Nice Try!
Nice Try! is Curbed's new podcast about the perpetual search for utopian living. Listen to the first season today in your favorite podcast app.
Listen to Season 1 of Nice Try!
The first season of "Nice Try!" tells the stories of the world’s most fascinating communities.
What I learned from a year in utopias
2019 saw a flood of interest in idealized ways to live. But to what end?
How radical Chilean artists used architecture to find utopia
Ciudad Abierta, or the "Open City," was about reconnecting with the landscape through poetic design.
When Disney imagineered a $2.5 billion town
In this "Nice Try!" bonus episode, dive into Disney’s utopian design forays from Epcot to Celebration, Florida.
This small Indiana town is a hotbed of utopianism
New Harmony has attracted eccentric spiritual groups, social reformers, intellectuals, and artists.
The utopian ‘feminist apartment hotels’ of Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Her idea was regarded as "the most dangerous enemy American domesticity has yet had to encounter."
‘Nice Try!’ isn’t over yet. Join us for a live taping
Avery Trufelman and New York Times’s Caity Weaver will be onstage in New York City to host a special bonus episode.
Can utopia ever exist?
The final episode of Nice Try! season one explores utopias by and for feminists.
Obsessed with utopias? Read the books that inspired ‘Nice Try!’
If you’re interested in learning more about the failed utopias on the podcast, these 29 titles are a good place to start.
This failed utopia from the 1970s sparked an international dispute
"We can’t have people setting up empires on our doorstep," the prince of Tonga once said about the Republic of Minerva.
Inside the strange—and misunderstood—saga of Biosphere 2
Episode 6 of "Nice Try!" visits the Arizona research facility that began as an experimental space colony and ended as a lesson on hubris and human nature.
What five failed utopias can teach us today
Catch up on the best moments so far from Curbed’s podcast, "Nice Try!"
Inside Paraguay’s failed Aryan ‘utopia’
In the late 1800s, Nietzsche’s sister tried to establish a paradise for the white race. It ended with a suicide.
Traces of this fascist utopia still exist in modern Berlin
Episode 5 of "Nice Try!" explores Germania, the capital city Nazis designed to embody their destructive world view.
One of America’s most popular furniture styles was invented by a celibate religious sect
All Shaker furniture is symbolic of the values of the utopian spiritual sect that designed it and gave the style its name—values that are overdue for a comeback today.
The ‘free love’ utopia behind your forks and knives
Episode 4 of "Nice Try!" explores how a radical, polyamorous 19th-century commune became a symbol of middle-class domesticity.
This suburban utopia is all about worshipping nature
At Serenbe, biophilic design unlocks an alternative—and idyllic—method of suburban development.
How the dream of homeownership failed African Americans
The third episode of Nice Try! travels to postwar suburbia, where homebuyers were sold their own personal utopias.
Inside Brazil’s ‘cautionary tale’ for utopian urbanists
Brasilia is reconciling its historic identity with the realities of contemporary life.
The Kardashians have this modernist Indian city to thank for their dining chairs
The second episode of "Nice Try!" explores the Indian government’s attempt to create a town as a work of art—and the iconic furniture that was made for it.
This California ghost town began with utopian visions
A developer dreamed of transforming California desert into a futuristic dream city—then came the lawsuits.
Jamestown, America’s other experiment
The first episode of "Nice Try!" looks at England’s first permanent colony and asks: Utopia for whom?
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The modernist enclave that tested a utopian vision of LA
In the 1940s, four friends set out to build a community where the houses were affordable and stylish and neighbors shared similar beliefs in progressive ideals.
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Llano del Rio: The ruins of LA’s socialist colony
Hundreds of colonists crossed treacherous roads out of Los Angeles to form a thriving utopia in the Antelope Valley. But their dream of cooperative living was short-lived.
Photos: The faded glory of India’s modernist utopian city
A new book explores the architectural gems of Chandigarh today, after decades of adaptation and decay