![Let us begin with the kernel idea of “nowhere” implied by the very word “utopia”
and Thomas More’s descriptions: a place which has no place, a ghost city; for a river
no water; for a prince no people, etc. What must be emphasized is the benefit of this
kind of extra-territoriality for the social function of utopia. From this “no-place,” an
exterior glance is cast on our reality, which suddenly looks strange, nothing more
being taken for granted. The field of the possible is now opened up beyond that of
the actual, a field for alternative ways of living. The question therefore is whether
the imagination could have any constitutive role without this leap outside. Utopia
is the way in which we radically rethink what is family, consumption, government,
religion, etc. The fantasy of an alternative society and its topographical figuration
“nowhere” works as the most formidable contestation of what is. […] [C]ultural
revolution proceeds from the possible to the real, from fantasy to reality.
— Paul Ricoeur, “Ideology and Utopia as Cultural Imagination”](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/5236703-250606202521-447a26aa/85/Imagining-And-Making-The-World-Reconsidering-Architecture-And-Utopia-Nathaniel-Coleman-11-320.jpg)
![List of Illustrations
Figure 1 AntoniodiPietroAverlino(Filarete).Planviewof Sforzindawithschematic
city center, from Trattato de Architettura, 1465. (Filarete vo1.2, 43r).
Figure 2 Paul Chenavard,La Palingénésie sociale (esquisse), Musée des Beaux-Arts de
Lyon: © Lyon MBA / Photo Alain Basset.
Figure 3 Louis-Auguste Boileau, Nouvelle forme architecturale, V-12841, Planche 2,
Bibliothèque nationale de France.
Figure 4 Bruno Taut’s Monument of Iron at Leipzig, 1913. From Der Industriebau
4.11 (15 November 1913), 149.
Figure 5 Bruno Taut’s sketch at the Collegiate Church of Stuttgart, 1904.
Figure 6 On the cover of Bruno Taut’s pamphlet for the Glashaus, Paul Scheerbart’s
motto“DerGotischeDomistdasPräludiumderGlasarchitektur”wasplaced
below Taut’s drawing. Glashaus: Werkbundausstellung Cöln (Cologne:
[n. pub.], 1914).
Figure 7 The Glashaus: interior view of the glass cupola. From Deutsche Form im
Kriegsjahr.DieAusstellungKöln1914.JahrbuchdesDeutschenWerkbundes
(Munich: F. Bruckmann, 1915), plate 79.
Figure 8 Thomas More. Frontispiece to Utopia, 1516.
Figure 9 Francesco Colonna. “Cythera” from Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, 1499.
Figure 10 EbenezerHoward.“SlumlessSmokelessCities”from To-morrow:APeaceful
Path to Real Reform, 1898.
Figure 11 Patrick Geddes. “Spirillum” from “On the Life-History of Spirillum.”
Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, June 1878.
Figure 12 PatrickGeddes.“SocialNotation”,1902.Universityof StrathclydeArchives.
GED 18/1/203.
Figure 13 Patrick Geddes. “Thinking Machine”, undated. University of Strathclyde
Archives. GED 18/1/281.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/5236703-250606202521-447a26aa/85/Imagining-And-Making-The-World-Reconsidering-Architecture-And-Utopia-Nathaniel-Coleman-19-320.jpg)
![2 Nathaniel Coleman
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
distinctionbetween“Utopia”moregenerallyand“Eutopiaorpositiveutopia”
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
readerlived”(“Defense”15).Importanthereis“reader”becauseitsuggeststhat
although Sargent now includes “the design of ideal cities” in his “Defense,”
he remains primarily concerned with utopian literature above all else.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/5236703-250606202521-447a26aa/85/Imagining-And-Making-The-World-Reconsidering-Architecture-And-Utopia-Nathaniel-Coleman-24-320.jpg)
![Introduction: Architecture and Utopia 3
On the other hand, Ruth Levitas proposes “a broad analytic definition
ofutopia,”valuablebecause“theissuesof boundaries,”socentraltoSargent’s
definition“ceases”inherview,“tobeaproblem”(Concept198).Inthissense,
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 difference 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-fledged 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 offers 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 affairs, 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).](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/5236703-250606202521-447a26aa/85/Imagining-And-Making-The-World-Reconsidering-Architecture-And-Utopia-Nathaniel-Coleman-25-320.jpg)
![Introduction: Architecture and Utopia 5
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
Spacesof Hope]givestoolittlespacetosocialstructureandtosociology,tendingtocol-
lapsethesocialintothespatial,andthesociologicalintothegeographical–reflecting
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).](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/5236703-250606202521-447a26aa/85/Imagining-And-Making-The-World-Reconsidering-Architecture-And-Utopia-Nathaniel-Coleman-27-320.jpg)
![6 Nathaniel Coleman
“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 offer 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
modernarchitecture(of thesortidentifiedwiththe CongrèsInternationaux
d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) and Le Corbusier) are blamed on its sup-
posed attempts to make Utopia take flesh 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 Reflections” 13).](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/5236703-250606202521-447a26aa/85/Imagining-And-Making-The-World-Reconsidering-Architecture-And-Utopia-Nathaniel-Coleman-28-320.jpg)
![Introduction: Architecture and Utopia 7
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 offers 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 reflection 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.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/5236703-250606202521-447a26aa/85/Imagining-And-Making-The-World-Reconsidering-Architecture-And-Utopia-Nathaniel-Coleman-29-320.jpg)
![8 Nathaniel Coleman
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,asmyobjectiveinthisintroductionistodemonstratethe
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](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/5236703-250606202521-447a26aa/85/Imagining-And-Making-The-World-Reconsidering-Architecture-And-Utopia-Nathaniel-Coleman-30-320.jpg)
![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.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/5236703-250606202521-447a26aa/85/Imagining-And-Making-The-World-Reconsidering-Architecture-And-Utopia-Nathaniel-Coleman-31-320.jpg)
![10 Nathaniel Coleman
[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 effort 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,](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/5236703-250606202521-447a26aa/85/Imagining-And-Making-The-World-Reconsidering-Architecture-And-Utopia-Nathaniel-Coleman-32-320.jpg)
![18 Nathaniel Coleman
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-
tecturerevealsautopiandimension(asBlochandothershavenoted).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
emancipatorypotentialofarchitecturethatErsoyattemptstorecuperatein
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.
