architecture dissertation utopia

Utopology: A Re-Interrogation of the Utopian in Architecture

• Department of Architecture and Built Environment

Research output : Thesis › Doctoral Thesis (monograph)

Bibliographical note

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• Architecture
• Art History
• Media Studies
• Social Sciences Interdisciplinary

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• Utopia Arts & Humanities 100%
• Interrogation Arts & Humanities 70%
• Utopian Arts & Humanities 63%
• Household Words Arts & Humanities 10%
• End of History Arts & Humanities 8%
• Universality Arts & Humanities 8%
• Dread Arts & Humanities 8%
• Irrelevance Arts & Humanities 8%

Research output

Research output per year

An Anatomy of Hope

Research output : Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

An Essay About Nothing

Research output : Contribution to journal › Article

YES Boss! The 8 house: Towards a projective critique

• 3 Participation in conference

Activities per year

This Thing Called Theory

Fredrik Torisson (Presenter)

Activity : Participating in or organising an event › Participation in conference

Utopian Talk Show

Fredrik Torisson (Member of programme committee)

Topographies of Harmony

T1 - Utopology

T2 - A Re-Interrogation of the Utopian in Architecture

AU - Torisson, Fredrik

N1 - Defence details Date: 2017-06-02 Time: 13:15 Place: Skissernas museum, Finngatan 2, Lund. External reviewer(s) Name: Cousins, Mark Title: Director Affiliation: Architectural Association, School of Architecture, London, UK ---

PY - 2017/5/3

Y1 - 2017/5/3

N2 - Utopia – the word is simultaneously evocative of hope and dread. As a concept it is stupendously problematic, and yet despite its alleged passing into irrelevance, utopia still remains a household word. Why is this so?Utopia has been reduced to a category. We place a solution in the category of the utopian or, conversely, the not-utopian. Without fail, discussions involving utopia will eventually veer toward debates on whether a book, project, or building is utopian or not.Utopia reduced to such a category invokes both a problematic universality and a convoluted end of history – perhaps nowhere more so than in the field of architecture. However, if we begin with the problem to which the solution is a response rather than the solution being proposed, we soon realize that utopia is more complicated than a simple image of a perfect future.The study at hand re-interrogates the utopian concept. The question is not what architecture is utopian, but how and why architecture is utopian. Utopia is reinterpreted as a concept predicated on survival and a desire for a better way of living, rather than on immortality and perfection. Utopia in this sense is monstrous; its function is to challenge the presuppositions that define the horizons of our imagination, and to show us that the future is not predetermined: the future is fundamentally open.What assumptions, then, are formative of how architects relate to the future and utopia when projections of that future perfect have become irrelevant?If the projection of a perfect future is impossible, yet intimately associated with the architect, utopia becomes paradoxical for architects. Utopian desire is instead expressed in other ways, consciously or unconsciously. The study argues that the present worldview is dominated by what is here dubbed the Network-image; we think of everything in terms of networks, privileging connections over form, and the architect is again assuming a new role for herself as a manager, rather than an expert.Networks offer different ways of working with architecture. Rather than specifying the forms of the future (projections), architects can and do work by defining and elaborating protocols that enable and cultivate connections which, according to the prevalent narrative, build transversal collectives that can potentially transform the world.However, there are other implications linked to these new opportunities. Any network is governed by multiple protocols, and the architect as manager becomes inscribed in a logic of control. There is an implicit notion that architects can produce architecture that is self-governing, participatory, and implicitly egalitarian (and instrumental in opening up the future) through designing protocols. This assumption urgently needs to be interrogated.The discussion in this study centers on the need to challenge the Network-image itself, and not only to take our role in it as given. The dissertation is an argument for considering the how of imagining the future with more scrutiny, and it offers a set of principles and a terminology for discussion to enable further research on the subject.

AB - Utopia – the word is simultaneously evocative of hope and dread. As a concept it is stupendously problematic, and yet despite its alleged passing into irrelevance, utopia still remains a household word. Why is this so?Utopia has been reduced to a category. We place a solution in the category of the utopian or, conversely, the not-utopian. Without fail, discussions involving utopia will eventually veer toward debates on whether a book, project, or building is utopian or not.Utopia reduced to such a category invokes both a problematic universality and a convoluted end of history – perhaps nowhere more so than in the field of architecture. However, if we begin with the problem to which the solution is a response rather than the solution being proposed, we soon realize that utopia is more complicated than a simple image of a perfect future.The study at hand re-interrogates the utopian concept. The question is not what architecture is utopian, but how and why architecture is utopian. Utopia is reinterpreted as a concept predicated on survival and a desire for a better way of living, rather than on immortality and perfection. Utopia in this sense is monstrous; its function is to challenge the presuppositions that define the horizons of our imagination, and to show us that the future is not predetermined: the future is fundamentally open.What assumptions, then, are formative of how architects relate to the future and utopia when projections of that future perfect have become irrelevant?If the projection of a perfect future is impossible, yet intimately associated with the architect, utopia becomes paradoxical for architects. Utopian desire is instead expressed in other ways, consciously or unconsciously. The study argues that the present worldview is dominated by what is here dubbed the Network-image; we think of everything in terms of networks, privileging connections over form, and the architect is again assuming a new role for herself as a manager, rather than an expert.Networks offer different ways of working with architecture. Rather than specifying the forms of the future (projections), architects can and do work by defining and elaborating protocols that enable and cultivate connections which, according to the prevalent narrative, build transversal collectives that can potentially transform the world.However, there are other implications linked to these new opportunities. Any network is governed by multiple protocols, and the architect as manager becomes inscribed in a logic of control. There is an implicit notion that architects can produce architecture that is self-governing, participatory, and implicitly egalitarian (and instrumental in opening up the future) through designing protocols. This assumption urgently needs to be interrogated.The discussion in this study centers on the need to challenge the Network-image itself, and not only to take our role in it as given. The dissertation is an argument for considering the how of imagining the future with more scrutiny, and it offers a set of principles and a terminology for discussion to enable further research on the subject.

KW - Utopia

KW - Architecture

KW - Networks

KW - Architect

KW - Arboraphobia

KW - Anticipation

KW - Monsters

M3 - Doctoral Thesis (monograph)

SN - 978-91-7753-285-9

PB - Lund University

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Notes on Utopia, the City, and Architecture

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Antoine Picon; Notes on Utopia, the City, and Architecture. Grey Room 2017; (68): 94–105. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/GREY_a_00222

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Utopia. The Design of the Ideal City

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• First Online: 20 July 2017
• pp 1353–1364
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• Ubaldo Occhinegro 2  

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Civil Engineering ((LNCE,volume 3))

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This contribution arises from some reflections and studies about the idea of ‘Utopian City’. All those meditations subsequently flowed in an overall intellectual and imaginative abstract depiction whence a series of architectural drawings representing ‘Ideals Cities’ came to light between 2014 and 2017 by the Author. Architect’s will to imagine alternative, utopian cities grows almost naturally with the awareness on the difficulties ‘real’ cities undeniably have always had in addressing the complexity of human needs. Arising in contrast with the commonly shared idea of what people genuinely perceive as ‘ordinary’ in structures and buildings because of the familiarity they acquired with that ‘concrete surrounding’ usually defined as ‘architectonic reality’, the ‘utopian eye’ is a limited though extremely important instrument Architects may use to open a window on a fanciful reproduction of the natural space thus re-imagined through a number of mental creative operations aiming to give birth to a very personal Ideal World. This innate aspiration can operate on different levels to satisfy several needs: from a mere research on the built-form of a City it can finally head to ‘monumentalize’ it, even landing to an investigation about both social and anthropological norms lying at the very basis of both formal and compositive development of the City. The mental process that leads the ‘Utopian Architect’ in re-shaping the urban body, re-defining the conception of public and private spaces, re-organizing the hierarchy of roads, squares and buildings, is what the Author wants to investigate in this research as well as within his drawings.

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Choay F (1973) La città utopie e realtà. Giulio Einaudi Editore, Torino

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Tafuri M (1973) Progetto e Utopia. Laterza editori, Bari

Panowsky E (1974) La prospettiva come forma simbolica. Feltrinelli, Milano

Moore T (1516) (2006) Libretto davvero aureo sulla migliore forma di repubblica e su una nuova isola chiamata Utopia. Laterza edizioni 2006, Bari

Ricoeur P (1997) L’idéologie et l’utopie. Édition du Seuil, Paris

Rykwert J (2002) L’idea di città. Adelphi, Milano

Mumford L (2008) Storia dell’utopia. Donzelli, Roma

(2010) Utopies. In: ≪Cités≫, n. 42. PUF, Paris

Foucault M (2006) Utopie eterotopie. Cronopio, Napoli

Piranesi GB (1762) Il Campo Marzio dell’antica Roma. Roma

Marletta A (2011) L’arte del contemperare. Storia e progetto nell’opera Il Campo Marzio dell’antica Roma di Giovanni Battista Piranesi. Ph.D. thesis, Università degli Studi di Catania, Catania

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Occhinegro, U. (2018). Utopia. The Design of the Ideal City. In: Amoruso, G. (eds) Putting Tradition into Practice: Heritage, Place and Design. INTBAU 2017. Lecture Notes in Civil Engineering , vol 3. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57937-5_139

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Imagining New Worlds. Or How Architecture Has Dreamt Of Utopia

By Benedetta Ricci

“A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias” Oscar Wilde

In a time of turmoil, it is instructive to think about how an ideal place to live should look, and what elements it should consist of in order to fulfil the needs of a diverse population. Since the dawn of time, humankind has not only strived for a better society in political and philosophical terms, but also dreamt, drawn and endeavoured to design the best one for it to inhabit–an idealised world for harmonious living. This is what has come to be known as ‘utopia’: an imaginary state of things, so perfect that it is unreachable and unattainable. When it comes to art, utopian ambitions have been very impactful, though the relationship between utopia and art is deeply paradoxical–at the same time always and never existing, in the constant pursuit of something that will never be. Architecture and its varied practitioners and theorists have come closest, collecting utopian ideas with the objective of turning them into something concrete – since the ideal society can only inhabit the ideal city. Architects have conceived imaginative designs that sometimes even reached actual construction, but more often remained at the planning stage.

Long before the term ‘utopia’ was even coined, Plato, in his best-known work, the Republic , written around 375 BC, proposed the first example of this long cultural strand, imagining a city-state, called Callipolis (literally ‘Beautiful City’) ruled by a philosopher-king. For the word ‘utopia’ to enter the lexicon and frame the idea, we need to leap forward almost two thousand years: it was 1516 when the English philosopher Sir Thomas More published a book about the political system of an imaginary island state which he named, in fact, Utopia . The term comes from Greek and is the combination of ‘ou’ (‘not’) and ‘topos’ (‘place’) which translates as ‘no-place’ defining a hypothetical or non-existent reality. But there’s a subtle wordplay behind this terminology. According to the English pronunciation, ‘ Utopia’ is pronounced as ‘Eu-topia’ (where, from the Greek, the prefix ‘eu’ stands for ‘good’ or ‘happy’) which literally means ‘good place’ or ‘happy place’. This ambiguity has led to a complex double meaning suggesting that the perfect society is one that does not or cannot exist.

