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Utopian Studies, Volume 25, Number 1, 2014, pp. 1-22 (Article)

DOI: 10.1353/utp.2014.0015

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Utopian Studies, Vol. 25, No. 1, 2014 Copyright © 2014. The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA

The Problematic of Architecture and Utopia

Nathaniel Coleman

abstractThe job of recovering or recuperating Utopia for architecture is no easy task, consid-ering how deeply entrenched suspicions about Utopia are in the discipline of archi-tecture, 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.

keywords: architecture, modern architecture, Utopia, ideal cities, visionary, dystopia

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

UTS 25.1_01_Coleman.indd 1 03/04/14 5:03 PM

Utopian Studies 25.1

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The Perils of Transdisciplinarity: Utopian Studies and Architecture

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 transdiscipli-narily. If the articles that follow are understood in this way, each can equally be understood as making a significant contribution to developing our under-standing of architecture and Utopia, from within the discipline of architec-ture 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 consider-ations 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 envi-ronment 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


nathaniel coleman: The Problematic of Architecture and Utopia

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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.

Utopia Trouble

The job of recovering or recuperating Utopia for architecture is no easy task, considering how deeply entrenched suspicions about Utopia are in the dis-cipline 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 ambi-tions. 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 narra-tives 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 character-ized (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 archi-tecture remain decidedly negative. Although it is difficult to ascertain exactly when modern architecture was first characterized as utopian, architectural



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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 mod-ernist 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 move-ment 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 con-temporary 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



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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 dysto-pia 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 conscious-ness 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).

Against the City

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 accord-ing 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 manifesta-tions—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.



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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 immemo-rial 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 primar-ily 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 divest-ing 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 overorgani-zation, 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 ide-ological 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.



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Toward a Definition of Utopia in Architecture

Although modern architecture’s association with Utopia could seem self-evident, considerations of architecture and Utopia from within the dis-cipline and by utopian studies scholars are beset by a troubling lack of pre-cision in defining the utopian dimensions of architecture and urbanism or how either might actually benefit from encounters with Utopia. If this asser-tion 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 uto-pian 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 overcon-fident 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 crit-ics, theorists, and architects, including Jane Jacobs, Colin Rowe, and Robert Venturi (among others), has less to do with Utopia’s vocation for envisag-ing alternatives than with something akin to a stylistic critique that is decid-edly 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 archi-tectural discourse and stymies identification of a more precise and thus useful definition of Utopia in relation to architecture. As a corrective, the concep-tion of architecture and Utopia introduced here is constructed with refer-ence 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



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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 con-structed; and, not least, a substantive—ethical and aesthetical—critique of the present informed by a critical-historical perspective. In short, a discernible uto-pian dimension of architecture or urbanism (no matter how partial the claim to Utopia may be) entails a sustained consideration of both social process and spa-tial 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 archi-tecture 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, concep-tualizing 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 architec-ture. 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 ostensi-bly improve conditions, is requisite.8

Untangling Utopia from Visionary

In consideration of the conception of Utopia introduced above, the first task confronting any attempt to gain a more precise definition of Utopia for



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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 con-fused 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 inter-changeable 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 pre-sumed 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 examina-tion of their contents quickly reveals how entrenched the confusion of vision-ary and Utopia is in considerations of architecture and cities. Among other possible meanings, visionary suggests something inspired, imaginative, cre-ative, 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,



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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 per-fect 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 pri-mary 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 neces-sary, creates problems for it: Ideal inevitably suggests perfection, and because perfection is impossible, aiming at it appears to implicate Utopia in the dubi-ous belief that perfection might actually be achievable. In this way, Utopia appears a species of hubris, or arrogance, so profound, or profoundly stu-pid, in its assumptions and attempts at installation that it is beyond redemp-tion, 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 pos-sible 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



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partial, built upon an as if condition to guide both the imagination of alterna-tives 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 propo-sition 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 inhab-itants. 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

Defining Utopia for Architecture

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 inhu-manity 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 urban-ism 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 archi-tecture 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



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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 architec-ture and urbanism (in addition to keeping the four elements introduced ear-lier 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 archi-tecture 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 urban-ism 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 archi-tecture is all but inevitable, captured as it is within the cultural norms of the building industry in particular but more generally within the prevailing socio-political and economic conditions of capitalism, which led German philoso-pher 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



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beyond the limits of the possible in the present, imagining a way toward something we might call Utopia is still possible.