Nomatterhowmucharchitectsandotherspaylip-servicetoideasof “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.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/5236703-250606202521-447a26aa/85/Imagining-And-Making-The-World-Reconsidering-Architecture-And-Utopia-Nathaniel-Coleman-40-320.jpg)
![22 Nathaniel Coleman
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 reflecting on architecture and Utopia holds out the hope
that not only might Utopia be revealed again (and again) as the “tacit
coefficient 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]”).](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/5236703-250606202521-447a26aa/85/Imagining-And-Making-The-World-Reconsidering-Architecture-And-Utopia-Nathaniel-Coleman-44-320.jpg)
![24 Nathaniel Coleman
Coleman, Alice. Utopia on Trial: Vision and Reality in Planned Housing. London:
Hilary Shipman, 1985.
Coleman, Nathaniel. “Building Dystopia.” Morris E Rinascimento 4 (2007): 181–92.
——. Utopias and Architecture. Abingdon: Routledge, 2005.
Frampton, Kenneth. “Brief reflections on the predicament of Urbanism.” The State
of Architecture at the Beginning of the 21st Century. Eds Barnard Tschumi and
Irene Cheng. New York: The Monacelli Press/Columbia Books on Architec-
ture, 2003. 13.
——.ModernArchitecture:ACriticalHistory,4thedn.London:ThamesandHudson,
2007.
——. “Rappel à l’ordre, the Case for the Tectonic.”Architectural Design60.3–4 (1990):
19–25. Theorizing a New Agenda for Architecture: An Anthology of Architectural
Theory 1965–1995. Ed. Kate Nesbit. New York: Princeton Architectural Press,
1996. 518–28.
Gordon, Alastair. Weekend Utopia: Modern Living in the Hamptons. New York: Prin-
ceton Architectural Press, 2001.
Henket, Hubert-Jan and Hilde Heynen (eds). Back from Utopia: The Challenge of the
Modern Movement. Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2002.
Jameson, Fredric. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other
Science Fictions. London and New York: Verso, 2005.
Kemerling, Garth. “Aristotle: Ethics.” Philosophy Pages (18 August 2010) <http://
www.philosophypages.com/hy/2s.htm>.
——.“eqos[ethos].”PhilosophyPages(18August2010)<http://www.philosophypages.
com/dy/e9.htm#eth>.
Kirk, Terry. The Architecture of Modern Italy: Visions of Utopia, 1900-Present Vol.II.
New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2005.
Lejeune, Jean-Francois (ed.). Cruelty and Utopia: Cities and Landscapes of Latin
America. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2005.
Levitas, Ruth. The Concept of Utopia. Oxford and Bern: Peter Lang, 2010.
——. “For Utopia the (Limits of the) Utopian Function in Late Capitalist Soci-
ety.” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy. 3.2 (2000):
25–43.
——. “The Imaginary Reconstitution of Society: Utopia as Method.” Utopia Method
Vision: The Use Value of Social Dreaming. Eds Tom Moylan and Raffaella Bac-
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——. “RE: modernism and utopia.” E-mail to Nathaniel Coleman. Date e-mailed:
