THE POLITICS OF UTOPIA EXHIBITION

Associate Professor Irene Cheng, Graduate Seminar, 2019

“We can leave it to the literary small fry to solemnly quibble over these phantasies, which today only make us smile, and to crow over the superiority of their own bald reasoning, as compared with such “insanity.” For ourselves, we delight in the stupendously grand thoughts and germs of thought that everywhere break out through their phantastic covering, and to which these Philistines are blind.”
- Frederick Engels, “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific” (1880)

Architecture has had a long engagement with utopian speculation, and more recently with dystopian imagination as well. Utopianism has been criticized by architectural critics like Colin Rowe as at best naive and at worst tyrannical. This seminar surveyed utopian architecture across three centuries, from Enlightenment cities, to mid-nineteenth-century socialist and free love colonies, to the dome cities and techno-utopias of the 1960s and 1970s, to contemporary "temporary autonomous zones." Particular attention was paid to architectural and urban utopias that were more than just fantastic visions of a future world, but rather encompassed comprehensive, critical visions of social transformation—of the economy, government, gender and family relations. The course interrogated the relationship between aesthetic and sociopolitical radicalism, asked whether utopian speculation continues to be an effective aesthetic and political strategy, and considered what forms a contemporary utopia might take.

Utopia is traditionally understood as a fictive site—literally, “eu-topia” or “no place.” Yet this has not prevented designers and reformers from trying to materialize radical visions of an ideal community on paper and in concrete, glass, and steel. Such attempts are easily dismissed as naïve, megalomaniacal, or simply farfetched. What makes a project utopian is not just its impracticability or distance from reality, however. The architectural historian Colin Rowe has argued that all utopias have two components—a sociopolitical program and an aesthetic vision.

The fourteen student research projects in this exhibit, spanning from the end of the nineteenth century to the present, all combine a social, political, or economic agenda with an aesthetic form or impulse. Utopia may take the form of an urban plan striving to reconcile nature and the industrial city, or a temporary occupation of federal land by Native Americans, or an ambivalent fable about architecture in a modern consumer society. Recovering the history of these and other utopian projects may serve as incitement to continue such forms of critical-imaginative speculation in the present.