by propellers. Within its core were workshops, baths and storerooms. The upper level contained residential spaces, the lower level a landing platform for small planes. This imagination was only topped by Bruno Taut who proposed a giant aerial theatre, a "cosmic-comical amusement in silver", that would be carried aloft by airplanes and rotated by propellers in the wind, while planes disguised at comets would zoom around it....