16 July 2010.
——. “On Dialectical Utopianism.” History of the Human Sciences. 16.1 (2003):
137–50.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/5236703-250606202521-447a26aa/85/Imagining-And-Making-The-World-Reconsidering-Architecture-And-Utopia-Nathaniel-Coleman-46-320.jpg)
Imagining And Making The World Reconsidering Architecture And Utopia Nathaniel Coleman
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- 5. Imagining and Making the World Edited by Nathaniel Coleman ISBN 978-3-0343-0120-6 www.peterlang.com Although the association between architecture and utopia (the relationship between imagining a new world and exploring how its new conditions can best be organized) might appear obvious from within the domain of utopian studies, architects have long attempted to dissociate themselves from utopia. Concentrating on the difficulties writers from both perspectives experience with the topic, this collection interrogates the meta-theoretical problematic for ongoing intellectual work on architecture and utopia. The essays explore divergent manifestations of the play of utopia on architectural imagination, situated within specific historical moments, from the early Renaissance to the present day. The volume closes with an exchange between Nathaniel Coleman, Ruth Levitas, and Lyman Tower Sargent, reflecting on the contributions the essays make to situating architecture and utopia historically and theoretically within utopian studies, and to articulating utopia as a method for inventing and producing better places. Intriguing to architects, planners, urban designers, and others who study and make the built environment, this collection will also be of interest to utopian studies scholars, students, and general readers with a concern for the interrelationships between the built environment and social dreaming. “This collection is a must for anyone interested in attempts to make the world a better place. Drawing together the work of key scholars in the multi-disciplinary field of utopian studies and leading thinkers in the field of architecture, Nathaniel Coleman argues for a symbiotic relationship between utopia and architecture.” Lucy Sargisson, University of Nottingham “The great variety of work considered here – from Ildefons Cerdà’s visionary but very successfully realized Barcelona plan to Patrick Geddes’s methods for the urban planner - suggests a fresh and enormously varied panorama of realistic thinking about city form. Perhaps the buildings of the future may be the product of a new dialogue between designer and inhabitant in which the utopian thinking this book so ably advocates will inevitably be an essential factor.” Joseph Rykwert, University of Pennsylvania “A fine collection of essays that makes an important contribution to the complex and undertheorized relationship between utopianism and architecture. Providing a uniquely cross-disciplinary approach, the essays explore architectural theory and praxis in literary and social utopias, and, vice versa, utopian theory and praxis in architecture.” Nicole Pohl, Oxford Brookes University Ralahine Utopian Studies - Volume Eight Nathaniel Coleman is Senior Lecturer in Architecture at Newcastle University, UK, and the author of Utopias and Architecture (2005). He has also contributed chapters to Constructing Place and The Hand and the Soul, and has published articles on utopia and architecture, the history and theory of architecture, and pedagogy in journals such as Architectural Research Quarterly, Interfaces: Image, Texte, Langage, Morus: Utopia e Rinascimento, Cloud-Cuckoo-Land: International Journal of Architectural Theory, and The International Journal of Art and Design Education. Imagining and Making the World Imagining and Making the World Reconsidering Architecture and Utopia Edited by Nathaniel Coleman Peter Lang
- 6. Imagining and Making the World Edited by Nathaniel Coleman www.peterlang.com Although the association between architecture and utopia (the relationship between imagining a new world and exploring how its new conditions can best be organized) might appear obvious from within the domain of utopian studies, architects have long attempted to dissociate themselves from utopia. Concentrating on the difficulties writers from both perspectives experience with the topic, this collection interrogates the meta-theoretical problematic for ongoing intellectual work on architecture and utopia. The essays explore divergent manifestations of the play of utopia on architectural imagination, situated within specific historical moments, from the early Renaissance to the present day. The volume closes with an exchange between Nathaniel Coleman, Ruth Levitas, and Lyman Tower Sargent, reflecting on the contributions the essays make to situating architecture and utopia historically and theoretically within utopian studies, and to articulating utopia as a method for inventing and producing better places. Intriguing to architects, planners, urban designers, and others who study and make the built environment, this collection will also be of interest to utopian studies scholars, students, and general readers with a concern for the interrelationships between the built environment and social dreaming. “This collection is a must for anyone interested in attempts to make the world a better place. Drawing together the work of key scholars in the multi-disciplinary field of utopian studies and leading thinkers in the field of architecture, Nathaniel Coleman argues for a symbiotic relationship between utopia and architecture.” Lucy Sargisson, University of Nottingham “The great variety of work considered here – from Ildefons Cerdà’s visionary but very successfully realized Barcelona plan to Patrick Geddes’s methods for the urban planner - suggests a fresh and enormously varied panorama of realistic thinking about city form. Perhaps the buildings of the future may be the product of a new dialogue between designer and inhabitant in which the utopian thinking this book so ably advocates will inevitably be an essential factor.” Joseph Rykwert, University of Pennsylvania “A fine collection of essays that makes an important contribution to the complex and undertheorized relationship between utopianism and architecture. Providing a uniquely cross-disciplinary approach, the essays explore architectural theory and praxis in literary and social utopias, and, vice versa, utopian theory and praxis in architecture.” Nicole Pohl, Oxford Brookes University Ralahine Utopian Studies - Volume Eight Nathaniel Coleman is Senior Lecturer in Architecture at Newcastle University, UK, and the author of Utopias and Architecture (2005). He has also contributed chapters to Constructing Place and The Hand and the Soul, and has published articles on utopia and architecture, the history and theory of architecture, and pedagogy in journals such as Architectural Research Quarterly, Interfaces: Image, Texte, Langage, Morus: Utopia e Rinascimento, Cloud-Cuckoo-Land: International Journal of Architectural Theory, and The International Journal of Art and Design Education. Imagining and Making the World Imagining and Making the World Reconsidering Architecture and Utopia Edited by Nathaniel Coleman Peter Lang
