Nathaniel Coleman

Introduction: Architecture and Utopia

No Architecture Without Utopia?

There is no Utopia without architecture, at least where bodies are present, but can there also be no architecture without Utopia. Perhaps it is easier to verify the former rather than the latter. For example, it does not matter whether the Utopia being considered is of a literary sort, an intentional community, or a more generalized project for social renewal. Utopias including bodies are always situated; they must take place somewhere. To be achievable and sustainable, any Utopia that shelters corporeal beings requires a setting attuned to its specific objectives. From walled gardens to new towns and ecovillages, such utopias are always architectural prob-lems, no less than projects for ideal cities – or physical manifestations of enlightened institutions – are utopian ones.

The proposition – equation even – introduced above obviously raises some questions. For example, if there can be no architecture without Utopia, this would seem to implicate Utopia in the overriding failure of Modern Architecture to provide individuals and groups with appropriate settings for private and civic life, especially during the twentieth century (and even into the present). Moreover, if Utopia, in turn, is impossible without architecture, does that suggest that Utopia must remain unrealizable – not to say unimaginable – so long as most of what is built (some of it in the name of architecture) is extensively limited by the dystopic conditions of the present epoch?

In consideration of the themes introduced above, the aim of this intro-duction and the chapters that follow is to interrogate the relation between architecture and Utopia, in particular with an eye toward recuperating a utopian mindset as being at least as important for architecture as design,

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engineering, and developers are. And in so doing, a further objective of this collection of essays is to argue that the real possibilities of Utopia always require an architectural frame, precisely because both Utopia and archi-tecture are problems of form that turn, in large part, on how individuals and groups appropriate space.

Defining Utopia within Utopian Studies: Prolegomenon to the Problem of Architecture and Utopia

Within Utopian studies there are multiple divergences as to what might be called a Utopia, or utopian, although Lyman Tower Sargent argues “that a Utopia must contain a fairly detailed description of a social system that is nonexistent but is located in time and space. At least one of the foci of the work must be such a description. […] It eliminates many of the works that clutter up the bibliographies of Utopias. Very few reform tracts present more than a limited view of society. And of course virtually all city plans and the like would be excluded” (“Definition” 143). In a later and more inclusive definition of utopianism, Sargent writes:

[t]oday dreaming of or imagining better societies is usually called “utopianism,” and utopianism can be expressed in a variety of ways. Utopian literature, the creation of intentional communities or communes, formerly called utopian experiments, and utopian social theory are the most commonly noted forms in which utopianism is expressed, but there are other means of expressing utopianism, such as the design of ideal cities (“Utopia”).

Nevertheless, more recently Sargent has refined his definition by making a distinction between “Utopia” more generally and “Eutopia or positive utopia” more specifically as “a non-existent society described in considerable detail and normally located in time and space that the author intended a contem-porary reader to view as considerably better than the society in which that reader lived” (“Defense” 15). Important here is “reader” because it suggests that although Sargent now includes “the design of ideal cities” in his “Defense,” he remains primarily concerned with utopian literature above all else.

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On the other hand, Ruth Levitas proposes “a broad analytic definition of utopia,” valuable because “the issues of boundaries,” so central to Sargent’s definition “ceases” in her view, “to be a problem” (Concept 198). In this sense, Levitas’s utopian “theoretic,” rather than “definition,” emphasizes that the “one function of utopia is the education of desire […] in the context of an analytic rather than descriptive definition” (“RE: modernism and utopia”). Thus, according to Levitas, almost any activity, cultural artifact, or program may be utopian, even if only partially so, including the city plans Sargent would leave out. The crucial dif ference then between Sargent’s definition and Levitas’s is the issue of categorization with the boundaries this suggests, an issue which he emphasizes, but which she puts to the side. In this way, Levitas says that she follows Bloch, opting

for a much broader definition of utopia: expression of desire for a better way of living. […] It is, essentially, an analytic definition rather than a descriptive one. It provides a way of addressing the utopian aspects of a variety of cultural forms and expres-sions, rather than demanding fully-f ledged utopias in the form of imagined societies (“Imaginary” 54–5).

Where Levitas and Sargent appear to intersect is “that while utopia can be dangerous, utopian visions are absolutely essential,” Levitas is also keen to encounter the fruits of those visions, concretely, in the external world, no matter how provisionally (Sargent, “Defense” 11). In his description of what he calls “critical utopia,” Tom Moylan of fers something of a corrective (or response) to the totality generally associated with Utopia. For him, a “central concern of the critical utopia is the awareness of the limitations of the utopian tradition, so that these texts reject utopia as blueprint while preserving it as dream” (Demand 10). Levitas elaborates on this by suggest-ing that for Moylan (and Fredric Jameson):

[t]he function of utopian fiction is no longer to be seen as providing an outline of a social system to be interrogated literally in terms of its structural properties, and treated as a goal. The utopian function is estrangement and defamiliarisation, ren-dering the taken-for-granted world problematic, and calling into question the exist-ing state of af fairs, not the imposition of a plan for the future. […] [W]hat is most important […] is less what is imagined than the act of imagination itself, a process which disrupts the closure of the present (“For Utopia” 39).