Utopian thinking, and consequently utopian architecture, has emerged in alternating phases throughout history, always characterising great moments of cultural ferment and desire for renewal, especially during the early Renaissance, the period around the French Revolution and the Twentieth Century.

“The home of the Utopian impulse was architecture rather than painting or sculpture. Painting can make us happy, but building is the art we live in; it is the social art par excellence, the carapace of political fantasy, the exoskeleton of one’s economic dreams. It is also the one art nobody can escape.” Robert Hughes

Renaissance ‘Ideal City’

With the advent of fifteenth-century humanism, which renewed the affirmation of humankind’s centrality, along with the rediscovery of art and classical architecture as well as the recent invention of perspective, the theme of the “ideal city” was brought back to the centre of the debate. The Renaissance idea involved an urban design reflecting a predominantly geometric scheme, founded on criteria of rationality, but also with the ambition to combine functional requirements with an inspired aesthetic sensitivity.

The unknown painter of The Ideal City – some attribute it to Piero Della Francesca or Melozzo da Forlì, while others have suggested Leon Battista Alberti or Luciano Laurana as the author – represented the absolute model of the Renaissance city: conceived as a chessboard where the polychrome marbled streets reflect and amplify the city’s status and structure; the buildings, just like chessboard pieces, are placed at regular intervals of space, according to canons of absolutist precision, including, amongst other precepts, the golden ratio and Euclidean geometry.

Since the second half of the fifteenth century, there were some attempts to commit theory into practice, respecting the ideal requirements of aesthetics, rationality, and balance between functionalities: including representations of authority (the palace), defence (the fortifications), habitation (housing structures) and, finally, entertainment (the theatre), and also including other elements such as piazze, which serve both to aggrandise but also provide places where public gathering can happen. The actual practical achievements were few in number, but some can still be admired. Among the most spectacular cases is the city of Palmanova, a concentric fortress-town with radiant streets in northern Italy. Founded by the Venetian Republic and designed by the architect Vincenzo Scamozzi in 1593, the city was an extremely innovative example of an urban settlement that involved the use of all the latest military devices. Also Urbino, Pienza, and Ferrara, in Italy as well, have been planned according to utopian ideals.

Revolutionary Architects

In the second half of the 18th century, at the height of the French Enlightenment, a group of architects returned to classicism and the purity of simple geometric forms, but with a philosophical focus on the writings of philosophers such as Rousseau and Burke. Among them, the most influential were Étienne-Louis Boullée and Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, often referred to as “visionary architects” or “revolutionary architects” as they interpreted the changes as linked to the French Revolution – though without getting actually involved in it. Architecture had become a discipline capable of redeeming from ignorance, prejudice, and obscurantism.

The architecture of this time was characterised by an intense ethical and symbolic value. It was also defined as “talking architecture” because of its ability to communicate and evoke moral values and civil virtues through symbolism and allusion. Projects were not unfeasible, yet also ambitious, making them strongly utopian both in philosophical terms, but also in their likelihood of being realised. According to Boullée, architecture was like poetry: valuable only if capable of arousing strong feelings. Beauty lay in symmetry, proportion and variety, and the sphere, composed of these characters altogether, was the perfect shape. His style, monumental yet devoid of all unnecessary ornamentation, found its maximum expression in the design of the Cenotaph for Sir Isaac Newton (1784): a colossal hollow sphere, more than one-hundred-and-fifty meters high, surrounded on the outside by concentric rings of cypresses, and arranged on three levels, as in ancient Roman mausoleums.

Externally, the sphere was intended to represent the Earth, while encased inside the volume was the celestial vault. Convexity and concavity expressed a paradox of the human mind: confined by certain limits, yet able to conceptually grasp the infinity of the universe. Due to the inadequacy of the materials and construction processes of the time the project was never realised. With almost no surviving built works and only suggestive drawings and engravings to support his fame, Boullée was almost entirely forgotten until the art historian Emil Kaufmann, in the late 1920s, rediscovered his work, ensuring he would exert a strong influence over generations of 20th-century architects.

More notorious was his younger colleague Claude-Nicolas Ledoux. Like Boullée, he was disinterested in buildings’ usability and functionality, but instead preferring to emphasize the poetic aspect of architecture, Ledoux’s ambition was to affirm the social role of the architect as a political, educational and moral reformer of modern times. His most grandiose utopian project was the visionary plan for the ideal city of Chaux, as an expansion of the Royal Saltworks at Arc-et-Senans. The work actually started in 1775, but was interrupted a few years later and never completed.

The project was supposed to inculcate a rational geometry with a hierarchical relation between the parts, but also incorporate a radical symbolism that associated the shape of a building with its function. For instance, the house for the river watchmen was designed as a hollow cylinder inside which the watercourse was meant to flow. His ideas did not reach the solemnity of Boullée’s but exemplified the ideal of an architecture supporting social reform, which has often led him to be presented as a precursor of modern social reform in architecture.

Utopian Vision in the Early 20th Century

At the beginning of the 20th century, constantly accelerating industrial production made new materials possible and widely available, including glass in large panes, steel, and reinforced concrete, all of which sparked the imagination of avant-garde architects. Different artistic movements found in these new materials and manufacturing techniques the inspiration to dream of a modern world about to come, yet also tantalisingly within reach. The Futurists , in particular, were obsessed with innovation and saw themselves as pioneers imbued with a mission to create a new civilization; they declared “ We stand on the last promontory of the centuries! (…) Why should we look back, when what we want is to break down the mysterious doors of the Impossible? ”. Out with classical references and simple volumes but forward with dynamism and speed, the hallmarks of a new technocratic society.

The Italian architect Antonio Sant’Elia embraced the twin ideals of mechanisation and motion, proposing a vision of a modern city in the form of a gigantic machine; he named it Città Nuova (“New City”), a name quite contextually appropriate. This futurist city, designed between 1912 and 1914, was a vast, multi-level, interconnected urban conurbation where massive skyscrapers were integrated by elevators, bridges, and elevated walkways in a constantly evolving artificial landscape. Paradoxically, Sant’Elia, like many other Futurists, saw warfare as the means to destroy the old world and build the much sought-after future. However, it was the entropy of war itself that would shatter their illusions, destroying not only the socio-economic conditions necessary to facilitate such grandiose plans but also its main protagonists–Sant’Elia was himself killed in a battle at the age of twenty-eight with almost no completed works of architecture left behind. Nonetheless, if his sketches seem familiar,, it is because his utopian visions have inspired masterpieces of cinema like Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982).

At the same time, on the other side of Europe, Russian artists and architects were searching for a new communist aesthetic, also intended to be both symbolic and monumental. Reminiscent of Cubist and Futurist examples, Constructivist architecture merged the former’s abstract geometry with the latter’s dynamism and technological character. Projects often included propagandistic imagery and the promise of a renewed industrialised society. Unfortunately, many ideas were far too ambitious and collided with the USSR’s practical reality. Among the many unrealised – and unrealisable – projects, stands the Monument to the Third International designed by Vladimir Tatlin, also known as Tatlin’s Tower . The spiral construction, around four hundred meters high, should have been built from industrial materials as a socialist symbol of modernity, and a direct counterpart, and competitor, to the Eiffel Tower.

Two of the most renowned masters of 20th-century architecture have also ventured into utopian architecture; both Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright tried their hand at regenerative schemes infused with social function. The French-Swiss architect was frustrated by the way Paris’ urban plan seemed to exacerbate economic segregation: while the bourgeois tended to inhabit the city centre where land prices were rising tremendously, lower classes were pushed to overcrowded suburbs where they lived in inhuman conditions and where epidemics were commonplace. Strongly believing that an efficient urban design could not only improve city life but the entirety of society, Le Corbusier decided, in 1925, to plan a redevelopment of central Paris. His idea, named Plan Voisin , was extremely radical and involved demolishing two square miles of downtown Paris to build eighteen widely spaced, 60-story cruciform towers, placed on a rectangular grid in an enormous green space. This high-density housing right in the city centre would have shortened the commuting distances and encouraged rapid intercommunication. Concerning the plan, Le Corbusier wrote: “Paris of tomorrow could be magnificently equal to the march of events that is day by day bringing us ever nearer to the dawn of a new social contract” . His utopian vision never left the drafting table.

In opposition to Le Corbusier’s idea of a densely populated city was Frank Lloyd Wright’s proposal: his main objective was the perfect harmony between built and natural environment, so in 1932 he imagined his own utopia, Broadacre City, where a minimum of one acre of ground was assigned to each household. In essence, he removed almost everything that was remotely urban, except for private cars to which the streets were entirely dedicated – pedestrians could only safely exist within the confines of the one-acre – and “aerators”, air travel devices that could take off and land vertically with no need of a landing strip, again one for each family. Although he never managed to build Broadacre City, some of its principles are the core of today’s American suburbs.

Utopian Visions in the 1960s and 1970s

A new wave of utopian visions characterised the decades following World War II. On the one hand, there was a real need to rebuild cities after the wreckage of war, and on the other an urge to replace the prevailing societal ills that had fomented such catastrophic conflict in the first place. The 1960s and, to a lesser extent, the 1970s, conveyed feelings of optimism and possibility, a renewed spirit of community and the sense that broader possibilities than ever before existed – scientifically, politically as well as artistically.

Among the most radical ideas, Paolo Soleri conceived ‘ arcology ‘, a combination of architecture and ecology, and designed to create a democratic society. The Italian architect, once settled in the United States, considered life in the American suburbs unhappy, unhealthy and wasteful, and a cause of self-isolation and social degradation. In response he designed low-impact, highly dense structures; buildings so enormous they exist as city entities unto themselves–compact and energy-efficient volumes where private means of transport did not exist and the most convenient way to get around was walking. His ideal city was an organism in which everyone and everything was part of a larger whole. For instance, Hexahedron Arcology , one of his most visionary projects, was a sort of artificial mountain in the shape of two pyramids, one straight, one inverted, hosting 170,000 residents. In 1970, in the middle of the desert in central Arizona, Soleri began to build a prototype city emblematic of ‘arcology’, with the aim of maximising human interaction, enjoying nature, the use of available local resources, a minimised use of energy, and a significant reduction in waste and environmental pollution. The city, called Arcosanti , has been in construction ever since as an extreme experimental project and is one of the rare examples of utopian architecture whose realization has come close to its hypothetical model.

But most of all, the 1960s and 1970s were the years of architecture collectives, utopian groups that saw architecture as an instrument of political, social, and cultural critique. Among the best known, Archizoom and Super Studio in Italy, Ant Farm in San Francisco, and especially Archigram in the UK. The latter, formed in London in 1961, employed unusual media and formats, such as collages, zines, comic strips and radical statements to spread the vision of pop, high-tech, consumerist cities. Their work was mainly imaginative and provocative, and their playful and dynamic cities like Plug-in City and Instant City had no presumption of actual realisation.

