Welcome to Paradise

Image credits: Still from Bubble House, Tacita Dean, 1999 (featured on the exhibition Utopia/Dystopia. A Paradigm Shift in Art and Architecture.

Whenever there is a historical crisis, which usually characterizes times of transition, when the established structures and hierarchies come into question, we are impelled, as Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History, to turn toward the accumulated ruins from the past, running the risk of ending up, dangerously, in a long lament, or on the contrary of looking at the future, where projections of a new world promise an apparently sublime way out of the present condition. Currently we find ourselves facing such a moment, with voices from different fields of knowledge—from economics to politics, science to art—appealing for the end of the capitalist era, which seems to be the beginning of all contemporary problems, even those caused by natural phenomena. “What is crippling is not the presence of an enemy but rather the universal belief, not only that this tendency is irreversible, but that the historic alternatives to capitalism have been proven unviable and impossible, and that no other socio-economic system is conceivable, let alone practically available.” (1)

It is at these particular moments in history that utopian projects become more urgent, albeit, nowadays, nearly always framed and understood through correlated visions of dystopian worlds, proving on one hand the resistance of the very utopian function in thought, which seeks to distance itself from the state of things, and on the other hand the change and profound alteration of the very paradigms and traditional utopian models. Since Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1924), one can hardly separate the utopian vision from the dystopian one, whose ambiguity stems from the inversion of the categories. Dystopia appears in this romance not only in the critique, which became recurrent in traditional utopias (the one of suppression of individual expression and freedom), as well as in the critique of what came to constitute itself as the utopian expression of the modern movement (the inscription of the capitalist system’s production and market laws on the different activities and the consequent suppression of the shock caused by the experience of the metropolis through the alteration of socioeconomic models, which would allow the proletariat economic, social, and political control). In turn, the utopian fantasy is born on the other side of the so called “green wall,” where nature reigns uncontrollably free.

There isn’t, then, any strangeness in the negation of the eminently positive character (puerile at times) that had, beforehand, been attributed to utopia. On the contrary, utopia is, since its genesis, as demonstrated by Fredric Jameson, profoundly negative, born from the abolition of the “evils” of the world (eradicating memory itself), or better still, from the profound desire to eliminate all that denies the political expression of communities, considering this the critique of all economic, social, and cultural systems, which inform life, capable of making the collective consciousness and respective revolutionary power disappear. Or, as Boaventura Sousa Santos reminds us (as a follow-up to Jameson, certainly), utopia is a necessity that corresponds to a dissident way of being here and now. It does not belong, therefore, to the realm of possibilities (to which we add that the possibility belongs to reality and, therefore, it may never constitute itself as radically another), but, precisely, to the imagination of something that is impossible. And this necessity always stems from inconformity, when the present reveals itself as intolerable. It is, then, the utopian conscience that imposes itself. It is not about imagining the future but about altering, radically, the conditions of the present so that the future is another: “Free oneself from the fear of the future by fixing the future as the present.” (2) This present-future is equivalent to the idea of Not-Yet that Ernst Bloch foresaw in each utopia—the imagination of something that doesn’t exist yet, which reveals itself to be inaccessible and impossible at the limit of logical thought, but which may be born out of the present condition, if that desire of collective anticipation exists. (3) Art is nearly always associated with this Not-Yet, whether through the act of creation itself, expression of freedom, and revolution, or the unique sensibility artists possess to “anticipate” the future, managing to pinpoint in existing reality the conditions for radical transformation (that which exists potentially in the world). (4)

We are interested, therefore, in thinking about the intercalary space that appears between utopia and dystopia, both understood as correlated with an impossible vision originating from a desire for profound change in our present condition, because it is there, solely, where we can reclaim the real as creative production of the new and the radical difference or, above all, as a potency-creating process (to the detriment of possibilities anchored in reality or exercises in speculation). It was thus that Manfredo Tafuri understood, for example, Le Corbusier’s project for Algiers: “Le Corbusier takes account of the reality of class in the modern city and transposes the conflicts to a higher level, giving life to the most elevated proposal for the integration of the public involved as operators and active consumers in the urban mechanism of development, now rendered organically “human.” Thus our initial hypothesis is confirmed. Architecture as ideology of the plan is swept away by the reality of the plan when, the level of utopia having been superseded, the plan becomes an operative mechanism.” (5)

