Godin's Social Palace: Reissued Blueprint for Utopian Living

A new edition of Jean-Baptiste André Godin's 'Solutions sociales' has been published by the Familistère press, offering a detailed look at the 19th-century industrialist's utopian social housing project. Godin, a socialist inventor and Freemason, built the 'Palais social' in Guise, France, in 1860, a symmetrical complex of housing, schools, a theater, baths, nurseries, and art studios for a few hundred residents, based on Fourierist principles. The book, reissued with index, annotations, and unpublished photographs, outlines Godin's social philosophy and the architectural principles of his 'Familistère,' which he saw as key to social reform. Godin, who also owned factories in Belgium and Guise, implemented profit-sharing and an unprecedented form of corporate democracy. The text, while verbose, provides a fascinating account of modernist housing that anticipates Le Corbusier's Cité Radieuse.