Still today, after centuries and centuries of ideas and false starts, the dream society and the architecture for it to live in seem to be unreachable. One just has to think of the problems humanity is facing these days: inequality, climate change, problems connected with access to food and clean water, overcrowded megalopolis, just to mention a few. Perhaps utopian thinkers and utopian architecture may yet have their most significant role to play.

Relevant  sources to learn more

Le Corbusier Foundation Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Arcosanti Project Ant Farm Archigram Brutalist Architecture: The Defining Style of the 20th Century? Gesamtkunstwerk. The Total Work Of Art Through The Ages.

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Utopian Thought and Architectural Design

Anthony L. Faith , University of Massachusetts Amherst Follow

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This thesis proposes that architectural utopian ideas are the foundation for societal change. The communities that form from utopian ideas act as test sites for societal values on a microscale (Gondolf 1985). When communities work together on a utopian vision through dialogue, they avoid the pitfall of one person’s utopian vision being blanketed over the world (Schneekloth 1998). Utopian communities solve problems through experimentation that create different ways of living which act as visions that can provide hope (ibid). Ruth Levitas, author of The Concept of Utopia, defines utopia as “the expression of the desire for a better way of living” (Gizem Deniz Guneri 2019,155). In this thesis I articulate a framework for understanding utopian societies in sociological terms, as a place or idea created with clearly stated design principles. Utopian communities have clear boundaries and ideological principles that favor the wellbeing of the group above that of the individual (Gondolf 1985). Moreover, social mechanisms in the form of designed social conventions are the traits of successful utopian communities (ibid).

The natural settings of utopian artists' retreats and craft schools contribute to creativity, community connection, and an increased appreciation for these natural settings. A comparison of four creative places, Black Mountain College (NC), Haystack Mountain School for Crafts (ME), Pilchuck Glass School (WA), and MacDowell (NH) are used to identify the positive characteristics of natural settings.

Using these precedents and associated literature on utopian communities. I have collected a series of features that contribute to the ideal environmental, architectural, and organizational design practices of utopian communities. This thesis then employs a research through design methodology to illustrate and test these features through a single, prototypical project. The findings of this thesis include a list of opportunities and challenges presented by this project, which can be broadly applied to similar endeavors.

https://doi.org/10.7275/35401163

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Faith, Anthony L., "Utopian Thought and Architectural Design" (2023). Masters Theses . 1314. https://doi.org/10.7275/35401163 https://scholarworks.umass.edu/masters_theses_2/1314

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The Perils of Transdisciplinarity: Utopian Studies and Architecture

Utopia trouble, against the city, toward a definition of utopia in architecture, untangling utopia from visionary, defining utopia for architecture, prospects for a utopian architecture: the social and the political, an open question, the problematic of architecture and utopia.

nathaniel coleman is a reader in history and theory of architecture at Newcastle University. He first studied architecture at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies and received his BFA and B.Arch degrees from the Rhode Island School of Design, his MUP degree in urban design from City College of New York, and his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Utopias and Architecture (2005) and editor of Imagining and Making the World: Reconsidering Architecture and Utopia (2011), and his most recent book, Lefebvre for Architects , will be published in July 2014. Guest editor of this special issue of Utopian Studies on architecture and utopia, he has published numerous journal articles and book chapters internationally on the problematic of architecture and Utopia, the city, and architecture education. Coleman is particularly interested in Utopia's generative potential.

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Nathaniel Coleman; The Problematic of Architecture and Utopia. Utopian Studies 1 April 2014; 25 (1): 1–22. doi: https://doi.org/10.5325/utopianstudies.25.1.0001

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The job of recovering or recuperating Utopia for architecture is no easy task, considering how deeply entrenched suspicions about Utopia are in the discipline of architecture, as elsewhere. In an attempt to set the stage for the articles that follow, the introduction to this special issue on architecture and Utopia is dedicated to explaining just how and why Utopia has become so estranged from architecture that it requires recuperation.

Architecture and the architect, threatened with disappearance, capitulate before the property developer who spends the money. —Henri Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis

And best of all is finding a place to be in the early years of a better civilisation. —Dennis Lee, Civil Elegies

As the articles in this special issue on the problematic of architecture and Utopia attest, the final word on the influence of Utopia on architecture, and of the veracity of claims that modern architecture in particular was utopian, is a long way off. Definitions are elusive, as is any real sense of persistent or consistent clarity about what exactly is intended by nominating this or that architecture or city plan utopian. At the very least, the articles that follow are testament to the significant difficulties of working cross- or transdisciplinarily. If the articles that follow are understood in this way, each can equally be understood as making a significant contribution to developing our understanding of architecture and Utopia, from within the discipline of architecture and the field of utopian studies simultaneously.

As a fundamentally transdisciplinary field of knowledge, utopian studies places great demands on scholars who attempt to do justice to the body of knowledge out of which the field is constructed, without doing violence to whatever other fields of knowledge are placed in proximity to it—in the instance of the essays that follow, architecture and urbanism, including diverse considerations of history, theory, and design. By the same token, as we all pretty much play out our lives in designed and constructed environments, it can be all too easy to presume a depth of understanding about architecture that is generally premature, at least if the aim is to do justice to architecture and urbanism as interrelated disciplines bound up with giving shape to the spaces of intimate and social interaction, which simultaneously struggle with ethical and aesthetical demands that can often appear to be at cross-purposes to one another, to such an extent that a tug-of-war arguably exists between them. Resolving this struggle and mastering architecture and Utopia simultaneously in the development of the arguments that follow are surely revealed as an exceedingly taxing endeavor.

And yet, a partial resolution resides in the shared condition of all of us having grown up in cultures where the denotative and connotative codes of architecture are learned through the body—even if often repressed on account of some obsession with novelty, perhaps, or because the built environment has become increasingly impoverished during the past century or more—and Utopia arguably describes something unique about human longing and desire, for a better way of being and sociability alike, achieved within settings suited to such accomplishment. Put as succinctly as possible: Utopia and architecture are pervasive, contributing in equal measure to the very fabric out of which individual and collective lives are made. If this claim were to be believed, then I would invite readers to consider the articles that make up this special issue on the problematic of architecture and Utopia as attempts to recover (or recuperate) Utopia for architecture and as attempts to resituate architecture and the city at the center of utopian considerations.

The job of recovering or recuperating Utopia for architecture is no easy task, considering how deeply entrenched suspicions about Utopia are in the discipline of architecture, as elsewhere. In an attempt to set the stage for the articles that follow, my introduction to this special issue on architecture and Utopia is dedicated to explaining just how and why Utopia has become so estranged from architecture that it requires recuperation.

Twentieth-century modern architecture, particularly in association with city planning, has, at least since the 1950s, been derided for its utopian ambitions. Postmodern architecture emerged in the mid-1960s—both as a “new” style and as simply that architecture coming after modern architecture—ostensibly in response to revelations, writ in concrete, that the grand narratives of modern architecture were exaggerated and untenable. In all of its guises, postmodern architecture has mostly positioned itself as other than modern architecture, largely through articulations of its negative relationship to Utopia. More precisely, if modern architecture is conventionally characterized (no matter how questionably) as having been fundamentally utopian in its aims and delusions, postmodern architecture—in its many appearances, from stylistic historicism to a sort of hypermodernism—is normally self-consciously characterized by adherents as being intrinsically anti-utopian. Following on from this, postmodern practices—processes as much as results—are asserted as embodying wise resistance to the hazards of utopian dreaming. Having learned from the apparent utopian failures of the past, architects today like to imagine themselves as being immune to Utopia, ostensibly assuring that their work will also have overcome the utopian fiasco of twentieth-century architecture, particularly in its attempts to remake the city.

Extolling the virtues of wiser postmodernisms as a tonic for the failures of modernism reveals how contemporary views on Utopia from within architecture remain decidedly negative. Although it is difficult to ascertain exactly when modern architecture was first characterized as utopian, architectural historian Tim Benton argues that “utopia is” most certainly “a post modernist term” that “wasn't used by modernists in the high period of modernism in architecture” (from the turn of the twentieth century until the late 1950s) and that “in using this term” we are “applying a current concept rather than one that was active at the time.” 1 Surely, negative criticism of orthodox modern architecture, which began emerging in the 1950s, mostly explains its failings as a consequence of its transactions with Utopia.

Among all the critics of modern architecture and the utopianism that is to have caused its downfall, Colin Rowe was perhaps the most influential, especially by way of his book Collage City , written with Fred Koetter and first published in 1978 (though large parts of it were informally circulated much earlier). While there have been other architectural historians, theorists, and critics who cast a sharper eye on architecture or made a deeper analysis of its historical development, arguably none have been more influential in shaping architectural practice in the North American context and the Anglosphere more generally, either implicitly or explicitly (the reach of which has been extended worldwide by way of globalization).

Rowe and Koetter's book proposed a reading of twentieth-century modernist architecture and city planning that apparently revealed the fatal flaws that poisoned it from the outset. According to the authors, the peculiar admixture of blind faith in technoscience combined with a desire for a return to paradise ensured that modern architecture would be the enemy of urban life. In short, a species of technological utopianism was identified as the ultimate culprit. Overcoming the influence of utopian thinking in architecture was advanced as the only sure guarantee against repeating the failures of the modern movement and for protecting us from its tyrannical tendencies more generally.

While the failures of modern architecture are by now as well rehearsed as they are well documented and experienced, it is difficult to see how contemporary architecture—unencumbered of its putative utopianism and earlier aspirations to become an international style (akin to the classical language of architecture that persisted from ancient Greece and Rome until its final collapse at the end of the nineteenth century)—has produced a built environment superior to that established by modern architecture. Ultimately, the limited success of the supposedly Utopia-free architecture following in the wake of modernism's apparent demise encourages a rethinking of the anti-utopianism promoted by Collage City . A good place to begin is with the prospect that much of the modern architecture attracting the harshest criticism was actually dystopian rather than utopian—closer in tone to the Fordism of Aldous Huxley's (1894–1963) dystopian novel Brave New World (1932) and the Taylorism of Yevgeny Zamyatin's (1884–1937) influential dystopia We (1921) than to the utopianism, for example, of Thomas More (1478–1535), Charles Fourier (1772–1837), or William Morris (1834–1896). 2 The unimagined consequence of this underexplored dimension of modern architecture is that contemporary (postmodern) architecture—no matter how much it may lack a social dimension or be ideologically neutral, formalist, or collagist—remains confined by the same dystopian Fordist and Taylorist framework that modern architecture originally succumbed to, largely because the consciousness out of which it emerged is shared with its predecessors, with present-day architecture even more decisively entrapped within the building industry.

The main criticism of modern architecture identifies the tendency of its adherents to engage in a species of naive and ham-fisted social determinism in the belief that form not only could influence behavior but could actually shape it by transforming the individual and social life that came in contact with it. Rowe certainly held this negative view of modern architecture as well, but he went further. For him, the utopianism of modern architecture ensured that it would forever be at odds with the dynamism of reality. The consequences of utopianist attempts, as he called them, would be to still time, as a product of moderns' hostility toward history and culture, made manifest in the great setting and expression of both: the city (especially in attempts to erase it).

