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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
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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
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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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Utopian Studies 25.1
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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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