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Ultimately, however, Levitas does not approve of this: “One of the con-sequences of this reading of utopia as heuristic rather than systematic, exploratory rather than prescriptive, is that it provides an alibi for what otherwise might be seen as the weaknesses, and failures of the iconic reg-ister of the utopian text” (“For Utopia” 39). However, as described by Levitas, estrangement and demailiarization are (as Paul Ricoeur observed), precisely the first steps toward the realization of transformed conditions: before the “structural closure of the present” can be disrupted, its “ideo-logical closure” needs be disrupted (N. Coleman, Utopias 56–62, 237–8; Levitas, “For Utopia” 40).

While this illuminates the potential value of both city plans and architectural designs as forms of utopian imagination (that might also represent the first steps toward overcoming the closure of the present), I would argue that a caveat is required, such as Sargent’s definition provides. According to him, a city plan or an architectural design may be a form of utopian imagination (or spring from it) but only insofar as the as of yet “non-existent” plan or design describes the new condition it proposes “in considerable detail,” enough so to adequately explain how the individuals or groups imagined as inhabiting either might actually do so “in time and space.” Likewise, such schemes must delineate how what is proposed could become the setting for a society “considerably better than the society in which” we presently live (“Defense” 15).

Interestingly, Fredric Jameson sees “SPACE” and “THE CITY” as lying along a line of Utopia as “PROGRAM,” and “The Individual Build-ing” as lying along a line of Utopia as “IMPULSE,” with the origin of both to be found in More’s Utopia. The apparent value of this conceptualization of Utopia as a broad field, with dual subfields encompassing a number of topics within each but with a shared origin, is that it can accommodate utopian texts, revolutionary praxis, and intentional communities (along with space and the city) as topics falling within the subfield of Utopia as “program,” while simultaneously accommodating political theory, reform, and a utopian hermeneutic (encompassing also the body, time and col-lectivity) as topics within the subfield of Utopia as “impulse” ( Jameson 4). Moreover, Jameson’s conceptualization makes a space for Sargent’s, Levitas’s, and Moylan’s divergent definitions of Utopia. Although I am

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pleased Jameson includes both city plans and individual buildings, I am less comfortable with their separation into one of each of his sub-subfields, because I see city plans and architecture as being parts of a comprehensive whole (although this reconciliation may arguably already reveal an ideal-ized view of planning and architecture out of step with present conditions of education, practice, and procurement). Perhaps Harvey’s conception of a “dialectical utopianism” comes closest to reconciling city plans and architecture with Utopia and the lived reality of social life (his emphasis on time and place rather than the social notwithstanding).1

Architecture and Utopia: Images and Objects

Any attempt to make a claim for the relative “utopianness” of architecture must begin by dealing with three issues. First, if Utopia may be defined as “a non-existent place located somewhere,” how could it be possible to construe something as real and concrete as a building as a Utopia? 2 A short answer might begin with directing attention away from any realized building toward the original plans for one to determine if it evidences a “utopian impulse.” In this sense, the mindset (or “mental tuning”) giving rise to the building could be utopian, even the constructed building could be “utopian” (rather than a “Utopia”). Moving away from architecture as

1 Levitas has observed that “[t]he space/time or geography/history dyad [in Harvey’s Spaces of Hope] gives too little space to social structure and to sociology, tending to col-lapse the social into the spatial, and the sociological into the geographical – ref lecting the recent intellectual relationship between those disciplines” (“Dialectical” 142).

2 Lyman Tower Sargent asserts: “Finally, it should be remembered that in addition to the various prefixes, ‘u,’ ‘eu,’ and ‘dys,’ – the word topos, or place, is an important part of the terminology. Topos implies that the Utopia must be located spatially and temporally; even though nowhere, it must have some place. This is, of course, a device for imparting reality, making it seem possible rather than impossible” (“Definition” 138).

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“Utopia” to architecture as “utopian” should make it easier to imagine how a work of architecture could convincingly be utopian, a product of thought or a philosophical position on Utopia (the Good Life), rather than an attempt to construct a Utopia. Accordingly, while it is doubtful that a single building or a collection of them in the form of a city could ever be Utopia realized in a final form, any construction has the potential to of fer a prospect on to another reality, no matter how unlikely it is that such a construction, or constructions, even if they exist, could sustain a singular vision of an alternative improved reality through inhabitation. People always use buildings and cities in ways architects and planners have never anticipated.

The second issue confronting any discussion on Utopia and archi-tecture is the degree to which the apparent failures of twentieth-century modern architecture (of the sort identified with the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) and Le Corbusier) are blamed on its sup-posed attempts to make Utopia take f lesh in cities throughout the world. To get a sense of this, one need only consider Alice Coleman’s 1985 book Utopia on Trial, which seeks to dispose of high Modern Architecture, Le Corbusier and Utopia altogether as if they were seamlessly interchangeable and thus responsible for the notorious failures of postwar mass housing in Britain. (Coleman’s dubious project is the subject of my contribution to this collection.) Although I have dealt with this conundrum elsewhere, it is worth reiterating that I am not convinced that Modern Architecture – especially mass high-rise housing – was ever as utopian in intent as it is commonplace to presume. In fact, the city of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is far more dystopian (or anti-utopian) than utopian, not so much in the “presentation” of bad places as in the “realization” of them (N. Coleman, “Dystopias”). The dystopian condition of the modern city is so serious that architecture critic and historian Kenneth Frampton asks:

Is there some fatal inescapable paralysis that prevails, separating the increasingly smart, technological extravagance of our armaments from the widespread dumbness and meanness of our environment? […] A more unaesthetic and strangely repetitive urban fabric – apart from the monumental tranquility of the occasional cemetery – would be hard to imagine. It is a dystopia from which we are usually shielded by the kaleidoscopic blur of the average taxi window, which more often than not is only partially transparent (“Brief Ref lections” 13).