- 7. Imagining and Making the World
- 8. Ralahine Utopian Studies Series editors: Raffaella Baccolini (University of Bologna, at Forlì) Joachim Fischer (University of Limerick) Michael J. Griffin (University of Limerick) Tom Moylan (University of Limerick) Volume 8 Peter Lang Oxford l Bern l Berlin l Bruxelles l Frankfurt am Main l New York l Wien
- 9. Nathaniel Coleman (ed.) Imagining and Making the World Reconsidering Architecture and Utopia Peter Lang Oxford l Bern l Berlin l Bruxelles l Frankfurt am Main l New York l Wien
- 10. © Peter Lang AG, International Academic Publishers, Bern 2011 Hochfeldstrasse 32, CH-3012 Bern, Switzerland info@peterlang.com, www.peterlang.com, www.peterlang.net All rights reserved. All parts of this publication are protected by copyright. Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution. This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems. Printed in Germany Cover image: Cangrande equestrian statue (fourteenth-century), installation by architect Carlo Scarpa (1906–1978), as part of his renovation of the Castelvecchio Museum (1958–1964), Verona, Italy. Photograph by Nathaniel Coleman (2007). ISSN16615875 (Print edition) IS9783034301206 EISBN 9783035301731 Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: Imagining and making the world : reconsidering architecture and utopia / editor, Nathaniel Coleman. p. cm. -- (Ralahine utopian studies ; 8) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-3-0343-0120-6 (alk. paper) 1. Visionary architecture. 2. Utopias. 3. Architecture--Philosophy. I. Coleman, Nathaniel, 1961- II. Title: Reconsidering architecture and utopia. NA209.5.I43 2011 720.1--dc22 2011011070
- 11. Let us begin with the kernel idea of “nowhere” implied by the very word “utopia” and Thomas More’s descriptions: a place which has no place, a ghost city; for a river no water; for a prince no people, etc. What must be emphasized is the benefit of this kind of extra-territoriality for the social function of utopia. From this “no-place,” an exterior glance is cast on our reality, which suddenly looks strange, nothing more being taken for granted. The field of the possible is now opened up beyond that of the actual, a field for alternative ways of living. The question therefore is whether the imagination could have any constitutive role without this leap outside. Utopia is the way in which we radically rethink what is family, consumption, government, religion, etc. The fantasy of an alternative society and its topographical figuration “nowhere” works as the most formidable contestation of what is. […] [C]ultural revolution proceeds from the possible to the real, from fantasy to reality. — Paul Ricoeur, “Ideology and Utopia as Cultural Imagination”
- 13. Contents Acknowledgements xi List of Illustrations xiii Nathaniel Coleman Introduction: Architecture and Utopia 1 Part One Architecture and Fiction 27 Jonathan Powers Building Utopia: The Status of the Ideal in Filarete’s Trattato 29 Greg Kerr Gautier, Boileau, and Chenavard: Utopian Architecture of the Temple in Mid-Nineteenth-Century France 57 Valérie NarayanA Du Génie en Utopie: The Figure of the Engineer in Balzacian and Zolian Utopias 81 Ufuk Ersoy To See Daydreams: The Glass Utopia of Paul Scheerbart and Bruno Taut 107
- 14. viii Part Two Reconsiderations 139 Malcolm Miles An Orderly Life: Ildefons Cerdà and the Northern Extension of Barcelona 141 Ellen Sullivan Drawing Blood: Patrick Geddes’s Sectional Thinking 165 Nathaniel Coleman Utopia on Trial? 183 Part Three Prospects 221 David H. Haney Spaces of Resistance and Compromise: The Concrete Utopia Realized 223 Diane E. Davis and TalI Hatuka Transcending the Utopian-Pragmatic Divide in Conflict Cities: Applying Vision and Imagination to Jerusalem’s Future 249 Phillip E. Wegner “The Mysterious Qualities of This Alleged Void”: Transvaluation and Utopian Urbanism in Rem Koolhaas’s S,M,L,XL 283
- 15. ix Part Four Commentary 299 Nathaniel Coleman, Ruth Levitas, and Lyman Tower Sargent Trialogue 301 Notes on Contributors 337 Index 341
- 17. Acknowledgements Above all, I would like to thank all of the contributors to this volume fore- most for their essays but also for their perservance during the long process duringwhichthis collectionhas takenshape,movingfrom theoriginalidea for it through the formal proposal stage, its development, and finally to the satisfaction of publication. Half of the chapters began as presentations during various sessions at the “Bridges to Utopia,” 9th International Con- ference of the Utopian Studies Society, hosted by the Ralahine Center for Utopia Studies at the University of Limerick, Ireland, 3–5 July 2008. It was at the conference that Tom Moylan first invited me to develop an edited collection on the meta-theoretical problematic of utopia and architecture, deriving at least in part from papers presented during it. I would thus like to thank Tom Moylan in particular for inviting me to develop this project and for his stalwart support and encouragement during its progress, both in his role as one of the series editors but also as a colleague and friend. I would also like to thank both Ruth Levitas and Lyman Tower Sargent for their close reading of all of the essays and for their willingness to engage with me in developing the commentary that closes this volume. A debt of gratitude is owed to the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape Research Committee and the Humanities andSocialScien- cies Faculty at the University of Newcastle for their contributions in sup- port of the publication of this volume. I would also like to acknowledge the ongoing support by the School Research Committee of my research more generally but in particular for supporting my ongoing attendance at Utopian Studies conferences on both sides of the Atlantic, the personal and academic benefits of which are innumerable. I am particularly grateful to the people who worked with me on pro- ducing this volume, the eighth in the Ralahine Utopian Studies book series: my original Peter Lang editor Hannah Godfrey in the U.K. and Christabel Scaife in Ireland who now has responsibility for the Ralahine
- 18. xii Acknowledgements Utopian Studies Series; Maureen O’Connor, for ably copy-editing the manuscript and producing the index, and series editor Raffaella Baccolini, especially for her input (with Tom Moylan) on the title of the book and the cover design. And finally, I would like to extend my deepest appreciation to my wife Elizabeth and children Zach and Sephie who continue to put up with the strange hours of an academic, including work patterns that often do not adhere to a proper routine, but mostly for their unflagging support and essential interuptions. Each day, my children remind me of Utopia’s real vocation, especially in a world that seems somehow determined to con- found progress with a narrowing of possibility. Permissions Every effort was made to reach the copyright holders of the documents included herein. Any additional arrangements or oversights will be cor- rected in subsquent editions.
