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DOI: 10.1353/utp.2014.0015
NathanielColeman
abstract
The 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.
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
historian Tim Benton argues that utopia is most certainly a post modernist
term that wasnt 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 Koetters 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 architectureunencumbered 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 modernisms 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
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 Rowes 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
societyno matter how often both ended in failurearchitects are now primar-
ily preoccupied with making images, serving developers, or beingfashionable.
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.
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 Spillers recent
Visionary Architecture: Blueprints of the Modern Imagination (2006) and Jane Alison
and Marie-Ange Brayers 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 Eatons Ideal Cities: Utopianism and the
(Un)Built Environment (2002) and Franco Borsis 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 Eatons 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
books 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, Utopias 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 b urden, 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,
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 (19132005), who
saw it as potentially generative, facilitating thought beyond the limits of the
given. In Ricoeurs terms, Utopia can be propitious, outlining possibility while
also taking the first steps toward its achievement. More valuable, perhaps, is
Ricoeurs 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
10
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 argumentor imagined as inevitably
negativecharting 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
11
12
beyond the limits of the possible in the present, imagining a way toward
something we might call Utopia is still possible.
Another way to clarify what Utopia might be for architecture is to begin with
Saint (Sir) Thomas Mores (14781535) originary coinage of the term in 1516 and
the definition that extends from it. First, it is worth considering that U topia is
a much older word than dystopia. Nevertheless, because Mores 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 Utopiaas proposed, or defined, by Moreresides 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
13
14
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 cityhistorical 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: Utopias 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 architectures fundamental social dimension.
Before Utopia can be recuperated for architecture, the commonly refer-
enced sources for the decline of utopian thought in architecture frequently
15
16
17
Bristols 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 utopianin generalwas twentieth-
century modern architecture anyway?
It is also worth noting that Bristols 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, Utopiaapparent 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 Vidlers 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 existthe eternal source of utopian thinking that never runs dryis
as rich, and possibly even richer than at the time of Sir Thomas More.26
18
19
20
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. Guilln, 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): 17188;
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), 2123; Colin Rowe, The Architecture of Utopia (1959) and Addendum
(1973), in The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa and Other Essays (Cambridge: MIT Press,
1976), 20523, especially 21112; 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),
37899, 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): 2543; On Dialectical Utopianism, History of the Human
Sciences 16, no. 1 (2003): 13750; 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), 4768. 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): 1117; Three Faces of Utopianism
Revisited, Utopian Studies 5, no. 1 (1994): 137; 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 UtopiaThe Problem of Definition, Extrapolation
16, no. 2 (Spring 1975): 13748. 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 theWorld.
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, 183219.
21
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 Ricoeurs encounter with Utopia, see Coleman, Utopias and
Architecture, 5662; 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 Leatherbarrows elaboration on architectures 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 (MayJune 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): 16371, 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.
22