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Arguably, Frampton’s description above, which refers to the taxi ride from JFK ( John F. Kennedy) International Airport, from the New York City borough of Queens to Manhattan, is generally applicable to modern cities everywhere. If so, it is questionable whether or not Utopia of fers an alter-native solution to the failures and limitations of the city of modern archi-tecture, especially if one considers Sargent’s observation that “[v]ery few reform tracts present more than a very limited view of society. And of course virtually all city plans and the like would be excluded” (“Definition”, 143). Sargent’s statement, made as part of his project to define the literary genre of Utopia, is especially provocative considering the large number of publications associating the words “City” or “Architecture” with Utopia (albeit, often enough with little ref lection on defining the utopian aspect of either).3 However, assuming the pairing of “architecture,” “urbanism,” and “city” with Utopia reveals something more significant than simply an attempt to sell books, it is worth clarifying what the relation could be and, perhaps more importantly, how that relationship might contribute to the construction of “better places.” Equally intriguing is why such pairings are so often made in an attempt to explain architectural and urban failures by implicating Utopia.

Before returning to how a utopian mentality can contribute to the realization of better buildings, cities and landscapes, the third issue con-fronting architecture and Utopia worth touching upon has to do with the emphasis on “representation” over “praxis” common to considerations of architecture and Utopia, in particular coming from within the history, theory, criticism and practice of architecture. In most instances, extrava-gant images of visionary cities (that may or may not be ideal) are deployed as evidence for asserting a connection between Utopia and architecture

3 Some notable recent examples of the identification of architecture and cities with utopia – especially in the modern period – include: Jane Alison et al., Future City; Peter Blake, No Place Like Utopia; Marie-Ange Brayer and Larry Busbea, Topologies; Nathaniel Coleman, Utopias and Architecture; Alastair Gordon, Weekend Utopia; Hubert-Jan Henket and Hilde Heynen (eds), Back from Utopia; Terry Kirk, The Architecture of Modern Italy; Jean-Francois Lejeune (ed.), Cruelty and Utopia; Malcolm Miles, Urban Utopias; Stefan Muthesius, The Postwar University; Felicity Scott, Architecture or Techno-Utopia.

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and the city. A striking example of this is a small book by Franco Borsi, Architecture and Utopia, which is bursting with visionary images of archi-tecture and the city from the tenth century to the near present, very few of which would survive even a cursory test against definitions of Utopia coming from within the field of Utopian Studies. For example, Sargent defines Utopianism, Utopia, and Eutopia as follows:

Utopianism – social dreaming.

Utopia – a non-existent society described in considerable detail and normally located in time and space. In standard usage utopia is used both as defined here and as an equivalent for eutopia (below).

Eutopia or positive utopia – a non-existent society described in considerable detail and normally located in time and space that the author intended a contemporane-ous reader to view as considerably better than the society in which that reader lived (“Defense” 15).

Focusing on Sargent’s definition of Utopia, it is a rare thing indeed for visionary architecture or city projects to describe the “non-existent soci-ety” for which the project is proposed “in considerable [enough] detail” to qualify as a Utopia. Frequently, the connection between such projects and a specific “time and place” is also extremely tenuous. In point of fact, much modern architecture could be described as “a-topic” (as a manifesta-tion of abstract space, or as intended for an “isotropic” condition). Thus, the characteristics of Utopia defined by Sargent are either not applicable to architecture, or reveal that the major part of architecture and city plans defined as representing a Utopia must not be.

Nevertheless, as my objective in this introduction is to demonstrate the relevance of collocating architecture and Utopia, it remains to suggest why such association might reasonably make sense, and more so why it might be beneficial. Since the seventeenth century, architecture has increasingly become either more “banal” or more “spectacular.” While “banality” and “spectacle” might seem diametrically opposed with regard to architec-ture and the city, both actually reveal the same tendency: a renunciation of architecture as a world-making art by recasting it as either a technical

Introduction: Architecture and Utopia 9

problem or a problem of image or representation alone.4 In point of fact, the two are normally combined in the commodification of architecture: the quantitative technicality of structure is masked by increasingly spec-tacular images, which may fascinate vision for a time, though destined to expire soon after, leaving only dullness as a residue. More to the point, architecture and the city as technical or spectacle reproduces what “is” so far as it duplicates settings suited to continued smooth operation of the prevailing cultural dominant, now mostly some variant of neoliberal, radi-cally free market capitalism.

Architecture and cities in the image of what “is” (in an extreme form) lack the critical, or resistant, moment necessary for reimagining how we might live better, and thus are unable to provide settings for the potential emergence of these new habits, settings that when provided constitute the utopian dimension of architecture and the city. Levitas provides some support for how architecture might be rethought through Utopia in this way. According to her, “Utopia is about the imaginary reconstitution of society: the construction or constitution of society […] It has both an archaeological or analytical mode, and an architectural or constructive mode” (“Imaginary” 47).

