Cities, like people, are full of contradictions. They promise order but grow through chaos. They are built on careful plans, yet shaped by imagination and memory. Cities, like dreams, a collaboration between Daniel Crouch Rare Books and Michael Hoppen Gallery for TEFAF Maastricht 2026, explores how cities have been pictured and understood across three centuries – how they have been drawn from above and experienced from within.

The exhibition brings two very different ways of seeing together. Monumental eighteenth‑century town plans – made at a time when faith in reason and measurement was at its height – are shown next to Sohei Nishino’s large‑scale photographic dioramas, dreamlike reconstructions of the same cities created from thousands of individual photographs. These pairings reveal what the city has always been: both a system and an emotion, something that can be mapped and yet never truly contained.