- 19. List of Illustrations Figure 1 AntoniodiPietroAverlino(Filarete).Planviewof Sforzindawithschematic city center, from Trattato de Architettura, 1465. (Filarete vo1.2, 43r). Figure 2 Paul Chenavard,La Palingénésie sociale (esquisse), Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon: © Lyon MBA / Photo Alain Basset. Figure 3 Louis-Auguste Boileau, Nouvelle forme architecturale, V-12841, Planche 2, Bibliothèque nationale de France. Figure 4 Bruno Taut’s Monument of Iron at Leipzig, 1913. From Der Industriebau 4.11 (15 November 1913), 149. Figure 5 Bruno Taut’s sketch at the Collegiate Church of Stuttgart, 1904. Figure 6 On the cover of Bruno Taut’s pamphlet for the Glashaus, Paul Scheerbart’s motto“DerGotischeDomistdasPräludiumderGlasarchitektur”wasplaced below Taut’s drawing. Glashaus: Werkbundausstellung Cöln (Cologne: [n. pub.], 1914). Figure 7 The Glashaus: interior view of the glass cupola. From Deutsche Form im Kriegsjahr.DieAusstellungKöln1914.JahrbuchdesDeutschenWerkbundes (Munich: F. Bruckmann, 1915), plate 79. Figure 8 Thomas More. Frontispiece to Utopia, 1516. Figure 9 Francesco Colonna. “Cythera” from Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, 1499. Figure 10 EbenezerHoward.“SlumlessSmokelessCities”from To-morrow:APeaceful Path to Real Reform, 1898. Figure 11 Patrick Geddes. “Spirillum” from “On the Life-History of Spirillum.” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, June 1878. Figure 12 PatrickGeddes.“SocialNotation”,1902.Universityof StrathclydeArchives. GED 18/1/203. Figure 13 Patrick Geddes. “Thinking Machine”, undated. University of Strathclyde Archives. GED 18/1/281.
- 20. xiv List of Illustrations Figure 14 Patrick Geddes. “Valley Section”, 1909. University of Strathclyde Archives. Figure 15 Patrick Geddes. “Geography of Education”, undated. University of Strath- clyde Archives. GED 14/1/60. Figure 16 ThomasHuxley.IllustrationfromPhysiography:AnIntroductiontotheStudy of Nature, 1877. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1901. Figure 17 ThomasHuxley.IllustrationfromPhysiography:AnIntroductiontotheStudy of Nature, 1877. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1901. Figure 18 Charles Darwin. “Tree of Life”, 1837. From Sketchbook. Figure 19 PatrickGeddes.“SocialNotation”,1902.Universityof StrathclydeArchives. GED 18/1/203. Figure 20 PatrickGeddes.“SocialNotation”,1902.Universityof StrathclydeArchives. GED 18/1/203. Figure 21 PatrickGeddes.“SocialNotation”,1902.Universityof StrathclydeArchives. GED 18/1/203. Figure 22 Patrick Geddes. “Toys! Games!”, 1902. University of Strathclyde Archives. GED 14/1/23. Figure 23 Detail of 22. Figure 24 PatrickGeddes.“OutlookTower”,1904.Universityof StrathclydeArchives. GED 18/1/224. Figure 25 Aerial view of Eden Siedlung, c. mid-1930s. Figure 26 View of Ziebigk Siedlung (Dessau), c. late 1920s. Figure 27 Recycling diagram for Ziebigk Siedlung, 1926. Figure 28 Originalmobilehome(caravan)oftheCaddysatFindhorn,currentcondition. Copyright Findhorn Foundation. Figure 29 The “Living Machine” at Findhorn. Copyright Findhorn Foundation. Figure 30 Pond/biotope at Sieben Linden Ecovillage. Photo: Eva Stützel. Figure 31 Gardener with horses at Sieben Linden Ecovillage. Photo: Michael Würfel.
- 21. List of Illustrations xv Figure 32 HUMMUS:EastMediterraneanCityBelt2050.SigiAtteneder,University of Art and Design, Linz, Lorenz Potocnik. <http://www.hummus2050.org> Figure 33 HUMMUS:EastMediterraneanCityBelt2050.SigiAtteneder,University of Art and Design, Linz, Lorenz Potocnik. <http://www.hummus2050.org> Figure 34 HUMMUS:EastMediterraneanCityBelt2050.SigiAtteneder,University of Art and Design, Linz, Lorenz Potocnik. <http://www.hummus2050.org>
- 23. 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 somequestions.Forexample,if therecanbenoarchitecturewithoutUtopia, 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? Inconsiderationof thethemesintroducedabove,theaimof thisintro- 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,
- 24. 2 Nathaniel Coleman 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 distinctionbetween“Utopia”moregenerallyand“Eutopiaorpositiveutopia” 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 readerlived”(“Defense”15).Importanthereis“reader”becauseitsuggeststhat although Sargent now includes “the design of ideal cities” in his “Defense,” he remains primarily concerned with utopian literature above all else.
- 25. Introduction: Architecture and Utopia 3 On the other hand, Ruth Levitas proposes “a broad analytic definition ofutopia,”valuablebecause“theissuesof boundaries,”socentraltoSargent’s definition“ceases”inherview,“tobeaproblem”(Concept198).Inthissense, 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 difference 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-fledged 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 offers 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 affairs, 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).