With Levitas’s “architectural or constructive mode of utopia” in mind, it is worth considering further the conventional split between “represen-tation” and “praxis” with regard to the expression of architectural Uto-pias in the form of images, a topic dealt with especially in Greg Kerr’s, Jonathan Powers’s, Ellen Sullivan’s, and Phillip E. Wegner’s contributions to this volume, each of which treats representation in often surprising ways. Utopia communicated as image always emphasizes representation over praxis, even though just the opposite is necessary to reveal Utopia’s potential contribution to reimagining architecture and the city (and the individual and social life they shelter). Tom Moylan is particularly helpful in developing this idea:

4 For more on this trajectory of architecture in the modern period, see Nathaniel Coleman; Kenneth Frampton, Modern Architecture; Alberto Pérez-Gómez; and Joseph Rykwert, The First Moderns.

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[Utopia] must hold that what is already being done is never enough, that what needs to be done must always keep the fullness of human experience on the agenda as an asymptotic reality that constantly pulls the political struggle forward (before, during, and after whatever counts as a revolutionary moment) (Scraps 88).

I believe that what Moylan suggests in the quote above is that to be satis-fied with the status quo is tantamount to having given up, or to having surrendered all resistance to mindlessly repetitive productivity. However, to formulate an alternative, it remains to get at Utopia as “process,” which would bring the discussion much closer to the actual activities of designing and constructing buildings and cities. Here again, Moylan’s own ef fort in defining “Utopia as process” is quite helpful. He argues that Utopia is “an ongoing human activity that takes up various forms but also exceeds the limits of any one of them” (Scraps 88). In considering Jameson’s ideas on Utopia, Moylan brings the discussion about as close as the field of utopian studies normally gets to architecture:

What utopian practice can deliver, however, is a set of provocative but dispensable new ways of living and possible ways toward them, and what it most importantly delivers is the grave acknowledgment that only through the complex process of strug-gle will more emancipatory possibilities than those imagined actually be achieved. Utopia thus calls attention to the implicit limits of its own vision and turns us back to the task of building the future. […] The task of the Utopia is not the unmediated production of the realm of freedom (which the text nevertheless names) but rather the production of the conditions for such historical change. […] Utopia’s promise will rise out of the conditions in which we live and not in some idealized past or future (Scraps 94, 107).

In the above, Moylan echoes Levitas’s conception that Utopia holds out an “archaeological” as well as an “architectural” method for rethinking what “is” (that is nascent in the everyday). Thus, although Utopia is concerned with the future, it emerges out of the present, but as a “reconstruction,” as much as a “reconstitution” of what is given; it must re-imagine forms of conduct as much as forms of individual and group appropriations of space. To do so, digging up origins is at least as important as new building. Moreover, by emphasizing process over representation, in the sense that completion and fixity are neither the aim nor the substance of Utopia,

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Moylan facilitates a rethinking of the value of Utopia for architecture and the city, which Powers develops in his chapter in this volume on Italian Renaissance architect and theorist Filarete.

Accordingly, Utopia’s significance resides not in the degree to which this project or that one approximates some familiar utopian image or form (or visionary project or ideal city plan) but rather in the degree to which every step of the way – from first sketch, through design development and construction to the moment “ownership” of the project is relinquished to those who will inhabit it – is a utopian process. The object is not to con-struct a Utopia, rather it is to imagine superior forms (or frameworks) for human inhabitation that emerge out of the critical moment Utopia shelters and which conventional practice obscures. As an example, Diane E. Davis and Tali Hatuka’s contribution to this book develops on the potentiali-ties of a decidedly utopian method for practice in what they call “conf lict cities,” such as Jerusalem.

Architecture and Utopia: Images and Objects

Earlier, I posed the question as to how it might be possible for something so real, so concrete, as a building to evidence a utopian impulse. More extravagantly still, how could a work of architecture ever be convincingly shown to be a utopia (or utopian), especially because it seems doubtful that a building or even a collection of them in the form of a city could convincingly of fer a prospect on to another reality. Less likely still is the possibility that such a construction, or constructions, if they even exist, could uphold a vision of an alternative improved reality, sustainable through inhabitation.

More precisely, how could it be possible for a functioning structure to be both no place (utopia) and simultaneously a good place (eutopia)? Perhaps the answer lies in the degree to which some architecture (or even urban plans or urban designs) are credibly works of art, of fering perspectives on to the unknown and windows into an augmented reality in the same

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way that literature, music, dance, painting and sculpture can. The utopian potential of art, or the potential of art as utopian construct, is credible enough, as Bloch has shown. But somehow architecture, burdened as it is by use, and so dependent on politics and the marketplace for its exist-ence, seems, especially in our times, to be of necessity ever the province of practicality. If a building can be built, how could it convincingly be a Utopia (or utopian)?

In an attempt to show how this might be possible, it is worth ref lecting on the degree to which the imagination and realization of architecture are ultimately not so wildly dif ferent from making in the other arts, or at least need not be. For example, a literary utopia or a contribution to Utopian studies will both begin as an idea, a desire, realized by way of the working upon this in and through the imagination. However, for the work to be made, in the sense of being available to others, in the form of a published book for example, it must be printed, which is, in its own way, the result of mechanical production and reproduction, in much the same way that constructing a building is.