It is certain that modern architecture, in the guise of urban renewal, set upon the traditional city with a degree of ferociousness equaled only by the devastation of total war. There is something to this: if World War II was in large part an assault on the silted-up inheritance of European civilization at the hands of technology unhinged from any ethical restraint and organized according to banal bureaucratic structures, the remaking of the city according to the logic of traffic planning and ahistorical modernization has done a shockingly good job of dismantling the physical forms of the traditional city that once gave shape to the social life for which it had long been a stage.

The traditional city, wherever it may be found and in all of its manifestations—from antiquity to the nineteenth century—reveals a trace linking civic life in the present to its origins in the past and ongoing transformations through time. Although modern architecture was often as brutal in its effect on the traditional city as it was philistine and pigheadedly ahistorical in its thinking, a most valuable component of the absolutist utopianism that arguably characterized too much modern architecture was its earnest, albeit woefully naive, commitment to the betterment of society, supposedly achievable by making a new, better-organized, more hygienic, and often strangely parklike world over the traditional city. Rowe was horrified by this species of supposedly utopian dreaming that demands to be given shape over the tabula rasa made by clearing away the past.

The alternative espoused by Rowe required the making of forms without Utopia, which would take flesh as a kind of architecture as free of ideology as it would be of social dreaming. While Rowe's horror at the destructive potential wrought by the ravages of World War II and the erasure of the traditional city in the name of renewal and progress was well founded, architects liberated from any kind of ethical restraint and definitively awoken from their immemorial social dreaming remain hard-pressed to reimagine a role for themselves within society. Freed from a concern with social housing or the betterment of society—no matter how often both ended in failure—architects are now primarily preoccupied with making images, serving developers, or being fashionable.

Rowe was preoccupied with images too, so he encouraged raiding history for good examples that could be decontextualized with methods borrowed from collage, for reuse where and however. The imagined effect of this would be improvement of the built environment by drawing upon superior historical models while emptying them of any political or ideological content. By divesting these ready-mades of their social, cultural, political, and historical baggage, architects and the built environment would be inoculated against the dangerous excesses of Utopia, what Rowe called “the embarrassment of utopian politics.”

Overcoming Utopia, for Rowe, would redeem architecture. In actuality, it has succeeded only in making it even more the handmaiden of overorganization, commerce, and narcissistic self-indulgence than modern architecture ever was. The modern neoliberal city divested of social dreaming, and thus of utopian possibility, threatens to become an ever more dreary setting best suited to passivity, transfixed by entertainment, consumption, management, planning, and the banal and bureaucratic organization of human resources. While this is not what Rowe hoped for, ethical restraint is arguably always ideological in character, and social dreaming is fundamentally utopian. As such, a built environment made with neither will be overburdened by a stultifying realism ever out of step with the repressed aspirations of civic life.

Although modern architecture's association with Utopia could seem self-evident, considerations of architecture and Utopia from within the discipline and by utopian studies scholars are beset by a troubling lack of precision in defining the utopian dimensions of architecture and urbanism or how either might actually benefit from encounters with Utopia. If this assertion is accepted, any meaningful recuperation of Utopia for architecture must begin with clarifying what this might actually offer. In most circles, including architecture and utopian studies, visual representations of novel forms (and on occasion their construction) have been enough to designate individual works of architecture and city plans as utopian. Arguably, an unwillingness to risk strong declarations as to what makes works of architecture utopian—beyond newness—ensures that Utopia will remain an apparent irrelevance in discussions of architecture. By the same token, in the absence of definition, conventional readings of orthodox modern architecture as utopian, and as having actually attempted to give form to Utopia in its heyday, will persist. Because the preponderantly negative reading of modern architecture as utopian largely derives from profound dissatisfaction with the real failures of twentieth-century architecture to produce a humane city, Utopia has become a damning myth for architects and the public alike, even though the overconfident inventors of the modern city rarely if ever asserted Utopia as their aim. 3

The association of the city of modern architecture with Utopia by critics, theorists, and architects, including Jane Jacobs, Colin Rowe, and Robert Venturi (among others), has less to do with Utopia's vocation for envisaging alternatives than with something akin to a stylistic critique that is decidedly aesthetical, or formalist, rather than ethical. 4 Understood in this way, Utopia has come to equal impossibility or failure in modern architecture, if not worse. 5 Equally, confusion of “visionary” and “technological utopianism” with a more convincingly utopian dimension in architecture prevails in architectural discourse and stymies identification of a more precise and thus useful definition of Utopia in relation to architecture. As a corrective, the conception of architecture and Utopia introduced here is constructed with reference to the partial definitions of Utopia and architecture suggested by David Harvey, Fredric Jameson, Ruth Levitas, Tom Moylan, Lyman Tower Sargent, and Henri Lefebvre and inevitably draws upon my own earlier clarifications. 6 If greater precision in defining the association of architecture and Utopia is not achieved, persisting conceptual confusion risks fixing Utopia as at best no more than a category of stylistic novelty in architecture.

I would argue that constructing a convincing association of Utopia and architecture requires the following: social and political content; a significant level of detail in the description of what is proposed; elaboration of a positive transformation of social and political life as key to what is proposed or constructed; and, not least, a substantive—ethical and aesthetical—critique of the present informed by a critical-historical perspective. In short, a discernible utopian dimension of architecture or urbanism (no matter how partial the claim to Utopia may be) entails a sustained consideration of both social process and spatial closure . It is also important to underline that clarifying an understanding of architecture and Utopia is not about taste, indexing “likes” and “dislikes” relative to specific examples of each, or about relative levels of novelty or strangeness. Rather, a verifiably utopian dimension in architecture and urbanism is, in the first instance, suggested by literary Utopias (including architectural treatises), intentional communities, utopian studies, and specific works of architecture. 7

While there is real value in considering the associations between architecture and Utopia, an argument for architecture as Utopia is less promising. If architecture must embody the four elements introduced above to be called a Utopia (which is the assertion here), then identifying any individual work of architecture or larger urban ensemble as a Utopia would be all but impossible. But shifting the scale somewhat, so that a requirement for total application (as is associated with Utopia in its blueprint form) is surrendered, conceptualizing Utopia as ever unfinished—and acceptably so—becomes possible. Thinking of architecture as having utopian potential , or a utopian dimension , enables a more productive way to consider how Utopia could enrich architecture. Rather than requiring an absolute embodiment of the four elements of Utopia introduced above, some persuasive admixture of them that renders a work convincingly utopian would be acceptable, even at the level of a single building, as a partial Utopia . Even so, detailed description of the proposed transformation, particularly its social dimension, and how this would ostensibly improve conditions, is requisite. 8

In consideration of the conception of Utopia introduced above, the first task confronting any attempt to gain a more precise definition of Utopia for architecture is to untangle the terms visionary and Utopia from one another. The necessity of doing so derives from the frequency with which they are confused as synonyms in architectural discourse. For example, Neil Spiller's recent Visionary Architecture: Blueprints of the Modern Imagination (2006) and Jane Alison and Marie-Ange Brayer's Future City: Experiment and Utopia in Architecture (2007) are revealing for the degree to which visionary and Utopia appear to be interchangeable when considered across both volumes. Other recent books that encourage such confusion include Ruth Eaton's Ideal Cities: Utopianism and the (Un)Built Environment (2002) and Franco Borsi's Architecture and Utopia (1997).

The first thing one notices in considering the books listed above is their shared emphasis on image, on representations collected together that are presumed to indicate Utopia, apparently without the need of much argument to explain why this might be so. Simply analyzing the book titles reveals other aspects of how Utopia is commonly construed in concert with architecture. For example, the title of Eaton's book suggests that ideal cities are forms of Utopia, which might be true, but not in all instances, including a number of examples in the book that are dubiously so at best. More importantly, the book's title suggests that remaining unbuilt is a key criterion for identifying Utopia in architecture and urbanism, whether ideal or utopian. Granted, the titles of the other books listed are somewhat less forthcoming, but examination of their contents quickly reveals how entrenched the confusion of visionary and Utopia is in considerations of architecture and cities. Among other possible meanings, visionary suggests something inspired, imaginative, creative, inventive, ingenious, enterprising, innovative; insightful, perceptive, intuitive, prescient, discerning, shrewd, wise, clever, resourceful; idealistic, romantic, quixotic, dreamy; or starry-eyed. 9

While Utopias may include all of the qualities associated with visionary , visionary lacks those very crucial aspects of Utopia that suggest, despite its association with failure and totalitarianism, how it remains a valuable term for describing a constellation of possibility and concerns now normally absent from architecture. The most significant point of distinction between the two terms is that while visionary is bound up with unreality , Utopia's vocation is to act upon reality, at least when it is concrete rather than abstract (despite its association with impossibility as often constituting the sum total of common understandings of it). The term Utopia may appear to be too much of a burden, for its bad name and negative associations, to be of much use to the development of enriched methods for inventing more comprehensive architecture and cities; however, no other term captures the dynamic relation between (architectural) form and (social) process as well. Thus, despite its taint, the recuperation of Utopia remains a worthwhile project, albeit an apparently quixotic one.

The key component in the definition of Utopia that distinguishes it from visionary is the requirement that it take up the elaboration, or depiction, of “a perfect social, legal, and political system.” A further definition locates Utopia squarely within the province of architecture and urbanism in a way that no definition of visionary does: “a place, state, or condition ideally perfect in respect of politics, laws, customs, and conditions.” Reference to an “ideally perfect” “place, state,” “condition,” and “customs and conditions” will call to mind architectural or urban settings. 10 Instauration of a place and conditions suited to the customs (or habits) of inhabitants persists as a primary aim of architecture, despite the popularity of more visionary, technical, and commercial flourishes. The enduring burden of use that architectural autonomists might like to be free of requires that architects at least attempt to achieve “ideally perfect” settings for the habits buildings or urban settings are intended to situate. Inclusion of ideal in definitions of Utopia , while necessary, creates problems for it: Ideal inevitably suggests perfection, and because perfection is impossible, aiming at it appears to implicate Utopia in the dubious belief that perfection might actually be achievable. In this way, Utopia appears a species of hubris, or arrogance, so profound, or profoundly stupid, in its assumptions and attempts at installation that it is beyond redemption, especially in the light of the political and architectural excesses of the twentieth century frequently laid at its doorstep.

