This 1972 image of architect Paolo Soleri’s proposed “Hexahedron” appeared in Playboy’s feature In the Image of Man by David Butler, with photography by Jeff Cohen. Presented as a dramatic photomontage, the image places Soleri’s immense speculative city along a coastline, making the futuristic structure feel almost like a real place photographed from across the water.
Hexahedron was one of Soleri’s arcology concepts, combining architecture and ecology by concentrating a large population into an extremely dense urban structure. The feature described the city as roughly two-thirds of a mile high and designed to support about 170,000 people. Seen today, the image is a striking piece of early-1970s futurism, blending architectural theory, environmental thinking, photography, and science-fiction imagery into one vision of how cities might evolve.
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