Prospects for a Utopian Architecture: The Social and the Political

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 sys-tem, 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, Uto-pia seems to inscribe within itself the most common criticism of it: impossibil-ity (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 possi-bilities. In the absence of a crucial habit for thinking about how to achieve the possible-impossible, the culturally dominant conviction that “there is no alter-native” 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 dream-ing. 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



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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-topi-ans, 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 con-sidered 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 subjec-tivity) 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 dysto-pia, 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.



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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 exist-ing 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.

An Open Question

As has been argued throughout this introduction, the complex relation between architecture and Utopia remains peculiarly undertheorized. In most conversa-tions 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 vision-ary 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 refer-enced sources for the decline of utopian thought in architecture frequently



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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 develop-ment. 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 prac-tice 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 archi-tecture 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 post-modernisms in the 1960s, when the apparent spiritual bankruptcy of ortho-dox modern architecture could no longer be denied. It is according to this schema that the end of orthodox modern architecture, and by some loose



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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 demoli-tion 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 con-tribution to sharpening an understanding of just how Utopia might be alter-natively 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 neces-sity 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 identification of orthodox modern architecture with Utopia, and by convenient extension with the presumed certain failure of both, is ultimately self-serving for an architectural profession in need of justification for its move toward any variety of stylistic postmodernisms in tandem with the discipline’s abnegation of social responsibility, addressed by Bristol in the following:

The two most central critiques of the design of Pruitt-Igoe have come from successor movements to High Modernism: Postmodern-ism, and environment and behavior. . . . Pruitt-Igoe provides a con-venient embodiment of all the alleged failings of Modernism. . . . Proponents of these new approaches attribute the problems of pub-lic 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



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Bristol’s observation that it was self-serving of architects and critics to pin the cause of building failure on those aspects of modernist design they disliked is indeed valuable. However, it also reveals how the genuine social agenda of twentieth-century modern architecture was rejected on the basis of taste, arguably justified by associating modernist architecture with Utopia and Utopia with failure. Emphasis on this helps to highlight how typical recollec-tions of the crisis of Utopia in architecture and its causes (as told by Vidler, for example) conform to convention above all else. But such stories actually raise a more important question: How utopian—in general—was twentieth-century modern architecture anyway?

It is also worth noting that Bristol’s assertion that architects are relatively powerless in determining the outcome, or consequences, of their works unfor-tunately encourages the view that architects thus need not take any respon-sibility 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 indus-try. 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 commu-nism 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 raz-ing of the Berlin Wall, amounted to a requiem for Marx and communism, and with them, Utopia—apparent confirmation that there really is no alter-native 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 perma-nence 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



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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 rel-evant now. While Vidler recognizes a correspondence between his own think-ing 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, com-bined 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 uto-pian dimension architects would “have to regain their sense of social respon-sibility, 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 achiev-able, 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 conceptu-alization 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



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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 degen-erate 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 con-strued 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, some-time 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, liter-ature, 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.



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Notes

1. 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.

2. 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).

3. 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).

4. 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.

5. 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.

6. 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).

7. See Coleman, Utopias and Architecture; and Coleman, Imagining and Making the World.8. 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.



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

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

11. 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).

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

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

14. Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia (1936; Orlando: Harvest, 1985), 192.15. Ibid.16. Fredric Jameson, “Future City,” New Left Review 21 (May–June 2003), accessed July

28, 2012, http://newleftreview.org/II/21/fredric-jameson-future-city.17. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “dystopia, n.,” accessed July 28, 2012, http://www.oed

.com/view/Entry/58909.18. John Stuart Mill, Hansard Commons (1868), accessed July 28, 2012, http://hansard

.millbanksystems.com/commons/1868/mar/12/adjourned-debate#column_1517.19. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “dystopia, n.,” accessed July 28, 2012, http://www.oed

.com/view/Entry/58909.20. 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.

21. Ibid.22. Charles Jencks, The Language of Post-modern Architecture (New York: Rizzoli, 1977), 9.23. Katherine G. Bristol, “The Pruitt-Igoe Myth,” Journal of Architectural Education 44,

no. 3 (1991): 163–71, at 163.24. 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).25. Vidler, response to “Crisis of Utopia?”.26. 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.

27. Vidler, response to “Crisis of Utopia?”28. Ibid.29. Louis Marin, “Utopic Degeneration: Disneyland,” in Utopics: The Semiological Play of

Textual Spaces (New York: Humanity Books, 1984), 239.30. Joseph Rykwert, The Seduction of Place: The History and Future of Cities

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 227.


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7KH 3UREOHPDWLF RI $UFKLWHFWXUH DQG 8WRSLD€¦ · 25/01/2020 · keywords: architecture, modern architecture, Utopia, ideal cities, visionary, dystopia Architecture and the architect,