Quixotic as attempts to recuperate Utopia for architecture may be, doing so can find no better ally than philosopher Paul Ricoeur (1913–2005), who saw it as potentially generative, facilitating thought beyond the limits of the given. In Ricoeur's terms, Utopia can be propitious, outlining possibility while also taking the first steps toward its achievement. More valuable, perhaps, is Ricoeur's assertion that Utopia has a dual character: It can be pathological , in just the ways that suggest the term is beyond redemption, but its other side is constitutive , making possible the articulation of ideals that also make it possible to imagine conditions better than they are. And while the visionary may retreat into impossibility as a way of escaping the limitations of the present, constitutive utopians have a method for thinking beyond those limitations and for taking the first steps toward them, even if ultimate or total achievement is never possible, or even the real aim. The constitutive Utopia is inevitably partial , built upon an as if condition to guide both the imagination of alternatives and their partial achievement, as if they already existed, or could. 11

Something akin to this reconceptualization of Utopia as method is latent in philosopher Theodor Adorno's challenge that “architecture worthy of human beings thinks better of men than they actually are.” 12 Implicit in this is the proposition that worthy architecture is less a problem of style, or image, or even form alone, than an issue of propriety, or appropriateness. However, in the current climate, extreme experimentalism prevails, taking shape as visionary or novel architecture, which seems more the product of the vagaries of fashion and the media than it is shaped around the bodily events or habits of its intended inhabitants. Reasonable as it may be to wish it otherwise, doing so articulates such a dissident position that the very otherness this asserts, in comparison to prevailing conditions, arguably reveals a utopian stance, in the sense that for architecture to change (for the better), everything that precedes it must change as well. 13

Most claims to Utopia for architecture are undertheorized at best, in the sense that the association between Utopia and architecture is either presumed—assumed to require no explanation or argument—or imagined as inevitably negative—charting impossibility or failure at best and absolutism and inhumanity at worst. Alternatively, Utopia is confused with other characteristics—described as visionary, for example, but also misconstrued with determinism and technological utopianism. As suggested above, the most common pitfall shared by treatments of Utopia coming from within architecture and urbanism is the conflation of visionary with revolutionary , technological optimism , social ideals , futurism , and, of course, Utopia . While Utopia may encapsulate all of these other terms, each could happily survive on its own without Utopia .

Because current usage is so confused and contradictory, each use of Utopia begs for definition, not least to alert the reader to whether Utopia is intended in its pathological sense of failure or totalitarianism, evident in architecture and urban projects as a requirement for total application all at once, with no opportunities for rethinking proposals (or failing that, remaining forever untested as paper palaces ), or in its constitutional sense of taking the first steps toward improved physical and social conditions while also allowing for partial achievement and even significant changes to plans in the course of their realization. Claims that a visionary architectural or urban project constitutes a Utopia usually depend on descriptions woefully short of detail on how the improved setting and society promised (if one is even anticipated) might actually be achieved or function. The political naïveté and infeasibility that characterize visionary architecture and urban projects, often erroneously ascribed to Utopia, make it difficult to understand how most proposed new conditions can be said to be realizable or even to suggest a Utopia.

One way to ensure a verifiable utopian dimension to works of architecture and urbanism (in addition to keeping the four elements introduced earlier in mind) would be to stay close to German sociologist Karl Mannheim's (1893–1947) definition of Utopia. Doing so provides claims to Utopia for architecture and urbanism with terms of criticism by which they could be analyzed more closely and carefully. In this way, the incongruence of such claims with Mannheim's definition of Utopia (and those of others) might be more readily ascertained: “However, we should not regard utopia as every state of mind which is incongruous with and transcends the immediate situation (and in this sense, ‘departs from reality’). Only those orientations transcending reality will be referred to by us as utopian which, when they pass over into conduct, tend to shatter, either partially or wholly, the order which prevails at the time.” 14 Divergence from Mannheim's definition is most explicitly observable in the degree to which most so-called utopian movements in architecture and urbanism collapse under the burden of their own ideological hollowness, confirmed by their inability, in Mannheim's words, “to shatter, either partially or wholly, the order which [prevailed] at the time … as [they pass] into conduct.” 15 As Manfredo Tafuri (1935–1994) observed, the reproduction function of architecture is all but inevitable, captured as it is within the cultural norms of the building industry in particular but more generally within the prevailing sociopolitical and economic conditions of capitalism, which led German philosopher of hope Ernst Bloch (1885–1977) to believe that to be “true,” as he called it, architecture would have to wait for radically transformed conditions to be renewed. In fact, when considered in this way, the utopian prospect of modern architecture was all but nonexistent; more so, it was rarely if ever the issue.

By mostly rehearsing the commonplaces that dominate considerations of Utopia, treatments of it from within the discipline of architecture tend to add little to our understanding of the concept of Utopia, or its impulse, relative to the invention of architecture or the city. However, these generally superficial treatments of Utopia reveal their own shadow realm: suggesting that even though architects and urbanists have all but given up on thinking beyond the limits of the possible in the present, imagining a way toward something we might call Utopia is still possible.

Another way to clarify what Utopia might be for architecture is to begin with Saint (Sir) Thomas More's (1478–1535) originary coinage of the term in 1516 and the definition that extends from it. First, it is worth considering that Utopia is a much older word than dystopia . Nevertheless, because More's Utopia depicts an imaginary island enjoying a putatively perfect social, legal, and political system, Utopia has primarily come to be associated with all such representations of the same, literary, architectural, and political alike. Utopia , though, contains within itself two senses that when taken together establish something of a paradox: referring to the Greek ou (no) and eu (good) plus topos (place), Utopia connotes both “a good place” and a “no place.” By being a good no place , Utopia seems to inscribe within itself the most common criticism of it: impossibility (as a placeless place). Worse still, because no (actual) place can be (or even approximate) an ideal state, the value of Utopia seems dubious at best. Even more troubling, because the ideal state depicted in Utopia requires a degree of coercion, as all social organizations do, Utopia has come to be associated with tyranny and is rejected, which deprives the imagination of a concept for possibilities. In the absence of a crucial habit for thinking about how to achieve the possible-impossible, the culturally dominant conviction that “there is no alternative” has taken on the character of a natural law, leading Fredric Jameson to observe: “Someone once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. We can now revise that and witness the attempt to imagine capitalism by way of imagining the end of the world.” 16

If capitalism is not only total in its reach but also terminal in itself, the value of recollecting Utopia—as proposed, or defined, by More—resides in the degree to which doing so helps to untangle Utopia from dystopia , and from visionary as well, and thus charts pathways toward substantive social dreaming. As commonly used in architectural discourses and elsewhere, Utopia seems to always already suggest dystopia . However, as with visionary , the two are not interchangeable; actually, they signify quite different things. In an effort to clarify what these are, one might do well to begin with the Oxford English Dictionary . But begin must remain the operative word. According to the Oxford English Dictionary , dystopia is “an imaginary place or condition in which everything is as bad as possible,” the opposite of Utopia. Thus, a “dystopian [is] one who advocates or describes a dystopia,” but it also pertains “to a dystopia,” whereas “dystopianism [indicates] dystopian [qualities] or characteristics.” 17 Most interesting, perhaps, is that dystopia is a relatively young word, the first recorded appearance of which in English is dated as 1868: “It is, perhaps, too complimentary to call them Utopians, they ought rather to be called dys-topians, or cacotopians. What is commonly called Utopian is something too good to be practicable; but what they appear to favour is too bad to be practicable.” 18

John Stewart Mill's coinage of dystopia actually sheds light on how it and Utopia differ. The so-called Utopians Mill refers to hardly matter. What is important is the distinction he makes between Utopia as aiming at something “good” and dystopia as aiming at something “bad.” If this distinction is considered in the light of dystopian fiction, which reveals grandiose claims to the good as all but inevitably resulting in the bad, the half-baked urban schemes of twentieth-century modern architects, from Sant'Elia to Yamasaki's Pruitt-Igoe to Archigram and Bernard Tschumi, as well as Rem Koolhaas, among others, could in no way be construed as utopian or as having achieved a Utopia.

Setting aside for a moment the tendency of relativism (or extreme subjectivity) to enervate leaps toward the possible-impossible (of Henri Lefebvre's Utopia in the positive), in contemporary social and political thought (identified by David Harvey as leading—by way of its uncertainty—to a nonproductive “both/and” cul-de-sac), Utopia and dystopia really cannot be interchangeable, as their aims are diametrically opposed. Even when the sense that dystopia is the opposite of Utopia persists in definitions of the two terms, common usage tends to muddy the affair. In common parlance, the move is from difference to a conception of dystopia as “inverted Utopia” and from there to a kind of interchangeability between them: “a strand of utopianism or dystopianism,” as one writer put it, suggesting their indivisibility. 19 Conjoining the two terms establishes a “both/and” condition and at best promises only confusion or at worst presupposes failure. If the first drains Utopia of its oppositional (or critical) dimension, the second asserts that Utopia is always already dystopia, no matter how initially attractive its proposition. In contrast, it would be more productive to maintain the “either/or” divide (arrived at dialectically) argued for by Harvey in Spaces of Hope (2000). Only by making a deliberate decision between alternatives, that is, only when one option is cut off, can life be promised to the other. It is no wonder, then, that the verb to decide carries within its very meaning a sense of necessary certainty, and judgment as well.

Coming from the Latin decidere , “to cut off,” “by giving the victory to one side or the other” in a choice or conflict, decide can have no truck with “both/and.” In point of fact, ethical behavior requires that the ambivalence of extreme relativism and radical subjectivity be overcome so that something like provisional certainty can arise, such as utopian imagination requires and projects. It does not matter that such certainty may be short-lived. The value of Utopia for imagining superior conditions resides in its vocation for doing so, even if time and necessity must always defeat attempts at total application: life lived will always attempt to play itself out in the loosest conformity with the prescriptions of any plan or social project (even in the face of violence).

If a utopian prospect for architecture and the city, which means for us as citizens as well, continues to exist, its traces will be found in the already existing city—historical and modern alike and even in the depths of the apparent dystopia of cities and citizenship deformed by capitalism, neoliberalism, and speculation. Where to look for such traces is a most pressing question. The answer is both obvious and obscure: Utopia's trace resides in the everyday life of the city and its inhabitants, especially in those mundane activities of ordinary citizens that somehow manage to remain free of the dual cancers of advertising and consumption, which deprive individuals and communities of whatever lingering agency they may have, not least by transforming each of us from citizens into shoppers. Lest the stultifying effects of the society of the spectacle prevail, resistance, in the form of utopian longings and projects for a more just city, must inevitably begin with the self, through a stubborn conviction that we can continue to imagine substantive alternatives together.

As has been argued throughout this introduction, the complex relation between architecture and Utopia remains peculiarly undertheorized. In most conversations concerning the two, Utopia is, as has been suggested, shorthand for either escape or failure. The possibility that Utopia might actually offer insights into the prospect of a better world, by informing both theory and praxis, remains all but invisible within the discipline of architecture, except when confused with visionary fantasy projects destined to remain on paper or with audacious built works generally absent of a concern for architecture's fundamental social dimension.