Both a book and a building generally begin with a sketch. In this way, a manuscript is something like an architectural drawing, or other form of representation. Very rarely is a published book exactly like even the final draft. Everything involved in bringing a text from evident completion to publication is also an interpretation of it. In the same way, architectural drawings and even blueprints (or construction documents, or even more restrictively, contract documents) never coincide exactly with a building as built. Or, as Powers observes in his chapter, this is an invaluable provi-sionality that lends any project a vitality, or at least once did but has now been mostly lost to our obsessive pursuit of fidelity between drawing and building (of which use of computers in design and representation can be both cause and symptom). Needless to say, the gaps between planned occupation of a structure and its actual day-to-day functioning are usually even wider than the break between those revealed by the translation from drawings to buildings.

The steps between idea and availability entail multiple layers of inter-pretation. And if a book only finally becomes “real” in the imagination of readers through reading, a building only becomes “real” through its occupa-tion by inhabitants. Only in an epoch of persuasive practical realism, when

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architecture seems little more than a product of the building industry and architects are mostly little more than technicians, could the fictive qual-ity of buildings have receded so far into the background of the psyches of architect, client, observer, and occupant alike. Nevertheless, works of architecture that lay claim to the status of works of art will inevitably share with other works of art the capacity for permitting unexpected, and thus refreshing, insights into realty that neither the natural sciences nor the social sciences could ever hope to disclose. It is precisely the fictive and illuminat-ing potential of architecture (in an intersection with literature) that Ufuk Ersoy’s chapter in this collection examines through architect Bruno Taut’s collaboration with novelist Paul Scheerbart early in the twentieth century. Valérie Narayana’s, Kerr’s, and Wegner’s chapters also examine intersections between architecture and literature in the invention and representation of utopias. Kerr and Narayana ref lect on this by considering the figure of the temple and the engineer in nineteenth-century French literature, respec-tively, whereas Wegner considers this by way of Rem Koolhaas’s explora-tions of “the void” as utopian potential.

Once a work of architecture can be construed as a work of art, it may be argued to have, at least potentially, a utopian function, in the same way any other artistic expression can, but will not always have. All works of crea-tive expression have their sketches and some even their blueprints. Every time a work of theatre, dance, or music is experienced, it is made anew by each viewer and through each subsequent performance. Even a painting, sculpture or a film (though static) will be experienced in another way with each first encounter of it. The same individual will also experience any given work dif ferently during each subsequent encounter with it. Theatre, music, and dance could be said to have an inbuilt promise of interpretation, no matter how rigorously notated or exhaustively rehearsed, and this is simply because no performer, director, conductor, or choreographer could ever re-play the same piece exactly as its composer imagined. Equally, each time a work of art is encountered it will reveal something new (and if it does not, perhaps it has no claim to art). Such perpetual newness applies equally to motionless works of art like painting as to mobile ones like dance; in either case, a work of art, if it is one, will ever reveal something fresh, even unexpected or unanticipated, each time it is experienced, which is – at least in principle – its utopian potential.

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A utopian text is no less utopian for having been committed to the page, published, and then read and re-read by untold numbers of readers. Neither consumption nor criticism promises to exhaust a robust work’s potential for renewal. Perhaps similarly, the appearance and subsequent disappearance of an intentional community reveals less about the certain failure of Utopia than it does about its possibility. And when considera-tion turns to intentional communities, it ought to turn also to the built environment of that community. It is here also that architecture is at its most potentially utopian but also its least: how can any claim to the organic relationship between the intentions of a community and the character of its physical setting be verified? Or, vice versa, what role, if any, could the built environment play in inaugurating a Utopia? David H. Haney’s chap-ter in this volume, for example, examines how an alternative community’s concrete manifestation – the forms it takes as well as shapes – can (at least begin to) bridge the gap between social processes and architectural form in Utopia.

In most instances, when Utopia is considered in tandem with archi-tecture, the social dimension of the former – its intentionality, gives way, almost completely, to an aesthetics of utopian imagery, which is more like a form of visionary projection than a Utopia. When nominating architecture as utopian it often seems as though Utopia must always and everywhere have a fixed character, no matter the variations of invention, content and context. For example, if twentieth-century modern architecture was ever utopian, as many architects, critics and historians claim it was, it is no wonder that whatever project for social reform it might have had failed so miserably: in most instances, the supposed utopian frame was fixed long before any nuanced perspective on its ultimate social organization and operations was ever even ventured. In short, the most significant dif ference between an intentional community of consensus (as much for its inhabit-ants as for the built environment that shelters them) and a hypothetically utopian example of modern architecture, in the form of let us say a housing project, is that all of the intentionality in the latter is imposed from above by architects, planners, developers, and governmental authorities rather than by the intended inhabitants.

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Because the imagined utopian potential of most social housing projects is dictated rather than arrived at through agreement, the architectural and social result will, in most instances, resemble something far more despotic than utopian (which I discuss in my chapter). Haney’s chapter explores alternatives to this apparent inevitability. It is the rare architect who is able to navigate all of the pitfalls and restrictions that come with building in a bureaucratic situation; rarer still is the architect who after all of this is nevertheless able to actually achieve a potentially utopian framework, especially when what is constructed is intended for strangers who have had little or no involvement in any stage of the process (and sometimes even when they do). Malcolm Miles examines just this dilemma in his chapter on Cerdà’s plan for the extension of Barcelona at the end of the nineteenth century. Sullivan also considers this in her investigation of Patrick Ged-des’s attempts to bridge the gaps between representation, social reality, and utopian transformation of both space and society. Davis and Hatuka also deal with this in their chapter by elaborating on ways of envisioning uto-pian proposals in the present that can include multiple narratives without losing their transformative potential.