- 26. 4 Nathaniel Coleman 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
- 27. Introduction: Architecture and Utopia 5 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 Spacesof Hope]givestoolittlespacetosocialstructureandtosociology,tendingtocol- lapsethesocialintothespatial,andthesociologicalintothegeographical–reflecting 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).
- 28. 6 Nathaniel Coleman “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 offer 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 modernarchitecture(of thesortidentifiedwiththe CongrèsInternationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) and Le Corbusier) are blamed on its sup- posed attempts to make Utopia take flesh 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 Reflections” 13).
- 29. Introduction: Architecture and Utopia 7 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 offers 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 reflection 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.
- 30. 8 Nathaniel Coleman 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,asmyobjectiveinthisintroductionistodemonstratethe 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
- 31. 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.
- 32. 10 Nathaniel Coleman [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 effort 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,
- 33. Introduction: Architecture and Utopia 11 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 humaninhabitationthatemergeoutof thecriticalmomentUtopiashelters 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 “conflict 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 offer a prospect on to another reality. Less likely still is the possibility that such a construction, or constructions, if they even exist, couldupholdavisionofanalternativeimprovedreality,sustainablethrough 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 urbanplansorurbandesigns)arecrediblyworksofart,offeringperspectives on to the unknown and windows into an augmented reality in the same
- 34. 12 Nathaniel Coleman 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)? Inanattempttoshowhowthismightbepossible,itisworthreflecting on the degree to which the imagination and realization of architecture are ultimately not so wildly different 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 readersthroughreading,abuildingonlybecomes“real”throughitsoccupa- tion by inhabitants. Only in an epoch of persuasive practical realism, when
- 35. Introduction: Architecture and Utopia 13 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,insightsintorealtythatneitherthenaturalsciencesnorthesocial 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. ValérieNarayana’s,Kerr’s,andWegner’schaptersalsoexamineintersections between architecture and literature in the invention and representation of utopias. Kerr and Narayana reflect 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 anyotherartisticexpressioncan,butwillnotalwayshave.Allworksofcrea- 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 eachfirstencounterofit.Thesameindividualwillalsoexperienceanygiven work differently 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.
- 36. 14 Nathaniel Coleman 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 mostpotentially utopian but also its least: how can any claim tothe 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 formofvisionaryprojectionthanaUtopia.Whennominatingarchitecture 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 difference 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.
- 37. Introduction: Architecture and Utopia 15 Becausetheimaginedutopianpotentialofmostsocialhousingprojects 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
- 38. 16 Nathaniel Coleman 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 (perhapsallarelikedreams),thenineteenth-centuryGermanarchitect 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, Semperunderstoodmusic,dance,andarchitectureas“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).
- 39. Introduction: Architecture and Utopia 17 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- centurypaintingandsculpturethat,althoughrepresentational,nevertheless opens up perspectives onto alternative realities; the work of Michelangelo comestomind.However,therewasalwayssomething“architectural”about Michelangelo’s painting and sculpture (his Sistine Chapel frescoes for example, or his Moses sculpture), which often either augmented an archi- tecturalorurbanframeworkorweresetwithinoneortheother.Hisgradual 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).
- 40. 18 Nathaniel Coleman 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- tecturerevealsautopiandimension(asBlochandothershavenoted).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 emancipatorypotentialofarchitecturethatErsoyattemptstorecuperatein 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. Nomatterhowmucharchitectsandotherspaylip-servicetoideasof “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.
- 41. Introduction: Architecture and Utopia 19 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 beanextremely aridtechnocraticseriesofrequirements forhowtorespond 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 conflict, 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, orasanexemplarofutopianimagination,itmustdomorethansimplylook 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.
- 42. 20 Nathaniel Coleman 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,thespecialcapacityof Utopiaforinstillingpurposetodesignrequires 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.
- 43. Introduction: Architecture and Utopia 21 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 different 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 offer 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
- 44. 22 Nathaniel Coleman 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 reflecting on architecture and Utopia holds out the hope that not only might Utopia be revealed again (and again) as the “tacit coefficient 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]”).
- 45. Introduction: Architecture and Utopia 23 verdurous offerings, 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.ArchitectureandUtopia.Trans.DekeDusinberre.Paris:ÉditionsHazan, 1997. Brayer, Marie-Ange and Larry Busbea. Topologies: The Urban Utopia in France, 1960– 1970. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2007.