Before Utopia can be recuperated for architecture, the commonly referenced sources for the decline of utopian thought in architecture frequently rehearsed in the historiography of twentieth-century modern architecture and theory must be interrogated. In most stories, rejection of Utopia is explained causally as a consequence of what amounts to architectural hubris from the “18th century to the late 1960s.” Accordingly, by the 1960s the impossibility of deterministic architectural social science (misconstrued as Utopia) to ever deliver on its promises of improvement (the project of modern architecture) was revealed as not simply improbable but ultimately impossible—a diversion away from the supposedly real problems of development. As architectural historian and theorist Anthony Vidler observes: “The crisis of utopia/utopian thinking [in architecture] was brought about by the architects' vision that utopia could be designed and planned.” 20

Because architecture could never bring about Utopia, the “failure of this vision,” according to Vidler, “caused a decline and rejection of utopian thought in architecture in favor of a pragmatic view of professional practice and its role in the development of neo-liberal capitalist society.” 21 Le Corbusier's grand urban schemes, the failure of modernist planning more generally, and the destruction of the Pruitt-Igoe public housing project in St. Louis, Missouri, are brought to mind. Constructed between 1952 and 1955, three of Pruitt-Igoe's blocks were imploded in 1972. The spectacular failure of Pruitt-Igoe and the equally spectacular manner of its demolition transformed it into something of an emblem of the failure of Utopia and modernist architecture alike. Confirming this, Charles Jencks wrote: “Modern Architecture died in St. Louis, Missouri on July 15, 1972 at 3.32 pm (or thereabouts) when the infamous Pruitt Igoe scheme, or rather several of its slab blocks, were given the final coup de grâce by dynamite.” 22

Vidler's representation of the rise of utopian thinking in architecture and its subsequent decline and fall follows this conventional schema: the Utopias of the eighteenth century, represented in particular for him by Claude-Nicolas Ledoux's (1736–1806) ideal city of Chaux (1804) and constructed Saltworks (1775–78), which was something of a fragment of the proposed city, give way—all but teleologically—to the more extravagant urban plans of Le Corbusier, and perhaps to the Congrès International d'Architecture Moderne (CIAM) urbanism more generally, from its founding in 1928 to its demise in 1959, followed by the rise of stylistic (or formalist) and more promising postmodernisms in the 1960s, when the apparent spiritual bankruptcy of orthodox modern architecture could no longer be denied. It is according to this schema that the end of orthodox modern architecture, and by some loose association, Utopia in architecture as well, is identified, in particular, with the demolition of Pruitt-Igoe.

But the emphasis on failure as a product of design, or as a consequence of somehow having arrived at the wrong style, arguably forecloses on utopian possibility in architecture. As K. G. Bristol observes, adoption of the demolition of Pruitt-Igoe as representative of the failings of modern architecture, and as a marker of its demise, has at its core “the idea that architectural design was responsible for the demise of Pruitt-Igoe.” 23 Hiding in this insight is a contribution to sharpening an understanding of just how Utopia might be alternatively construed in architecture, shedding light on how any understanding of Utopia that begins and ends with form (with design), with representation or spatial closure alone, really must be abandoned before Utopia can make a meaningful contribution to imagining architecture and the city in all their depth. As noted earlier, Harvey has conceptualized a first step in this direction in his development of “dialectical utopianism,” which turns on the necessity for “spatial closure” to be adjoined with the equal necessity of “social process” in the proposition of any Utopia that might take a concrete form.

The two most central critiques of the design of Pruitt-Igoe have come from successor movements to High Modernism: Postmodernism, and environment and behavior…. Pruitt-Igoe provides a convenient embodiment of all the alleged failings of Modernism…. Proponents of these new approaches attribute the problems of public housing to architectural failure, and propose as a solution a new approach to design. They do not in any significant way acknowledge the political-economic and social context for the failure of Pruitt-Igoe…. Pruitt-Igoe was shaped by … strategies … that did not emanate from the architects, but rather from the system in which they practice. The Pruitt-Igoe myth … not only inflates the power of the architect to effect social change, … it masks the extent to which the profession is implicated, inextricably, in structures and practices that it is powerless to change. 24

It is also worth noting that Bristol's assertion that architects are relatively powerless in determining the outcome, or consequences, of their works unfortunately encourages the view that architects thus need not take any responsibility for what they do. Such resignation would also seem to confirm the pointlessness of Utopia: if architecture is impotent in effecting “social change” because architects are “implicated” in the “structures and practices” of the system within which they operate, then their ability to plan a Utopia must be null. As bleakly attractive as this proposition might be, accepting it ignores the persisting existence of possibilities for subverting systems from within, even by architects entrapped by the forces of speculation that define the building industry. Unfortunately, it appears that this prospect is alien to Vidler, for example, who believes that “the fall of the Berlin Wall, the proclaimed death of communism and Marx, finished utopian thought very quickly. Perhaps one might say that utopian thought killed the possibility of utopian thought?” 25

For Vidler, dissolution of the Soviet Empire, especially the ritualized razing of the Berlin Wall, amounted to a requiem for Marx and communism, and with them, Utopia—apparent confirmation that there really is no alternative to capitalism, just as neoliberals have long believed. Arguably, this self-serving conviction does not so much bespeak a crisis of Utopia as it is a failure of imagination (which makes envisioning subversion from within all but impossible). While Vidler's association of “the fall of the Berlin Wall” with “the proclaimed death of communism and Marx” may seem reasonable enough, interpreting this as ensuring the end of Utopia disregards the permanence of desire . In this regard, Zygmunt Bauman observes, “Imagining a better life than the existing one, a life that does not yet exist but one that could and should exist—the eternal source of ‘utopian thinking’ that never runs dry—is as rich, and possibly even richer than at the time of Sir Thomas More.” 26

If Utopia is as permanent as is desire, its survival does not depend on either Marx or communism. Nonetheless, Utopia may be just what Marx needs now, lending to Marxism a preoccupation with space and the city and dreams that it lacks—a significant enhancement that Harvey in Spaces of Hope and, earlier, Lefebvre have articulated. More to the point, the much celebrated failure of communism and Marxism—to date—makes Utopia even more relevant now. While Vidler recognizes a correspondence between his own thinking and Jameson's, he believes that Utopia is all but impossible outside of already transformed conditions: an impossible situation that would inevitably negate any value for Utopia, confirming Vidler's proposition “that utopian thought killed the possibility of utopian thought,” because of its hubris, combined with its very impossibility. In this regard, according to Vidler: “Fredric Jameson has proposed that utopian thought whether in prose or design can offer alternatives in a time of lock-down and melt down…. [B]ut for this to happen, architects have to regain their sense of social responsibility, and their political sanity, vote for a world ruled by communitarian and socialist ethics and practices, and not for a world ruled by the myth that the next technological discovery will provide a solution.” 27

While there can be no doubt that for architecture to have a credibly utopian dimension architects would “have to regain their sense of social responsibility, and their political sanity,” is voting en masse “for a world ruled by communitarian and socialist ethics and practices,” and against “a world ruled by the myth that the next technological discovery will provide a solution,” a prerequisite for Utopia? Or might the incremental, or piecemeal, achievement of Utopia be a real possibility? Is it inconceivable that Utopia could be achievable, even partially, on a building-by-building basis, to produce a condition of numerous Utopias in among the banal products of mainstream architecture and urban design practices? Might this not reasonably herald the possibility of alternatives amid more generally unpromising conditions (by making the first steps toward the realization of other possibilities)? Interestingly, Vidler's comments above almost paraphrase Frederick Engels's position in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1880), that because Utopia is out of step with history, it is impossible to imagine and realize until everything preceding has already changed (which would make it redundant anyway), not least our conceptualization of technology as panacea. Nevertheless, Vidler does offer a glimpse of an alternative condition: “In William Morris's “News from Nowhere” the society is served by technology that stays well in the background; technology ruled by community and not by investment and profit.” 28 Although Morris is offered, Vidler does so absent of any pronounced conviction that the society described might be a real possibility , rather than little more than one tentative possible reality among so many others.

The crossroads of the end of Utopia (apparently ensured by the fall of the Berlin Wall and Soviet Russia), the end of the world (apparently easier to imagine than an alternative to capitalism), and capitalism itself (which is apparently eternal) seems an apt place to turn toward the problem of degenerate Utopia and the city, which, after all, pretty much amount to the same thing in our time. Louis Marin's proposition is that “a degenerate utopia is ideology changed into the form of a myth.” 29 Arguably, one such myth is capitalism. Another might be modernity or modernism, and a third could be the inevitability of the contemporary city as the concretization of capitalist realism. However, the cities that most of us inhabit could conceivably be construed as Utopias by neoliberals, as constituting the best of all possible worlds for the spread of free markets, or equally so by anti-utopians, who might see in the modern city Utopia realized, that is, dystopia. In any event, and whatever one's preconceived notion of Utopia might be, the contemporary city stands primarily as confirmation “of the impotence of corporate capital to generate a socially cohesive environment.” 30 As such, it is also arguably no Utopia, which persists as an open project to be imagined and realized, sometime and somewhere in the future, in the footsteps of present efforts to define Utopia for architecture and the city and to establish its spaces.

It is in this sense that Utopia can be understood as lying before us —in both senses of this confounding double phrase. Utopia resides in the past ( before in this instance means “behind us”) inasmuch as any reconsideration of Utopia in the present must inevitably begin with the past. But if the sources of Utopia in the present reside in the past, realization is in the future ( before in this instance means “ahead of us”). It is this double valence that links the articles that make up this special issue. Some deal with historical figures, literature, or places, while others take up analogous considerations that are closer to us now. However, in each case, the future is what is at issue: What shape will it take? How might the circumstances of its emergence be as propitious as possible? These key questions suffuse all of the articles that follow and are of the greatest urgency to all disciplines but in particular for architecture and urbanism, which are burdened with providing the stage upon which we play out the drama of our lives, individually and collectively.

Tim Benton, “Session 5: Le Corbusier,” in “Utopias and Avant-Gardes Study Day—Part 3,” Tate Modern and Open University, London, March 25, 2006, Tate Channel, accessed July 25, 2012, http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/video/utopias-and-avant-gardes-study-day-part-3 .

For unintentional support of this reading, see Mauro F. Guillén, The Taylorized Beauty of the Mechanical: Scientific Management and the Rise of Modernist Architecture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).

For two attempts to domesticate Utopia, see Antoine Picon, “Contemporary Architecture and the Quest for Political and Social Meaning,” Satroniana 21 (2008): 171–88; and Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter, Collage City (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1978).

See Jane Jacob, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961; New York: Vintage Books, 1992), 21–23; Colin Rowe, “The Architecture of Utopia” (1959) and “Addendum” (1973), in The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa and Other Essays (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1976), 205–23, especially 211–12; Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas , rev. ed. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1977), 129.

For a succinct overview of this conception of Utopia and architecture, see Hilde Heynen, “Engaging Modernism,” in Back from Utopia: The Challenge of the Modern Movements , ed. Hubert-Jan Henket and Hilde Heynen (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2002), 378–99, especially 382.

