A4599 Architecture and Utopia
History/Theory SeminarStan Allen
INTRODUCTION
This seminar undertakes a thematic examination of architecture's long-standing relationship with utopian speculation. I am not so naive as to propose, at the end of the twentieth century, an unqualified return to utopian ideals. As Louis Marin points out, ...utopia as representation defines a totalitarian power, an absolute, formal and abstract power. Recognizing a legitimate suspicion of totalizing systems, this seminar is in tended to have a corrective function. It works to redress an imbalance created by the recent emphases on critical practices which have had, in my view, the effect of under-estimating the fundamentally affirmative character of architectural production. The course will work through the implications of the double bind outlined by Theodor Adorno:
One of the crucial antinomies of art today is that it wants to be and must be squarely utopian, as social reality increasingly impedes Utopia, while at the same time it should not be Utopian so as not to be found guilty of administering comfort and illusion.
It is the movement between an intimate and realistic knowledge of the possibilities of the present and the uncertainty of an unknowable future that marks architecture as a discipline with a necessary, yet paradoxical relation to utopia. Hence Tafuri's impossible qualification: a fragment of utopia...
In proposing a reassessment of the utopian impulse in architecture and urbanism, I want to assert that architecture's critical capacity resides not (as with literature, film or painting) in its capacity to expose or to lay bare the contradictions of a given reality, but instead in its ability to propose alternative realities. Architecture's most powerful critical potential is to contrast existing reality with an exemplary alternative. It is this possibility that architecture might work in anticipation of some better future that keeps the utopian impulse alive today. The sudden appearance of a previously unimagined form of the city optimistic, generous, and unprecedented is perhaps the most disruptive event that architecture could provoke.
COURSE ORGANIZATION
The field in which these ideas operate most effectively is that of the city and its territories. We will examine utopian literature and projects from the Renaissance to the present. Key texts from philosophy and critical theory will be introduced as required. After the introductory presentations and discussions, students will be responsible for defining a topic area for personal research and for presenting that research to the seminar. Instead of a chronological approach (which could only skim the surface of this vast topic) I have defined four thematic approaches to the problem of utopia. Each one addresses an aspect of the city and its history.
BACKGROUND SESSIONS
- introduction and overview: The Paradox of Architecture and Utopia
- philosophical uses of utopia: Hope and Anticipation
- the predicament of modernist utopia: Negative Utopias/Visionary Cities
THEMATIC SESSIONS (each followed by student presentations)
- Cartographies the spatiality of utopia; ideal cities in the Renaissance and beyond; Ledoux; Fourier; St. Simon; Piranesi (Tafuri's concept of negative utopia ); Virilio (the war machine); Foucault (space and power)
- Technologies Garnier; Sant Elia; architecture and mass-production; Banham; Archigram; Meyer; Hilberseimer; Russian Constructivism; Taut (the mystique of glass); critiques of technological progress (New Brutalism, Team 10, late Le Corbusier); new technologies of movement and communication; Virtual utopias?
- Neo-Realisms This area will chart the complex interplay between late capitalism and the partial realization of some form of utopia in an intended or unintended way, with positive or negative effects utopia/dystopia the present-day status of the concept of heterotopia: resorts and theme parks; film and special effects; emerging urbanisms (Hong Kong, Singapore, Las Vegas, American edge cities ); cyberspace/cyberpunk
- Provisional Utopias Kiesler and the Austrian connection (Hollein, St. Florian, Abraham, Coop Himmelblau); Metabolism; Mega-structures; Superstudio; New Organicism; Green architecture; the return to beauty/lyricism