If the likelihood of achieving a utopian moment in architecture that is sustainable through time and occupation appears so unpromising, what possible claim could any building outside of the confines of an intentional community (or fiction) possibly have on Utopia? It is on this dilemma more than any other that so many attempted pairings of architecture and Utopia (except in the most negative sense) break, to be revealed as bogus. Yet, by returning the discussion to the utopian potential of works of art on the one hand, while keeping intentional communities nearby on the other, there might still be some way to rescue the proposition that archi-tecture can be utopian even today. Perhaps even with the hope of arriving at a more precise definition than one that accepts architecture as utopian simply because the drawings that precede it articulate a “not-yet” condi-tion and that to build, to construct, “must” always entail some degree of optimism, or even that public housing inevitably includes social imagin-ing. The limitations of both generalities are too obvious to ignore. For the first, architectural drawings for construction have for a long time now been primarily technical documents far more than rhetorical devices: rather

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than opening up perspectives on to a possible world, they are generally intended to assure, as far as possible, conformity with the blueprint in the built result, which Powers explores in his chapter through a consideration of Filarete’s Renaissance treatise on architecture. With the advent of com-puter aided drafting and representations, interpretations of, or divergences from, drawings through construction have only become more limited. As for the second, real estate investment and development, not to mention the vanity of architects and clients alike, reveal building to be, as often as not, an instrument of capital accumulation, or an object of spectacle, far more than a credible attempt at realizing genuinely improved conditions (despite often extravagant claims that they are).

Architecture and Utopia: World-Making Arts

If a work of architecture can be argued for as being in some way analogous to literature on the one hand and visual and performing art on the other (perhaps all are like dreams), the nineteenth-century German architect and theorist Gottfried Semper’s argument that, akin to music and dance, archi-tecture is a “world-making art” becomes quite revealing.5 For Semper, the apparently static quality of painting and sculpture determined the incapac-ity of both for acting on reality, or for revealing alternatives to it in the way that music, dance, and architecture supposedly could. More to the point, Semper understood music, dance, and architecture as “world-making” inas-much as they are profoundly environmental, interpreting setting as much

5 As architecture historian Kenneth Frampton observes, “In tracing this thought retrospectively, one may cite Semper’s ‘Theory of Formal Beauty’ of 1856, in which he no longer grouped architecture with painting and sculpture as a plastic art, but with music and dance as a cosmic art, as an ontological world-making rather than as representational form. Semper regarded such arts as paramount not only because they were symbolic but also because they embodied man’s underlying erotic urge to strike a beat, to string a necklace, to weave a pattern, and thus to decorate according to a rhythmic law” (“Rappel à l’ordre” 523).

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as giving rise to it. In this sense, all three open doorways onto alternative realities, or at the very least parallel ones, in much the way that utopias do. It is in this way that art can be anticipatory – utopian – as Bloch imagined it could be. What is more, before its utilitarian turn during the nineteenth century essentially deprived modern architecture of its earlier transaction with cosmology and myths, architecture was paradoxically generally more abstract though also more capable of construing figurative meaning than it is today (in much the way that music and dance are). Along these lines, Kerr’s, Narayana’s, Ersoy’s, and Wegner’s essays each articulates an intersec-tion between architecture and other artistic expression in the formulation of anticipated transformation; individual and social, as well as artistic.

Actually, by operating through reference or analogy rather than rep-resentation, music and dance can transcend whatever limitations distance might place on them between their original invention and performance in the present. The more strictly representational quality of traditional painting and sculpture limited the “world-making” capacities of both, at least until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Yet, as helpful as this conception of art might be for identifying a coincidence between Utopia and architecture, it is obvious that there is much pre-twentieth-century painting and sculpture that, although representational, nevertheless opens up perspectives onto alternative realities; the work of Michelangelo comes to mind. However, there was always something “architectural” about Michelangelo’s painting and sculpture (his Sistine Chapel frescoes for example, or his Moses sculpture), which often either augmented an archi-tectural or urban framework or were set within one or the other. His gradual move away from painting and sculpture to architecture is quite suggestive. Nonetheless, Semper’s conception of architecture as a “world-making art” is helpful to developing an understanding of its utopian potential as much as its utopian vocation:

Architecture (now called tectonics) is no longer grouped with painting and sculpture as a plastic art but with dance and music as a “cosmic art” – cosmic because their laws of spatial harmony are immanently form giving, decorative in the very manipulation of their basic elements. The instinct underlying tectonic creation is man’s primordial urge to strike a beat, to string a necklace to decorate “lawfully” (Semper 33).