For David Harvey, see Spaces of Hope (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000). For Fredric Jameson, see Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (London: Verso, 2005). For Ruth Levitas, see The Concept of Utopia (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1990); “For Utopia the (Limits of the) Utopian Function in Late Capitalist Society,” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 3, no. 2 (2000): 25–43; “On Dialectical Utopianism,” History of the Human Sciences 16, no. 1 (2003): 137–50; and “The Imaginary Reconstitution of Society: Utopia as Method,” in Utopia Method Vision: The Use Value of Social Dreaming , ed. Tom Moylan and Raffaella Baccolini (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007), 47–68. For Tom Moylan, see Demand the Impossible (New York: Methuen, 1986); and Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia (Oxford: Westview Press, 2000). For Lyman Tower Sargent, see “In Defense of Utopia,” Diogenes 53, no. 1 (2006): 11–17; “Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited,” Utopian Studies 5, no. 1 (1994): 1–37; “Utopia,” in New Dictionary of the History of Ideas , 2005, Encyclopedia.com , accessed July 26, 2012, http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G2-3424300799.html ; and “Utopia—The Problem of Definition,” Extrapolation 16, no. 2 (Spring 1975): 137–48. See also Nathaniel Coleman, Utopias and Architecture (Abingdon, England: Routledge, 2005); and N. Coleman, ed., Imagining and Making the World: Reconsidering Architecture and Utopia (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2011).

See Coleman, Utopias and Architecture ; and Coleman, Imagining and Making the World .

For more on the problem of detailed description in relation to Utopia and architecture, see Nathaniel Coleman, “Utopia on Trial,” in Coleman, Imagining and Making the World , 183–219.

Oxford English Dictionary , s.v. “visionary, adj. and n.,” accessed July 20, 2012, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/223948 .

Oxford English Dictionary , s.v. “utopia, n.,” accessed July 26, 2012, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/220784 .

For a discussion of Ricoeur's encounter with Utopia, see Coleman, Utopias and Architecture , 56–62; see also Paul Ricoeur, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia , ed. G. H. Taylor (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986).

Theodor Adorno, “Functionalism Today” (1965), in Rethinking Architecture , ed. Neil Leach (London: Routledge, 1997), 15.

David Leatherbarrow's elaboration on architecture's vocation in his talks and publications is an example of this.

Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia (1936; Orlando: Harvest, 1985), 192.

Fredric Jameson, “Future City,” New Left Review 21 (May–June 2003), accessed July 28, 2012, http://newleftreview.org/II/21/fredric-jameson-future-city .

Oxford English Dictionary , s.v. “dystopia, n.,” accessed July 28, 2012, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/58909 .

John Stuart Mill, Hansard Commons (1868), accessed July 28, 2012, http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1868/mar/12/adjourned-debate#column_1517 .

Anthony Vidler, response to “Crisis of Utopia? Editorial Questionnaire,” Autoportret , New York, April 29, 2011, accessed July 29, 2012, http://autoportret.pl/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/A34_01_Questionnaire.pdf .

Charles Jencks, The Language of Post-modern Architecture (New York: Rizzoli, 1977), 9.

Katherine G. Bristol, “The Pruitt-Igoe Myth,” Journal of Architectural Education 44, no. 3 (1991): 163–71, at 163.

Ibid., 170. For a detailed examination of the multiple causes of failure at Pruitt-Igoe, see The Pruitt-Igoe Myth , dir. Chad Freidrichs (First Run Feature, 2012).

Vidler, response to “Crisis of Utopia?”.

Zygmunt Bauman, response to “Crisis of Utopia? Editorial Questionnaire,” Autoportret , New York, May 29, 2011, accessed July 29, 2012, http://autoportret.pl/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/A34_01_Questionnaire.pdf .

Vidler, response to “Crisis of Utopia?”

Louis Marin, “Utopic Degeneration: Disneyland,” in Utopics: The Semiological Play of Textual Spaces (New York: Humanity Books, 1984), 239.

Joseph Rykwert, The Seduction of Place: The History and Future of Cities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 227.

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Pragmatic Utopia: How Reality Finally Caught Up with Fiction in BIG's Latest Monograph

• Written by Dima Stouhi
• Published on June 03, 2022

Architecture, with all its practitioners, academics, and theorists, have long been exploring utopic ideas with hopes of turning them into something concrete for the sake of a better world. But as the world heads towards an even greater polarization than it currently has, the architecture practice found itself having to adapt to the current systems of the planet, constrained by its ever-growing conditions. Slowly, practitioners realized that utopia can not truly be seen as the ideal solution, and needed to be readapted or morphed with other concepts for it to actually work. DETAIL's latest monograph BIG. Architecture and Construction Details / BIG. Architektur und Baudetails , a rapport between BIG’s imaginative, unbuilt utopias and functional, built architecture, explores 20 projects from the firm's workshop.

Derived from the Greek word " ou-topos", which means “no place” or “nowhere ”, the term "utopia" was originally coined by Thomas More in 1516, in a book of the same name. A utopian society describes an idealistic civilization; a perfect place without any obstacles, differences, or inequalities that promotes the improvement of society and ensures that everyone has the exact same assets and values.

Since utopia emits the illusion of perfection, this concept has mostly been seen in science fiction movies and books. In architecture, it has been expressed through ideas of a self-sufficient, independent, cohesive projects , as there hasn't been any clear physical characteristics or design elements that defined utopic designs. This lack of definition and restriction allowed architects to disregard consumer-driven projects and prioritize comfort over complying with structural guidelines, focusing on the social, economic, and political values of the urban fabric, and ensuring that the built environment is providing harmony within the community. Aesthetically, architects were inspired by abstract works of art and fictional movies, a style that stood against the cruelties and injustices of the world , and put an end to the wars waged between countries.

Early 20th century, modernists, futurists, and constructivists saw themselves as innovative pioneers with a mission to create a new, and better civilization. In 1968, Ricardo Bofill Architecture Workshop's published a manifesto responding to the demands of societies that are in constant transformation. This launched the idea of the City in Space , proclaimed as an absolute architecture that's capable of "resolving all the complexities of its contemporaneity through a unique open, flexible, and three-dimensional model". Soon enough, projects that were deemed impossible such as those of Arata Izozaki with the City in the Air (1961), Yona Friedman with his Space City (1964) or Kisho Kurokawa with his Helical City (1961) were being highlighted again, proving that these projects were not too far fetched. In 1924, Le Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse (Radiant City) was never actualized, although many of its principles influenced contemporary urban planning. In 1932, Frank Lloyd Wright’s utopic proposal aimed to create the perfect harmony between built and natural environment, so he imagined Broadacre City , where at least one acre of ground was assigned to each household, and removed everything that was urban.

However, this notion of perfection, self-reliability, and isolation caused by utopic societies was sure to create dissonance among all aspects of the community, mostly because these ideals serve as constraints rather than guidelines - even more so now that the entire world is witnessing detrimental effects of climate change, unstable economies, and reliance on digitalized and artificial-driven practices. This reality launched what's called “pragmatic utopia”, a utopia that combines an unattainable ideal with pragmatism, creating an almost ideal fragment of the world. First coined by architect and bioregional planner Davidya Kasperzyk , the term was further explored by Bjarke Ingles Group (BIG), describing an architectural style that pursues a perfect world through designs tempered by reality.

When the global economy collapsed in the summer of 2008, all our commissions disappeared in one fell swoop and we had to start all over again. All in all, I don’t think we are any less experimental today than we were in the beginning. The big difference between now and then is that a lot of our wild fantasies have become a reality. That’s why we’re actually being taken seriously now. Many of the concepts we developed in the past are finally finding a set of conditions where they can actually happen. -- Bjarke Ingels

BIG's The Twist - Kistefos Museum in Jevnaker, Norway represents the firm's approach of pragmatic utopia. Using a lot of wood, water, and a slightly sloping terrain perfect for exploiting hydropower as a source provided ideal conditions for the Kistefos cellulose factory. For the Tirpitz Museum in Blåvand, Denmark, the office extrapolated the existing topography and concealed the main part of the 2,800-m² area of the building beneath the ground. In addition to its unique form, many pragmatic and detailed solutions contribute to the convincing overall impression made by the museum building. Another venture by BIG is the Hyperloop , a tubular transit system that relies on maglev (magnetic-levitation) technology to transport passengers or cargo at speeds in excess of 700 miles per hour.

Only when an idea has crossed the threshold from fantasy to reality, and moves from the virtual world of images and data into the real world of atoms and spaces, does it gain tactility and credibility. -- Bjarke Ingels

Answering the question of “ what will be the future of architecture? ", architects are relying on the intelligence of materials , such as regenerative bio-concrete, carbon concrete, hydro-ceramics, and self-cleaning materials. As cities continue to develop, new tools are emerging to help envision and create the future built environment , with the help of machine learning, artificial intelligence, and generative design. Speaking of artificial intelligence, the world is also witnessing a major shift from the real world into digital platforms, particularly with the amplification of the Metaverse last year , which generated a new debate on the values of architecture in the digital age.

Architects today are also looking beyond the boundaries of planet Earth. BIG is in the process of building the first-ever-house for four people on the Moon, using existing resources, generating new tectonics and vernacular architecture. Elaborating on how there will be 3D-printed buildings in space in the near future, Bjarke explains that the actual implementation, which tends to sound like fiction, would involve obsidian-like material, similar to what “dragon glass” is in the television series “Game of Thrones”. Using a solar laser, moon dust (also called lunar regolith), can be solidified to produce a kind of moon obsidian. 

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2024 Thesis Award Winners

April 25, 2024

Congratulations to our 2024 Thesis Award Winners! Following last week’s energetic lobby pin-ups, the fifth-year students and faculty nominated 12 final projects to be reviewed by an esteemed jury including Steven Harper, Lauren Kogod, Erika Malanoski, and Frank Weiner. The jury was impressed by the range of work and the quality of architectural research and representation. Ultimately, four students were invited to present their thesis projects to the jury, faculty, and fellow students. Thoughtful deliberation and conversation determined the following awards sponsored by the Hanbury Prize, Hanbury Architecture + Design: Excellence in Architecture Undergraduate Thesis, First Place: Sakshi Pitre’s “On Dialogue between Utopia and Pragmatism: Rethinking contextual sentience, identity, culture and social equity in the Global South as a counter to the homogenous post-modern urban fabric” Excellence in Architecture Undergraduate Thesis, Second Place: Clayton Greer’s “The Norfolk Performing Arts Center: Redefining the Urban Waterfront Typology” Excellence in Architecture Undergraduate Thesis, Third Place: Nathan Brannon’s “Redefining the Margins of American Belonging: An Exploration in Flexible Dwelling for Asylum Seekers” Excellence in Architecture Undergraduate Thesis Research Award: Sara Mohamed’s, “A Documentation on Sudanese Domestic Architecture”. The other eight finalists were Alonzo Colon, Diana Fernandez-Borunda, Gray Kutrieb, Isabel Parkins, Jennie Wells, Nathan Swords, Sophia Chaudhry, and Tucker Rossi. Congratulations to all of our thesis students on a strong year. We are proud of your collective contribution to contemporary architectural discourse. Thank you to our jury for the time and care they took to review the work, and to Hanbury Architecture + Design for supporting our students through the Hanbury Prize.

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• College of Architecture, Arts, and Design
• School of Architecture

Submitted by WA Contents

Centers of gravity, not black holes:experts discuss new moscow metro stations, united kingdom architecture news - jan 22, 2015 - 10:42   4560 views.