Le Corbusier’s plan for Algiers expresses three fundamental ideas—freedom, integration, and collective participation (without denying individual expression)—which not only inscribe the necessities dictated by capitalist production, but transform them into critical matter and thus responsible for the creation of the plan itself. What, for Tafuri, is Le Corbusier’s realism, which oftentimes was wrongly considered utopian. (6) Never has Le Corbusier been this contemporary. If one thinks about current architectural collectives (the contemporary architectonic reinterpretation of The Communist Manifesto—artistic creation as the result of collective participation abolishing individual intellectual property) who defend an architecture based on participative models, an architecture capable of responding to collective needs, without jeopardizing individual expression, architecture that may be, in itself, a democratic space when the projects start belonging to the public space, one understands it is about the necessity of claiming the real as producer of a better life. When Alejandro Aravena places in the public domain the designs of four of his social housing projects, he is recovering the political and utopian function of architecture, incorporating even its own end, dictated in fact by Tafuri when he affirms that, removed its ideological role, architecture would hide behind the “rediscovery of disciplinary autonomy or neurotic attitudes of self destruction.” (7) What real does contemporary architecture create between utopia and dystopia?

With the modern movement’s crisis, architecture saw itself confronted with its own impotence (and failure) in transforming the world into a better place, annulling differences between classes and subverting the devouring logic of capitalism, what Tafuri describes in his 1976 book Architecture and Utopia, whose cover illustration reproduces the picture Aldo Rossi dedicated to him: L’architecture assassinée. A Manfredo Tafuri. This is not a peaceful loss, as the works of Kader Attia, Inci Eviner, Jonas Staal, Clara Ianni, Jordi Colomer, and Superstudio (fictitiously described above in a written collage) denounce. In these lies a final necessity of exposing the contradictions and ambiguities of the original project—which Tafuri himself does—and the political conscience that these appear to claim for architecture, pinpointing today, however, specific contexts where experimental critique may extravasate reality and build that impossible, that Not-Yet. One cannot be truly a political being without a utopian conscience, which means recognizing the failure of totalitarian and absolutist projects while acting utopian, longing to build the impossible, altering the conditions of the present in a radical way, and acting in fringes of the community, where the basis of any humanism is questioned, precisely, as “the fundamental acts.” Of those who reclaim the political condition of architecture, proclaiming clichés such as “architecture is always political,” how many, in reality, work with communities where it is urgent to activate and operate that consciousness? The big decisions in life, those that mold the behaviors of people and the way they inhabit, remembering the Atti fondamentali of Superstudio, are politically and socially coded in a much earlier stage than that of the architectural project, whose own instruments limit and bound the subversion of predefined systems, (9) with repercussions up to nowadays, in the incapacity, which Jameson alerts, to think about alternative models to the capitalist logic.

In a recent text Jonas Staal writes, curiously, about “revolutionary realism,” in a sense similar to what Tafuri found in the realism of Le Corbusier, to define the existing relation between the “discipline or art form” and the “democratic confederalism” or “democracy without a state” emerging in Rojava, after the separation of this Kurdish area from the Assad regime: “With this notion of “realism,” [Diyar] Hesso does not refer to a figurative realism, an art that derives from the mimicry of natural appearances. Rather, Hesso speaks of a revolutionary realism, meaning the kind of reality that becomes possible through a revolutionary practice but is not yet present. Revolutionary realism means that we reject the scripts that define what is realistic and what is utopian, what is proper citizenship and what is a terrorist act. Revolutionary realism focuses on shaping new possible realities once we have rejected the forms that structure our current performance, in this case specifically controlled within the stage of the nation-state.” (10)

For Staal, it is about thinking of the form (which, for him, is as much about the structural and material composition of an object, which stems from the performance of the one who creates—in the case of a painter, the different strokes, the layers of paint, and the force imprinted on them—as to the presence and manifestation of the public space associated with it), for example, of a parliament as the choreographic space of power decisions at the center of a stateless democracy, whose decisions belong to and pass through the collective participation of the community. In a sense, it is at this moment that architecture is expression (or form, in the meaning attributed by Staal) of an ideology and in a sense where both construct each other, mutually: “Ideology, in other words, has a material reality, which one can understand through morphology: through art. The discipline of the revolutionary practice of stateless democracy thus also affects the possibilities of the discipline of art to engage new, yet unscripted morphologies.” (11)

To Bloch, architectonic utopias are those “castles in the air,” sublime forms that express a society’s desires for perfection in a given historical moment, besides any ideological expression, whose resonances, however, traverse time and space (the ideal of perfection never reached and always reinvented). If we question what it is that is architectonically utopian, we are impelled to imagine buildings that extravasate the known reality and defy all laws of physics, material and technological, acquiring impossible forms and unpredictable mutations or models of whole cities, projected ad infinitum, denying the first condition of utopia, the one that defines it specially as a place that doesn’t exist in reality, a fictitious place wholly constructed on and by imagination.