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The value of Semper’s observation for the discussion here resides in the degree to which Utopia too engages in the making of worlds. However, while all architecture – no matter how impoverished – establishes some kind of setting and as such perhaps installs a world writ small, not all archi-tecture reveals a utopian dimension (as Bloch and others have noted). Leav-ing this qualitative problem aside for the moment, Semper’s assertion that architecture is “world-making” suggests that along with music and dance it does indeed open doorways onto alternative augmented realities, or at the very least parallel ones, in much the way that utopias do. According to architectural historian and theorist Joseph Rykwert:

The work of art he [Semper] says succinctly in the Prolegomena [to Style in the Tech-nical and Tectonic Arts or Practical Aesthetics, 1860–2] is man’s response to the world which is full of wonder and mysterious powers, whose laws man thinks he might understand but whose riddle he never resolves, so that he remains forever in unsatis-fied tension. The unattained completeness he conjures with play – and by building a miniature universe for himself. In this the cosmic law can be observed within the smallest dimensions of a self-contained object (“Semper” 127).

The reference to “unsatisfied tension” as a permanent condition of being human, gentled to some degree by both play and art, emphasizes the cos-mological character of both. How strange it is now to think of architec-ture (or almost anything else human-made in the present) as a “miniature universe” that assuages anxiety by making incompleteness more bearable. In many ways, it is just this compensatory, anticipatory, and ultimately emancipatory potential of architecture that Ersoy attempts to recuperate in his chapter on Scheerbart and Taut’s “Glass Utopia.” But it is precisely this latent potential of architecture, which today seems spent, that is, I believe, the utopian moment of architecture that requires Utopia to recuperate it. No matter how much architects and others pay lip-service to ideas of “place making,” the reality is that establishing welcoming environments that also allay not only the tensions introduced above, but mortal anxiety as well, seem all but beyond the capacity of the present culture. Over and over again, the built environment – our home – is re-inscribed with alienation, encouraging yet again dispossession of the city and civic life alike.

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In much the way an intentional community will have a founder, so will a work of architecture. The architect, no matter how much s/he works as a member of a team, envisions a response to the problems set for him or her by the client. However, what begins to distinguish a remarkable work of architecture from unremarkable ones is what the architect makes of the brief, the degree to which s/he is able to draw poetry from what might well be an extremely arid technocratic series of requirements for how to respond to the program. Another part of this distinguishing process is the degree to which the architect is able to imagine a result that responds to the fail-ures of past projects by attempting to surpass them with more successful future ones (N. Coleman, Utopias). Powers’s chapter on Filarete, Miles’s on Cerdà, Sullivan’s on Geddes, and Davis and Hatuka’s on “Visioning” each considers the ways architects and planners have worked to draw Utopia out of necessity, or imagine ways that they might do so. Haney’s chapter on “Concrete Utopia” proposes how this has been realized, at least (pro-visionally and) partially.

Returning for a moment to the connection between literary and social utopias and architecture, it is worth considering that the founding char-ter of an intentional community must be specific enough to distinguish it as intentional but open enough to withstand conf lict, negotiation, and evolution. As a corollary, works of architecture will come closest to being utopian when they are equally specific “and” open, which will go far in assuring their continuing usefulness into the future, in both technical and emotional senses. For a building to have any claim to the status of a Utopia, or as an exemplar of utopian imagination, it must do more than simply look like some familiar utopian image, as Powers touches on in his chapter and I do in mine. Rather, it will need to embody social imagination, especially regarding how it structures and negotiates relationships of individuals to each other, to society, to the world, and to nature, in much the way literary utopias and intentional communities envision the same. In this way, to lay claim in any way to Utopia, a work of architecture must be as purposeful as both fictional utopias and intentional communities are.

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Architecture Emptied

Italian architectural historian Manfredo Tafuri (1935–94) believed that the traditional liberal profession of architecture was at its end, quickly being replaced by “technicians in the building industry” (x). For him, all that could be hoped for was a silent – sublimely useless – architecture free of any agenda. Such architecture would at least be honest in having com-pletely turned away from what Tafuri called “false hopes in design” (182). According to him, architecture of the sort considered worthwhile in this introduction and the chapters that follow must be impossible to produce in the present, foreclosed on by the logic of capitalist production. Only after capitalism is overcome by a superior condition will it again be possible to imagine and construct a renewed culture, especially the architectural frame to house it. (Tafuri’s reading of the situation, it is worth noting, is very close to Bloch’s.) As described by Tafuri, current conditions emptied architecture of ideology, precisely because “Ideology is useless to capitalist development” (x). Perhaps, but it is also ideology that infuses architecture (among other human activities) with meaning and purpose.

Stripped of ideology, all that is left for architecture (and the city) is “form without utopia”; that is, architecture free of any purposefulness apart from its status as aesthetic or economic object or commodity fetish, which emphasizes its spectacle and technical aspects above all else (Tafuri, ix). If Tafuri’s description of the limit of contemporary architecture (and the city) as form without Utopia is accurate, which I believe it is, then the problem of a renewed architecture persists as a problem of Utopia (no matter how uncomfortable Tafuri would have been with this proposition) (Tafuri ix). Infusing form, and thus architecture and the city, with Utopia might be accomplishable by a force of will alone. But for “will” to have a force, the special capacity of Utopia for instilling purpose to design requires illumination, such as I have attempted to outline here. Beyond that, some more worked-out sense of artistic invention with regards to architecture is necessary, which could draw it back from the precipice of fanciful novelty or dour technicality that empty building of its more substantial qualities.