In 2015 Moscow will see a wide range of new capital transportation facilities, and their design is just as important. We asked four jury members of the recent design competition for metro stations Solntsevo and Novoperedelkino to tell us more about this aspect.

Erken Kagarov, Vice President of The Academy of the Graphic Design, art director of “Art. Lebedev Studio”:

“Being a designer, first of all I did my best to evaluate the visual aspect of the offered solutions. Besides that it was important for me to see something new and original. Otherwise, why bother organizing a competition?

As for the results of the contest, I am under the impression that we tried to get everything at once, and that was a mistake. The winning projects are quite expressive and not too expensive. Unfortunately, they are not at all ground-breaking. If we take a look at the history of Moscow metro and the work of one of its best creators, Alexey Dushkin, we’ll see that he was constantly inventing and reinventing certain techniques and materials: he was the first one to use stainless steel to decorate Mayakovskaya, he came up with the idea of columns lit from below for Kropotkinskaya, he put up stained-glass panels underground, where the sun doesn’t ever shine, on Novokuznetskaya...... Continue Reading

> via  archsovet.msk.ru

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The Future of Architecture: Utopias, Dystopias, Heterotopias

Cities have grown over the years and the problems within them have grown with it. The problems that have arisen over the years in the cities have led to the emergence of the concept of utopia as a solution. Cities and the lives in them have been tried to be changed with utopian architectural projects . They hoped that this change would be for the better. But for the dystopias, dystopian disagreed with this idea. And they produced counter-ideas. When it comes to heterotopias , they are places where utopias merge into reality. But unlike utopias, they can be found in more than one place and time.

Utopias | Dystopias

Utopia is an ideal and perfect place setting without mistakes. Since it consists of a non-existent world, it contains ideas that will oppose the conditions of the periods. It is not only concerned with society but also includes architecture . Ideal societies and ideal cities coexist. It is involved in architecture with future lives, cities , and design processes.

“The home of the Utopian impulse was architecture rather than painting or sculpture. Painting can make us happy, but building is the art we live in; it is the social art par excellence, the carapace of political fantasy, the exoskeleton of one’s economic dreams. It is also the one art nobody can escape .” (Hughes, 1980)

Architects’ Utopias

In the 15th century, urban design was developed in the search for the ideal during the Renaissance. Ideal cities are depicted in the form of stars. Visionary architects such as Étienne-Louis Boullée emerged in the 18th century. They designed symbolist, majestic buildings that were considered utopian to be built using large-scale geometric forms . At the beginning of the 20th century, the futuristic architecture movement emerged. They imagined modern worlds by using new materials and production techniques with technological developments. Antonio Sant’Elia, one of the idol architects, thought of Città Nuova as full of high skyscrapers and industrial elements. After the 1960s, pop culture studies emerged with neo-futurists’ manifesto works. Archigram was established. Within the framework of the possibilities that the developing technology can provide, a more intense and different lifestyle has been sought.

Anti-Utopias |   Dystopias

Dystopias have a more pessimistic outlook on the future. They believe that the future world will be a nightmarish place and that technology is dangerous. They criticize the great changes and chaos in the cities where anarchy prevails in human-urban relations. In dystopias, instead of personalization, uniformity, and placelessness, lack of identity can be emphasized. Science Fiction is a pioneer in producing dystopian products.

Science Fiction Cinema

The architectural structures and city images visualized in science fiction cinema, beyond being a superficial background, open the doors of a fictional world that provide the opportunity to criticize the present and reveal dreams and fears for the future. With this aspect, science fiction cinema offers people the most suitable ground for understanding the phenomenological history of the spatial and temporal transformation of the city . (Sobchack, 1997).

Besides architecture, Science fiction speculates about the future in cinema or literature. It shows us the effects of technology on space design with movies. 

Creating space is a common issue in cinema and architecture, so these two fields feed each other. Architects’ drawings and paintings allow 3D animation thanks to cinema ; that is, they can solve already thought-out science fiction ideas in a cinema or create new worlds and spaces that are thought to be realized in the future. But of course, producing space in the cinema is more flexible than architecture. There are references to future locations in some films, for example:

In the city depiction in the movie Metropolis, directed by F. Lang, the bad effect of technology on human life is shown. It does not show that the past has been erased and replaced by new super technologies, but that the past and the future have collapsed on top of each other and the city has become ruined and devastated. The lack of identity of place is emphasized in the movie Playtime, directed by J.Tati. Unrelatedness makes it difficult to understand where it is. The locations depicted in the movie Brazil, directed by T. Gilliam, take place in a nightmarish atmosphere. Reference is made to the excess of technology and gigantic structures stand out. Other movie examples: Alphaville- J.L. Godard, 2001 A Space Odyssey-Kubrick, Blade Runner- R. Scott, Delicatessen-M. Caro J. Jeunet, Inception-C. Nolan

Physical Representation of Utopias (Heterotopias) | Dystopias

Heterotopias, on the other hand, are the formation of original resistance efforts, different and opposing things in a space where social order is sought. They are places that exist in real space and that are also divided in time and space. Foucault distinguishes these two concepts through the metaphor of “mirror”. The mirror is a utopia because it is a place without a place. A kind of shadow formed in a place where there is no mirror image, in an unreal space that opens virtually behind the surface; mirror utopia. But the mirror is also a heterotopia to the extent that it has the effect of a kind of return to the place. Neighbourhoods that contain more than one time and place in a single real space such as museums , libraries, cemeteries, prisons, retirement homes, cinemas, theaters can be examples of heterotopia . ” (Foucault, 1997)

Three of these ways, utopias, cause collective spaces, dystopias cause collapse, and heterotopias cause physical spaces that act as other spaces alongside existing spaces, allowing for different expansions about the architecture of the future .

References:

• Hughes (1980) Imagining New Worlds. Or How Architecture Has Dreamt Of Utopia , [online].   Available at: https://magazine.artland.com/imagining-new-worlds-or-how-architecture-has-dreamt-of-utopia/ [Accessed 21 January 2022].
• Sobchack, V. (1997). Screening space: The American science fiction film. NewYork: Rutgers University Press.
• Foucault, M.. (1997.) Of Other Spaces: Utopia and Heterotopia . In Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory, edited by Neil Leach. New York: Routledge

It is a great passion for Elif Demirci, a student of the department of architecture, to examine all the works, materials and projects going on in the field of architecture. She believes that her writings will improve the built environment.

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Thursday, January 22, 2015

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Joel Wilf Defends His Dissertation “TECHNICALLY UTOPIA: TECHNOLOGY AND CONTROL IN UTOPIAN FICTION”

Congratulations to Joel Wilf for passing his dissertation defense on Friday, April 12, 2024!

Title of Dissertation:

TECHNICALLY UTOPIA: TECHNOLOGY AND CONTROL IN UTOPIAN FICTION

One of the enduring problems in the philosophy of technology is the “question of control:” to what extent is technology controlled by humans; and to what extent does it shape the society and its values? This study explores the “question of control” through a framework from the philosophy of technology, using a sample of modern fictional utopias as proxies for the “conceptual designs of desired, future societies.” Analyzing these utopias it asks: How do utopian societies use technology to meet their goals? How do utopian societies address risk and uncertainty? Do utopian societies treat information and communication technology (ICT) differently than other technologies? Do utopian societies implicitly follow a philosophy of technology? To answer these questions, the study employs an open-ended, qualitative content analysis method. A set of utopias are selected through purposive sampling. Coding categories are derived inductively from the data, guided by the conceptual frameworks mentioned above. The selected utopias are then coded and analyzed to answer the research questions and contribute to answering the “question of control.” The study has been performed as described here. The resulting insights have identified the underlying philosophy of technology in all nine of the utopian case studies; it advanced the prior work on technology in utopia; developed a deeper understanding of technical risk, especially for ICT; and created a deeper theoretical connection between utopian theory, critical constructivism, and systems engineering concepts; lastly, it provided a deeper theoretical underpinning from which the “question of control” was framed and answered.

Committee Members:

Dr. Jenifer Winter (CIS), Chair Dr. Elizabeth Davidson (CIS) Dr. Rich Gazan (CIS) Dr. Daniel Port (CIS) Dr. Todd Sammons (English Department), University Representative

Moscow Metro International Competition

Go to the competition

• Call For Ideas: The Dwelling 2023 Architecture Competition July 7, 2023
• The Master Studio – Community of Architecture & Design April 19, 2020
• Competition Collider Activity Center November 14, 2012

Submission:  July 31, 2014 Registration: July 31, 2014 Language:  English or Russian Location:  Moscow, Russia Prizes:  2 Prizes of (RUB 3.500.000) ($102.000) each.  and a total of RUB 3.890.000 ($114.000) spread in ten prizes for the finalists. Type:  Open competition for architects.

We are happy to announce the launch of online registration for those wishing to take part in the Architectural and Design Competition for Moscow Metro Stations Solntsevo and Novoperedelkino. The aim of the Competition is to create an inimitable, one of a kind profile for the two Moscow Metropolitan underground railway stations of Solntsevo and Novoperedelkino. The prize fund for the Competition stands at 3,890,000 rubles (including VAT) and is to be divided between the 10 Participants who pass through to the second stage of the Competition. Each of the two winners will be invited to settle a contract for the implementation of their architectural and design concept to a sum no larger than 3 500 000 rubles. Should you be able to make any news article or feature on this, thereby giving foreign architects the opportunity to participate in the Competition, we would be very grateful and willing to provide any assistance necessary.

Urban Transformations Competition: Designing the Symbiotic City

Competition [milan] world expo pavilion, this might interest you...., feeel design world prize ‘ 3rd season, the top door stopper – viefe design competiton, bci interior design awards 2024: tone x texture, architecture competition + course: adaptive reuse x placemaking, ai x biomimicry: architecture competition + course, int interior design awards, architecture masterprize (amp), hybrid coworking competition, houzee awards 2023, the studio school – a challenge to design....

Moscow (Architecture Skyline)

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• Moscow State University: The tallest of Moscow's Seven Sisters, it's been housing the State University since 1953, being the tallest educational building in the world with its 240m of height.
• Zuev Workers' Club: Projected by Ilya Golossov to be a recreational center for factory workers, its construction was finished in 1929 and it's still a reference in Constructivist architecture.
• Spasskaya Tower: Overlooking the Red Square, this clock tower on the Kremlin's walls was built by Milanese architect Pietro Antonio Solari back in 1491, and once the Kremlin's main entrance.
• State History Museum: The State History Museum complex has been open since 1872, and houses many artifacts, varying from pre-historical relics to artworks acquired by the old royalty.
• Mercury City Tower: The 5th tallest builing in Russia and Europe overall, this 338m tall skyscaper in the International Business Center stands out for its copper glass façade and spiky shape.
• Bolshoi Theater: First opened in 1825, it's home of the internationally renowned classical ballet company, and premiered works of composers such as Tchaikovsky and Shostakovich.

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