Nevertheless, architectonic utopias are not simple formal fantasy exercises. Under their extravagances and inversion paradigms, subversion, humor, and irony (composition artifices used in many of the works herein mentioned and that have their beginning in a logic of excess), there are hidden forces capable of dramatically altering instituted forms. It is not by chance that many of these works—which propose imagining the architecture of the future—contain, still, bits or pieces of existing realities, making, that way, an important passage, not only on a formal level (familiar forms are incorporated into fictitious ones, even in the most fantastical works, as in the architectures of Lebbeus Woods), but, mostly, historic and from the times: from the past and the collective memory, including the present which is past already, to the future, which, in the utopian work, is already a latent present. This transduction of forces is only possible, in fact, through a careful reading of the invisible layers of the social, political, and cultural fabric that define the space (what the Atti fondamentali of Superstudio denounce) and of a radical critical response that activates the necessary processes of differentiation. The utopian visions in the architecture of the future coincide, still and nearly always, with profound historical changes, reaffirming the real existence of the necessity of effectuating the passage that the work experimentally rehearses. In this sense they acquire, several times, an emancipatory potential that one doesn’t apprehend from the imagined forms, but from the critique these edify, as with the Berlin Wall, reinvented in the work by Rem Koolhaas, Elia Zenghelis, Madelon Vriesendorp, and Zoe Zenghelis, or to the city of superconsumption in Archizoom’s capitalist society (“the city was understood as a capitalist machine capable of resolving all the contradictions”). (13)

It will not be, consequently, the form by itself, but the program to which it responds, as Yona Friedman, for example, reclaimed in his Spatial City. The form resulting from the manipulation of the spatial elements by the inhabitants would always be secondary, or even irrelevant, if it allowed, precisely, maximum freedom in the appropriation and the utilization of the former according to the will of each of its inhabitants. The speculation on the form serves the main program of the freedom of appropriation that, in Spatial City, appears to find the formal expression of a castle in the air constructed among fluid and infinite lines, predicting, yet, a minimum interval of reading and coexistence with the historical strata (the present-past as a remembrance of the present-future). Individual freedom allied with spatial flexibility and informality has become, however, the most recurrent program of the utopian forms of the second vanguard movements. And, curiously, this condition assumes its maximum expression on the RMB City (2008) by Cao Fei, a real city built in a virtual space, Second Life, where avatars of real people may appropriate the different spaces and use them according to their most obscure desires. But the spaces of this city, constructed from the ruins of a postapocalyptic China, are a pure scenario for complex human relations, notwithstanding the hosting of events in some of the spaces, interacting with real agents.

In a recent interview about the influence Constant might have exerted upon his work, Rem Koolhaas concludes (and in his words there is no nostalgia of any kind): “The whole idea of investing time in how it should be has simply evaporated.” (14) As a castle in the air?

What, then, is architectonically utopian? Retaking the question that originated the previous hypothesis, our answer slightly changes its meaning at this moment. It is not about exercises in imagination and fantasy about the “architecture of the future” (despite some of the works, in this hypothesis, also exploring that path), but rather of imbuing the architectonic decision with a utopian potential. The work of architecture stops being the necessary place for things to happen (the material place of a social utopia, as has happened with the Frankfurt School) and starts being the mechanism through which things happen, constructing a utopia at the same time that, through its action or the set of actions affected to it, it makes possible that utopia’s actualization in the real.

