Recovering Utopia

Abstract

Although the topic of utopia in architecture may seem self-evident, discussion of it suffers from a lack of precision as to what actually constitutes a utopian dimension in architecture, or how architecture might actually transact with utopia. Arguably, the novelty of visionary projects is not enough to designate them as utopian. The recovery of utopia for architecture that this article considers includes identifying what makes works utopian. The attempt to recuperate the relevance of utopia for architecture includes interrogating conventional readings of orthodox modern architecture that equate utopia with failure and tyranny, and which derive from dissatisfaction with its shortcomings.

Notes

1. Alasdair Gray, engraved on a stone affixed to the Canongate Wall of the Scottish Parliament Building, attributed by Gray to Dennis Lee, although Lee's statement is slightly different (see second epigraph).

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

3. This is something much of my work addresses. See, e.g., Nathaniel Coleman, Utopias and Architecture (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2005); Nathaniel Coleman, “Building Dystopia,” Morris E Rinascimento 4 (2007): 181-192; Nathaniel Coleman, ed., Imagining and Making the World: Reconsidering Architecture and Utopia (Oxford: Peter Liang, 2011); and Nathaniel Coleman, “Utopic Pedagogies: Alternatives to Degenerate Architecture,” Utopian Studies 23, no 2 (2012): 314-354. See also soon-to-be-published articles: Nathaniel Coleman,” Utopia and Modern Architecture?,” Architecture Research Quarterly 16, no. 4 (anticipated 2013); Nathaniel Coleman, Space and Culture 16, no. 3 (anticipated 2013); Nathaniel Coleman, “Building in Empty Spaces': Is Architecture a Degenerate Utopia?,” Journal of Architecture (anticipated 2013), and my forthcoming book Lefebvre for Architects (Routledge, anticipated early 2014).

4. See, e.g., 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).

5. See David Harvey, Spaces of Hope (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), for an extended discussion of “dialectical utopia,” which suggests the kind of association between “spatial closure” and “social process” referred to here for reimagining what is.

6. See Coleman, Utopias and Architecture (note 3 above); Coleman, ed., Imagining and Making the World (note 3 above).

7. See Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Vintage Books, 1992 [1961]), 21–23; Colin Rowe, “The Architecture of Utopia” (1959) and “Addendum” (1973), both reprinted in The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa and Other Essays (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1976), 212; Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas, rev. ed. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1977), 129.

8. 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, eds. Hubert-Jan Henket and Hilde Heynen (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2002), 378–99, especially 382.

9. See Harvey, Spaces of Hope (note 5 above); Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (London: Verso, 2005); Ruth Levitas, The Concept of Utopia (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1990); Ruth Levitas, “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; Ruth Levitas, “On Dialectical Utopianism,” History of the Human Sciences 16, no. 1 (2003): 137–50; Ruth Levitas, “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 Liang, 2007), 47–68; Tom Moylan, Demand the Impossible (New York: Methuen, 1986); Tom Moylan, Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000); Lyman Tower Sargent, “In Defense of Utopia,” Diogenes 53, no. 1 (2006): 11–17; Lyman Tower Sargent, “Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited,” Utopian Studies 5, no. 1 (1994): 1–37; Lyman Tower Sargent, “Utopia,” in New Dictionary of the History of Ideas (2005), http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G2-3424300799.html, accessed 26 July 2012; Lyman Tower Sargent, “Utopia: The Problem of Definition,” Extrapolation 16, no. 2 (Spring 1975): 137–48; Coleman, Utopias and Architecture (note 3 above); Coleman, ed., Imagining and Making the World (note 3 above).

10. Katherine G. Bristol, “The Pruitt-Igoe Myth,” Journal of Architectural Education 44, no. 3 (1991): 163–71 at 170.

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

12. For more on the problem of detailed description in relation to Utopia and architecture see, Nathaniel Coleman, “Utopia on Trial,” in Imagining and Making the World: Reconsidering Architecture and Utopia, N. Coleman, Ed. (Oxford and Bern: Peter Laing, 2011), 183–219.