Atomville: Architects, Planners, and How to Survive the Bomb

In the post-Hiroshima era, atomic cities-designed to survive a nuclear attack-remain in the science fiction realm. Yet Hungarian émigré Paul Laszlo, a successful architect in Southern California suburbia, had a utopian vision for a futuristic, paradoxically luxurious atomic city he called "Atomville," never built but nonetheless seriously proposed. Laszlo was one of the very few architects known to venture into atomic survival on this scale. This article focuses on why the architectural profession for the most part ignored the issues raised by the atomic bomb, and on Laszlo's role as an outlier. It also deals with the genesis of Atomville and its place among the many unrealized ideas put forward in the 1940s and 1950s for urban survival, including underground buildings, urban dispersal, linear cities, and cluster cities.