One of the most expressive examples is the idea of Kitchenless City—a city composed of residential blocks whose apartments don’t have kitchen spaces, the inhabitants making use of a centrally located communal kitchen—which dates back to the nineteenth century (reappearing recently in the work of Anna Puigjaner), whose architectonic model, in its multiple variations, allowed the liberation of the woman from private domestic work and the reciprocal construction of an egalitarian society, where the idea of sharing prevailed. (16) This architectonic model plays an important utopian function, which differs, for example, from the origin of the Siedlungen, which were thought to imbue, in their production, the desired supremacy of the proletariat. However, nothing on the architectonic models of those houses anticipated the construction of the utopia itself (the control of the market wasn’t enough for the architectonic model of the house, which this was able to produce in turn, to eliminate class cleavages, since in reality the opposite effect—the cleavages were accentuated—only, actually and paradoxically, reversed with small elites acquiring the formerly controlled-cost housing). The models designed by Marie Steven Howland or Alice Constance Austin, two North American utopian feminists, embodied utopia itself, both at the production level (Austin mentioned, for example, that centralization allowed a simultaneous economy of labor, materials, and space), and in daily family relationships among inhabitants and the creation of an effective and spatially communal life. (17)

We find another example in Constant’s proposal for a gypsy campsite, after his encounter with the gypsy community of Alba (where he also met Guy Debord), which corresponds, as he said himself, to the origin of his New Babylon. Pedro G. Romero reminds us, for example, quoting Vaida Voevod III, then president of the Communauté Mondiale Gitane, which Constant transcribes in his text “New Babylon,” where he appeals to “a world without borders, a free world, without guns, where each person could travel unimpeded, from the Central Asian steppes to the Atlantic coast, from the South African plains to the forests of Finland,” adding that, looking at the current geopolitical map, this world exists solely in the realm of science fiction. (18) Notwithstanding, it is on this very model of the gypsy campsite (a spatial model capable of generating new ways of inhabiting, occupying, and circulating) that we recognize the assumptions that still contain a utopian potential in the present condition, if we want to act in specific contexts and problems, as for example in the creation of spatial models that answer, effectively, the current migrant and refugee crisis. The nomad-migrant personifies that desire to build a home even in the most inhospitable terrain, where the earth doesn’t bloom and the people don’t know how to receive him or her (as still happens, unfortunately, with gypsy communities). Relevantly, Didier Faustino’s Body in Transit 1.0 (2000) confronts us through the most cruel and dystopian vision, with death as the final possibility of choice for many migrants and refugees, whose destination, sixteen years after this work of art, remains fatal.

Many of these works present us with dystopian visions to activate the utopian function, because it is in the most agonizing vision that one recognizes the absolute necessity of the creation of another future (the present rapidly becomes intolerable). Curiously, the dystopian vision of Vigilism, aired in his Shanty Megastructures in Lagos, Nigeria, corresponds, inversely, to what succeeded in Medellín, Colombia. In the middle of the slums, important public works of architecture were built—museums, schools, and libraries—and effective infrastructures were created: the same cable cars that clip the fictional image of Lagos by Vigilism traverse the slums of Medellín. Can architecture, reverting to what the very history of the modern movement (with which we initiated the first hypothesis) taught us, build the utopia?

The Paradise: The Last of the Heterotopias

Our hypotheses don’t exist in isolation. They appear, in the different exhibited works, several times intertwined. A work will only manage to create a utopia if there is an a priori political consciousness, and the most bizarre forms of future visions can’t ignore individual desires, which, as revealed in the work of Alexander Brodsky and Ilya Utkin, can’t be dissociated from the architectonic environment and go much beyond the basic conditions of inhabiting.

There is, in our desire, that place we would like to call Paradise, the last of the heterotopias, (19) the intercalary space between utopia and dystopia (the mirror of which Michel Foucault speaks of), which is born from the ruins of these two states, the space where the current production of the real takes place. Henceforth, Paradise is not the place of total liberation of imagination and fantasy usually associated with utopia, nor the place of total abolition and rupture created by dystopia, but a place where both states become active and operative. In some parts of the world, this place is known as the place of art, where we would like to include, equally, architecture.

Notes

1. Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (London and New York: Verso, 2005), xii.

2. Antonio Negri quoted in Manfredo Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development, trans. Barbara Luigi La Penta (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 1976), 135.

3. Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 3 vols., 1995).

4. According to Constant Nieuwenhuys, “A creation has always been that which was still unknown.” Quoted in Richard Noble, ed., Utopias (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2009), 41.

5. Manfredo Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia, 135.

6. “The liberty allowed the public must be pushed to the point of permitting the public—the proletariat in the case of the serpentine that winds along the seaside, and the upper middle class on the hills of Fort-l’Empereur—to express its own bad taste.” Ibid., 132.

