There's this very cool building in L.A. called the Bradbury Building.

It's an office building. It's downtown.

So you walk in and there's this kind of like dark, narrow hallway.

But then as you go further into the building, it opens up into this big atrium.

You can see straight up to the ceiling. It's made of glass.

There's these beautiful, elaborate

wrought iron railings going around everything, and there's plants everywhere. And it honestly

kind of looks like a steampunk greenhouse or something. This building has been in a ton of movies.

The most famous is probably Blade Runner, which, of course, as you know, is like a

dystopian vision of the future. But I was surprised to find when looking into the history of

this building that it was actually inspired not by a dystopian view of the future, but by a

utopian one. Specifically, it was inspired by a utopian novel written in the 1800s about time travel.

And as it turns out, besides this very cool building in downtown L.A.,

this novel actually inspired quite a lot of other real-world places and ideas, too.

I'm Amanda McGowan, and this is Atlas Obscura,

a celebration of the world's strange, incredible, and wondrous places.

Nowadays, we hear a lot more about dystopias than utopias.

I mean, picture just about any dramatic TV series you've probably watched in the last few years.

But today, I want to look backwards at a utopian book with a big impact.

Because of this book, new political parties were formed.

People started communes to live on.

And there's even some surprising ripples in our own time, from L.A.''s Bradbury building to one small Massachusetts town.

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