- 46. 24 Nathaniel Coleman Coleman, Alice. Utopia on Trial: Vision and Reality in Planned Housing. London: Hilary Shipman, 1985. Coleman, Nathaniel. “Building Dystopia.” Morris E Rinascimento 4 (2007): 181–92. ——. Utopias and Architecture. Abingdon: Routledge, 2005. Frampton, Kenneth. “Brief reflections on the predicament of Urbanism.” The State of Architecture at the Beginning of the 21st Century. Eds Barnard Tschumi and Irene Cheng. New York: The Monacelli Press/Columbia Books on Architec- ture, 2003. 13. ——.ModernArchitecture:ACriticalHistory,4thedn.London:ThamesandHudson, 2007. ——. “Rappel à l’ordre, the Case for the Tectonic.”Architectural Design60.3–4 (1990): 19–25. Theorizing a New Agenda for Architecture: An Anthology of Architectural Theory 1965–1995. Ed. Kate Nesbit. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996. 518–28. Gordon, Alastair. Weekend Utopia: Modern Living in the Hamptons. New York: Prin- ceton Architectural Press, 2001. Henket, Hubert-Jan and Hilde Heynen (eds). Back from Utopia: The Challenge of the Modern Movement. Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2002. Jameson, Fredric. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. London and New York: Verso, 2005. Kemerling, Garth. “Aristotle: Ethics.” Philosophy Pages (18 August 2010) <http:// www.philosophypages.com/hy/2s.htm>. ——.“eqos[ethos].”PhilosophyPages(18August2010)<http://www.philosophypages. com/dy/e9.htm#eth>. Kirk, Terry. The Architecture of Modern Italy: Visions of Utopia, 1900-Present Vol.II. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2005. Lejeune, Jean-Francois (ed.). Cruelty and Utopia: Cities and Landscapes of Latin America. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2005. Levitas, Ruth. The Concept of Utopia. Oxford and Bern: Peter Lang, 2010. ——. “For Utopia the (Limits of the) Utopian Function in Late Capitalist Soci- ety.” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy. 3.2 (2000): 25–43. ——. “The Imaginary Reconstitution of Society: Utopia as Method.” Utopia Method Vision: The Use Value of Social Dreaming. Eds Tom Moylan and Raffaella Bac- colini. Bern: Peter Lang, 2007. 47–68. ——. “RE: modernism and utopia.” E-mail to Nathaniel Coleman. Date e-mailed: 16 July 2010. ——. “On Dialectical Utopianism.” History of the Human Sciences. 16.1 (2003): 137–50.
- 47. Introduction: Architecture and Utopia 25 Miles, Malcolm. Urban Utopias: The Built and Social Architectures of Alternative Set- tlement. London: Routledge, 2007. Moylan, Tom. Demand the Impossible. New York and London: Methuen, 1986. ——. Scraps of the Untainted Sky, Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia. Oxford: West- view Press, 2000. Muthesius, Stefan. The Postwar University: Utopianist Campus and College. New Haven: Yale University Press: 2000. Pérez-Gómez, Alberto. Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1983. Rykwert, Joseph. The First Moderns: Architects of the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1980. ——. “Semper and the Conception of Style” (1974). Necessity of Artifice. New York: Rizzoli, 1982. 123–30. Sargent, Lyman Tower. “In Defense of Utopia.” Diogenes. 53.1 (2006): 11–17. ——. “Utopia.” New Dictionary of the History of Ideas. 2005. Encyclopedia.com (19 July 2010) <http://www.encyclopedia.com>. ——. “Utopia – The Problem of Definition.” Extrapolation 16.2 (Spring 1975): 137–48. Scott, Felicity. Architecture or Techno-Utopia: Politics after Modernism. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2007. Semper, Gottfried. The Four Elements of Architecture, and Other Writings. Trans. Harry Francis Mallgrave and Wolfgang Herrmann. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Tafuri, Manfredo. Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development. 1973. Trans. Barbara Luigia La Penta. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1976.
- 49. Part One Architecture and Fiction
- 51. Jonathan Powers Building Utopia: The Status of the Ideal in Filarete’s Trattato Literary Conceits in the Presentation of Utopia No doubt that when Thomas More (1478–1535) employed the conceit of the travelogue in his paradigmatic Utopia (1516), he intended to use the effervescent wonder excited by the recent discovery of the New World to ignite the imaginations of his readers. Just so, More’s itinerant philoso- pher, Raphael Hythlodae, claims to have accompanied Amerigo Vespucci on three of his four famous voyages (7). When Utopia was published, Vespucci’s letters describing his voyages and discoveries were the toast of Europe.1 Europe’s literati therefore almost certainly read Utopia in part as a refinement (authentic in spirit if not in precise detail) of their collective mental image of the New World. In placing Hythlodae aboard Vespucci’s ships, More effectively illuminates his fiction by setting it in the radiance of wonder cast by Vespucci’s authoritative and beguiling letters.2 In addition 1 Françoise Choay observes that the letters of Amerigo Vespucci were not merely immensely popular in the sixteenth century, they were also immensely influential insofar as they provided an imaginative mirror in which European society would see itself reflected and thereby objectified (Choay 56–7). 2 Jack H. Hexter points out that More also uses the biographical detail of Hythlodae’s presence on Vespucci’s ships to knit together Utopia’s two parts. (More uses other details as well.) Hythlodae’s claim, in Part I of Utopia, to have accompanied Vespucci on three of his four voyages finds its echo in Part II, when the nearly anonymous narrator also claims an interest in four voyages to the New World (Hexter 17–18). The description of Utopia offered in Part II thereby becomes a commentary on and amplification of the social criticism offered in Part I.