7. Ibid., 136.

8. [1] Kader Attia, Following the Modern Genealogy; [2] Inci Eviner, Nursing Modern Fall; [3] Jonas Staal, Nosso Lar, Brasília; [4] Clara Ianni, Free Form/Forma Livre; [5] Jordi Colomer, X-Lisboa; [6] Superstudio, Gli Atti fondamentali; [7] Aldo Rossi, Architettura assassinata. These works were displayed on the exhibition Utopia/Dystopia.

9.  On the “fundamental acts,” Adolfo Natalini remembers: “The great issues, the main issues of our life, have never been touched by architecture. Architecture stays in a corner, and only steps in at a given point of the relational process, usually when the entire behaviour has already been codified, providing answers to rigidly asked questions. Although its replies are aberrant or subversive, the logics underlying their production and consumption avoid any real turmoil. Architecture does not propose alternative behaviours because it uses the tools designed by the system to avoid any significant deviation. Thus, the labourer’s house and the gentleman’s house follow the same patterns and the radical architect and the academic architects coincide: the difference only lies in the quantities at stake; all decisions on the quality of life have already been made. . . Then, to focus on the redefinition of primary acts and to examine—first of all—what the relations between architecture and those acts are, becomes an act of consistency or a last attempt of salvation.” Adolfo Natalini, “A History of Exhibitions,” in Super Superstudio, exh. cat., ed. Andreas Angelidakis, Vittorio Pizzigoni, and Valter Scelsi (Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2015), 60–61.

10. Jonas Staal, “Ideology=Form,” e-flux journal, no. 69 (January 2016), http://www.e-flux.com/journal/69/60626/ideology-form/.

11. Ibid.

12. [8] Cao Fei and China Tracy, RMB City: A Second Life City Planning; [9] Superstudio, Gli Atti Fondamentalli—Vita Supersuperficie e Il Monumento Continuo (not in the exhibition); [10] Rem Koolhaas, Madelon Vriesendorp, Elia Zenghelis, and Zoe Zenghelis, Exodus, or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture; [11] WAI Think Tank, One Hundred Years of Ideal Cities; [12] Office/Dogma, A Grammar for the City; [13] Alain Bublex, Plan voisin de Paris; [14] Lebbeus Woods, Aerial Paris; [15] Yona Friedman, Ville Spatiale. These works were displayed on the exhibition Utopia/Dystopia.

13. Felicity D. Scott, Architecture or Techno-Utopia: Politics after Modernism (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 2010), 142.

14. Rem Koolhaas, “The Topsy-Turvy as Utopian Architecture: Rem Koolhaas and Pascal Gielen Discuss Constant Nieuwenhuys,” in Constant: New Babylon, exh. cat., ed. Mercedes Pineda (Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 2015), 250.

15. [16] Olalekan Jeyifous/Vigilism, Shanty Megastructures; [17] Didier Faustino, Body in Transit 1.0; [18] Alexander Brodsky and Ilya Utkin, Ship of Fools or a Wooden Skyscraper for the Jolly Company; [19] Alexander Brodsky and Ilya Utkin, Wandering Turtle; [20] Inês Dantas, Micro Galaxy I e Supra Canopy I; [21] Pedro Bandeira '+ 18:25 [22] Beniamino Servino, The Lost Cathedral in the Jungle. These works were displayed on the exhibition Utopia/Dystopia.

16. In 2016 Anna Puigjaner received the Wheelwright Prize from Harvard University Graduate School of Design for her proposal Kitchenless City: Architectural Systems for Social Welfare. Puigjaner’s investigation centers on the idea that this kind of housing and communal life is an instrument of social transformation. The jury for the prize noted, precisely, the potential for an investigation to generate new models of inhabiting that may be operational in the face of the rapid growth of cities and the ascent of alternative resource-sharing economies.

17. Dolores Hayden, “Two Utopian Feminists and Their Campaigns for Kitchenless Houses,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 4, no. 2 (Winter 1978): 274–90.

18.  Pedro G. Romero, “The New Babylonians,” in Mercedes Pineda, Constant: New Babylon, 77.

19. Michel Foucault defines heterotopia as when, in reality, a determinate space, through historic conditions, changes its meaning and definition, sometimes antagonistically. This radical transformation stems, necessarily, from the creation of what we call “utopian function,” which allows us to understand, in the present, the future.

20. Michel Foucault, “Other Spaces,” in Richard Noble, Utopias, 63.

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