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Although many writers on art and architecture could aid in the achieve-ment of this, for the moment, the comprehensiveness of Semper’s thinking on such matters is especially worth considering:

Just as nature with her infinite abundance is very sparse in her motives, repeating continually the same basic forms by modifying them a thousand fold according to the formative shape reached by living beings and their dif ferent conditions of exist-ence, shortening some parts and lengthening others, developing parts which are only alluded to in others, just as nature has her history of development within which old motives are discernable in every formation – in the same way art is also based on a few standard forms and types that stem from the most ancient traditions and that always reappear yet of fer an infinite variety and like nature’s types have their history. Therefore nothing is arbitrary; everything is conditioned by circumstances and relations (183).

The value of the preceding quote for the present discussion is multiple. On the one hand, it suggests that there is no such thing as a volume zero original without a past: utopias, whether literary fictions or intentional communities, do not exist in either historical or formal isolation from one another, any more than works of architecture or cities do. On the other hand, Semper’s conviction that all living things, including objects and forms of human expression, have a history sheds light on the otherwise dead end of originality as ahistorical novum. A chiliastic total break from history is impossible.

Thinking for a moment of More’s Utopia and Morris’s News from Nowhere, it is possible to argue that the idea of the good or superior places both texts describe are critical of the bad consequences of modernity with-out being either enervating or conformist. In each, tradition – in the sense of inheritances that are handed “down” as well as “over” through time, by way of habit as much as evolution – is the ground of radical (re)invention (of society, city, and architecture).

In precisely the way Semper describes it in the passage above, all inno-vation (or design), no matter how far-reaching, has a past. In this sense, Utopia can bring meaning to history as much as to art (architecture and the city here) by granting both a sense of purpose in improving the lot of individuals and groups. Not just by “educating desire” but also by making

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possible the kind of social dreaming “licensed” to imagine better condi-tions, and thus envision and begin constructing the first steps toward their realization, precisely because the ways individuals and groups appropriate objects and spaces through habit can be attended to in a way that neither conservatism nor exaggerated progressivism can manage. Utopia accom-plishes this competence by proposing alternatives to the narrow confines of the marketplace and modernity (as technological progress), both of which privilege conformity and novelty in equal measure over and above transformation. Utopianism is restless but, as the chapters that follow attest, it is always caught up with the social and with imagining alterna-tives to the status quo, the most promising examples of which propose betterment but not necessarily at the expense of habit, which in turn is the source of both ethics and tradition.6 Both Utopia and architecture are world-making endeavors, each plays with reality by inventing new worlds and both imagine worlds within worlds, drawn out of experience of what exists in the present.

Overemphasis on technical skill in the training and practice of archi-tects tends to deprive architecture and thus the built environment gen-erally from becoming an enriched and resonant “counterform” to life, instead subjecting all of us who inhabit it to a framework that images and supports all too well the limitations of the present. If Utopia can also be construed as the “education of desire” (as a number of writers suggest it is), perhaps ref lecting on architecture and Utopia holds out the hope that not only might Utopia be revealed again (and again) as the “tacit coef ficient of architectural invention” but that by (re)visiting Utopia’s

6 “Ethics is not merely a theoretical study for Aristotle. Unlike any intellectual capac-ity, virtues of character are dispositions to act in certain ways in response to similar situations, the habits of behaving in a certain way. Thus, good conduct arises from habits that in turn can only be acquired by repeated action and correction, making ethics an intensely practical discipline” (Kemerling, “Aristotle: Ethics”). Ethics: “eqos [ethos] Greek word for custom or habit, the characteristic conduct of an individual human life. Hence, beginning with Aristotle, ethics is the study of human conduct, and the Stoics held that all behavior – for good or evil – arises from the eqos of the individual” (Kemerling, “eqos [ethos]”).

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verdurous of ferings, architects might have their consciousnesses raised to demand more of themselves and their clients, so that the inhabitants of the built environment (us) might feel empowered to also expect more, and in turn demand it.

Throughout the chapters that follow, the idea of architecture is devel-oped in intriguing ways that expand conventional understandings of it, widening its scope to include both obvious “auteur” buildings, but also territory and social space in one direction and texts in the other (including both literature and designs). The fictional space suggested by the archi-tecture of a given text (or design), although forever imaginary, is seen as a means – the first steps – to overcoming the closure of the apparently “real” by the genuinely “possible.” Powers’s, Kerr’s, Narayana’s, Haney’s, Davis and Hatuka’s, and Wegner’s chapters are particularly strong in this regard, but so are the chapters by Miles, Sullivan, and Ersoy. Each of these contribu-tions articulates the slippage between fiction and reality, or, are concerned with what I’ve argued elsewhere are “real fictions,” the degree to which the fictive is also a making (Coleman, Utopias 46–62). On the other hand, my own contribution to this collection focuses on a specific instance where Utopia is used as a sweeping pejorative that is patently fallacious.

Works Cited

Alison, Jane, Frédéric Migayrou, and Neil Spiller. Future City: Experiment and Utopia in Architecture. London: Thames and Hudson, 2007.

Blake, Peter. No Place Like Utopia: Modern Architecture and the Company We Kept. New York: W. W. Norton: 1993.

Bloch, Ernst. The Utopian Function of Art and Literature, Selected Essays. Trans. Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1988.

Borsi, Franco. Architecture and Utopia. Trans. Deke Dusinberre. Paris: Éditions Hazan, 1997.

Brayer, Marie-Ange and Larry Busbea. Topologies: The Urban Utopia in France, 1960–1970. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2007.