- 52. 30 Jonathan Powers to providing his fiction a credible frame, More’s presentation of the state of Utopia within a travelogue affords him, as an author, a great deal of latitude concerning the history of his fictional state. A polity that has been “discovered” appears to the eyes of the discoverer as a fait accompli. Hythlodae presents Utopia as a kind of sociological snapshot, without an urgent and immediate past or indeterminate future. He provides only a peremptory sketch of Utopia’s endogenous history (by which I mean the historyUtopianstellthemselvesaboutthemselves).Idonotmeantosuggest that Hythlodae interprets Utopian mores and institutions in bad faith; it is just that by omitting the contingent details of the Utopians’ immediate circumstances he effectively deprives his interlocutors (read: More’s read- ers) of a major interpretive resource.3 Readers of Utopia must depend more upon Hythlodae’s assumptions, deductions, and speculations than upon the Utopians’ understanding of their own actions and their own culture. When there is no conceit of discovery in a literary utopia, the author usually deploys the more straightforward conceit of didactic.4 The author cites or posits premises – usually concerning the nature of human being – and then proceeds to deduce the ideal structure of a human polity. The author “demonstrates” to the reader, step by step, the inferential logic obtaining between an axiomatic human nature and the necessary form of the polity that follows from it.5 In adopting the conceit of didactic, the author incurs no obligation to discuss the history of the polity he describes, 3 Although her position differs significantly from mine, Marina Leslie’s Renaissance UtopiasandtheProblemof History wasthestimulusthatinducedmetoconsidermore carefully the role of endogenous history (my term) in the constitution of Utopia. 4 In using the literary term “conceit” to describe didactic writing, I mean to emphasize that an author who wants to describe an ideal polity inevitably chooses some liter- ary mode of presentation. Even a didactic exposition represents an authorial choice about how to make manifest to a reader the point of the discourse. 5 Ernesto Grassi’s distinction between rhetorical speech (which has a metaphorical character) and rational speech (which has an apodictic character) has been excep- tionally useful in my analysis of the various uses and meanings of literary utopias. Although literary utopias partake of both forms of speech, priority belongs to rhe- torical speech, because the original premises of an argument cannot ground them- selves; the original must therefore be metaphorical in character and so be expressed in rhetorical speech. See especially the second chapter of Rhetoric as Philosophy.
- 53. Building Utopia: The Status of the Ideal in Filarete’s Trattato 31 since he operates in the realm of pure demonstration. The perfectly just polis in Plato’s Republic is the prototype of this kind of utopia – a didactic sketch that shows the necessary form of the polity following from the given premises. Both “travelogue” and “didactic” utopias pass over the question of the real-time “making” of an ideal polity. To the extent that “travelogue” and “didactic” utopias exhaust the genre of literary utopias, we can say generally that Utopia is not built, but “deduced.” My observation that Utopia is not built but deduced needs to be understood as referring quite strictly to literary utopias. The arguments advanced in this paper are premised on a sharp distinction between the cerebral activity of deduction and the manual activity of construction, and they are therefore positioned athwart the primary trend in contemporary utopian studies. Following the lead of Lyman Tower Sargent, Utopian studies today conflates three disparate activities: “the creation of utopian communities, communitarian experiments, communes, or what have you; utopian thought; and the writing of Utopias” (“Definition” 139). As the basis for his conflation, Sargent posits a fundamental human “hope/desire for a better life in this life,” which defines and animates all “utopian” activ- ity (“Defense” 11). Ruth Levitas epitomizes this line of thinking with her succinct definition: “Utopia is the expression of the desire for a better way of being” (8).6 According to this view, all humans share a basic, universal desireforcomparativelybetterlivingconditions;thisdesire,simultaneously 6 It bears mentioning that both Sargent and Levitas, notwithstanding More’s titular assertion that Utopia is the optima res publica, define Utopia using the comparative (“better life,” “better way of being”) rather than the superlative. Elsewhere in their respective writings, both discuss Utopia in the superlative, whether as normative ideal or definitional form. Now to the extent that we read literary utopias as social criticism, we necessarily hear them as speaking in the comparative; but to the extent that we read them as political hypotheses, we necessarily hear them as speaking in the superlative. It has occurred to me that Utopia’s amphibious existence as both comparative and superlative may well serve as the source of its political and intellec- tual power, but such a speculation only sharpens the question of why contemporary critics have not attended more carefully to this crucial ambiguity.
- 54. 32 Jonathan Powers individual and collective, lurks at the origin of all human activity that expresses both latent and operant political possibilities. Sargent’s and Levitas’s reframing of political idealism as a kind of social longing cleverly answers H. G. Wells’s 1905 call for a post-Darwinian “kinetic” utopia by assimilatingutilitarianismandindividualisticliberalism.7 AfterAdamSmith it becomes possible to read individual desires as socially dynamic, and after Sigmund Freud it becomes possible to read social desires as constitutive of individuals. Notwithstanding its incisiveness for contemporary debate, however, such a thoroughly modern definition can shed but little light on the literary motivations of authors such as Thomas More, Tommaso Campanella, and Johann Valentin Andreae. It would be absurd to read More as actually proposing that the English legislature enact any Utopian law. Rather, Utopia is best understood as a rhetorical move in the ongo- ing discourse that constituted sixteenth-century European politics. It is therefore tendentious – not to say naïve – to lump together the activities of physical construction, legislation, political organizing, contemplative reflection on politics, polemical writing, and literary imagining simply because the agents in question are assumed to prefer a hypothetical state of political affairs to their current situation. Only we moderns have ever confusedrhetoricalfictionsforlegislativeproposalsandarchitecturalplans, because only we moderns arrogantly presume to extrapolate our destinies from our desires. As opposed to a description of a deduced utopia, a credible account of the real-time “making” of an ideal polity – replete with all the predictably unpredictable setbacks, improvisations, and compromises – would require attention to natural history as well as to mythological history. We would havetoaccountfortheinfluenceof theunforeseeableaswellastheforeseen. We would have to account for the contingent confluence of events and actions that propitiate both the uncertain rise and the inevitable fall of our ideal polity in time. Most importantly, we would have to account for the fallible human makers who would draft and enforce its laws; who would charter and instantiate its institutions; who would build and defend its walls. A credible account of the building of Utopia, in other words, would 7 Cf. Hansot, passim.
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