Imagining and Making the World: Reconsidering Architecture and Utopia 978-3034301206, 3034301200

Table of contents :
Contents......Page 9
Acknowledgements......Page 13
List of Illustrations......Page 15
Nathaniel Coleman - Introduction: Architecture and Utopia......Page 19
Part One: Architecture and Fiction......Page 45
Jonathan Powers - Building Utopia: The Status of the Ideal in Filarete’s Trattato......Page 47
Greg Kerr - Gautier, Boileau, and Chenavard: Utopian Architecture of the Temple in Mid-Nineteenth-Century France......Page 75
Valérie Narayana - Du Génie en Utopie: The Figure of the Engineer in Balzacian and Zolian Utopias......Page 99
Ufuk Ersoy - To See Daydreams: The Glass Utopia of Paul Scheerbart and Bruno Taut......Page 125
Part Two: Reconsiderations......Page 157
Malcolm Miles - An Orderly Life: Ildefons Cerdà and the Northern Extension of Barcelona......Page 159
Ellen Sullivan - Drawing Blood: Patrick Geddes’s Sectional Thinking......Page 183
Nathaniel Coleman - Utopia on Trial?......Page 201
Part Three: Prospects......Page 239
David H. Haney - Spaces of Resistance and Compromise: The Concrete Utopia Realized......Page 241
Diane E. Davis and Tali Hatuka - Transcending the Utopian-Pragmatic Divide in Conflict Cities: Applying Vision and Imagination to Jerusalem’s Future......Page 267
Phillip E. Wegner - “The Mysterious Qualities of This Alleged Void”: Transvaluation and Utopian Urbanism in Rem Koolhaas’s S,M,L,XL......Page 301
Part Four: Commentary......Page 317
Nathaniel Coleman, Ruth Levitas, and Lyman Tower Sargent - Trialogue......Page 319
Notes on Contributors......Page 355
Index......Page 359

Citation preview

Imagining and Making the World

“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

“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 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 Reconsidering Architecture and Utopia

Edited by Nathaniel Coleman

“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

Imagining and Making the World

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.

Edited by N at h a n i e l C o l e m a n

ISBN 978-3-0343-0120-6

Ralahine Utopian Studies - Volume Eight

www.peterlang.com

Peter Lang

Imagining and Making the World

“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

“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 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.

Ralahine Utopian Studies - Volume Eight

www.peterlang.com

Imagining and Making the World Reconsidering Architecture and Utopia

Edited by Nathaniel Coleman

“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

Imagining and Making the World

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.

Edited by N at h a n i e l C o l e m a n

Peter Lang

Imagining and Making the World

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 Bern Berlin Bruxelles Frankfurt am Main New York Wien l

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Nathaniel Coleman (ed.)

Imagining and Making the World Reconsidering Architecture and Utopia

Peter Lang

Oxford Bern Berlin Bruxelles Frankfurt am Main New York Wien l

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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

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). ISSN 1661­5875 (Print edition) IS 978­3­0343­0120­6 E­ISBN 978­3­0353­0173­1 © Peter Lang AG, International Academic Publishers, Bern 2011 Hochfeldstrasse 32, CH-3012 Bern, Switzerland [email protected], 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

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”

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

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 Conf lict 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



Part Four  Commentary

ix

299

Nathaniel Coleman, Ruth Levitas, and Lyman Tower Sargent

Trialogue

301

Notes on Contributors

337

Index

341

Acknowledgements

Above all, I would like to thank all of the contributors to this volume foremost for their essays but also for their perservance during the long process during which this collection has taken shape, moving from the original idea 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 Conference 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 and Social Sciencies Faculty at the University of Newcastle for their contributions in support 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 producing 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

xii

Acknowledgements

Utopian Studies Series; Maureen O’Connor, for ably copy-editing the manuscript and producing the index, and series editor Raf faella 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 unf lagging support and essential interuptions. Each day, my children remind me of  Utopia’s real vocation, especially in a world that seems somehow determined to confound progress with a narrowing of possibility.

Permissions Every ef fort was made to reach the copyright holders of  the documents included herein. Any additional arrangements or oversights will be corrected in subsquent editions.

List of  Illustrations

Figure 1 Antonio di Pietro Averlino (Filarete). Plan view of Sforzinda with schematic 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 “Der Gotische Dom ist das Präludium der Glasarchitektur” was placed 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. Die Ausstellung Köln 1914. Jahrbuch des Deutschen Werkbundes (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 Ebenezer Howard. “Slumless Smokeless Cities” from To-morrow: A Peaceful 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 Patrick Geddes. “Social Notation”, 1902. University of Strathclyde Archives. GED 18/1/203. Figure 13 Patrick Geddes. “Thinking Machine”, undated. University of  Strathclyde Archives. GED 18/1/281.

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 Strathclyde Archives. GED 14/1/60. Figure 16 Thomas Huxley. Illustration from Physiography: An Introduction to the Study of  Nature, 1877. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1901. Figure 17 Thomas Huxley. Illustration from Physiography: An Introduction to the Study of  Nature, 1877. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1901. Figure 18 Charles Darwin. “Tree of  Life”, 1837. From Sketchbook. Figure 19 Patrick Geddes. “Social Notation”, 1902. University of Strathclyde Archives. GED 18/1/203. Figure 20 Patrick Geddes. “Social Notation”, 1902. University of Strathclyde Archives. GED 18/1/203. Figure 21 Patrick Geddes. “Social Notation”, 1902. University of Strathclyde Archives. 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 Patrick Geddes. “Outlook Tower”, 1904. University of Strathclyde Archives. 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 Original mobile home (caravan) of the Caddys at Findhorn, current condition. 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.

List of  Illustrations

xv

Figure 32 HUMMUS: East Mediterranean City Belt 2050. Sigi Atteneder, University of  Art and Design, Linz, Lorenz Potocnik.

Figure 33 HUMMUS: East Mediterranean City Belt 2050. Sigi Atteneder, University of  Art and Design, Linz, Lorenz Potocnik.

Figure 34 HUMMUS: East Mediterranean City Belt 2050. Sigi Atteneder, University of  Art and Design, Linz, Lorenz Potocnik.

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 problems, no less than projects for ideal cities – or physical manifestations of enlightened institutions – are utopian ones. The proposition – equation even – introduced above obviously raises some questions. For example, if there can be no architecture without Utopia, 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? In consideration of the themes introduced above, the aim of this introduction 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,

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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 architecture 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 distinction between “Utopia” more generally and “Eutopia or positive utopia” more specifically as “a non-existent society described in considerable detail and normally located in time and space that the author intended a contemporary reader to view as considerably better than the society in which that reader lived” (“Defense” 15). Important here is “reader” because it suggests that although Sargent now includes “the design of ideal cities” in his “Defense,” he remains primarily concerned with utopian literature above all else.

Introduction: Architecture and Utopia

3

On the other hand, Ruth Levitas proposes “a broad analytic definition of utopia,” valuable because “the issues of boundaries,” so central to Sargent’s definition “ceases” in her view, “to be a problem” (Concept 198). In this sense, 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 dif ference 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 expressions, rather than demanding fully-f ledged 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 of fers 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 suggesting 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, rendering the taken-for-granted world problematic, and calling into question the existing state of af fairs, 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).

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Nathaniel Coleman

Ultimately, however, Levitas does not approve of  this: “One of  the consequences 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 register 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 “ideological 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 Building” 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 collectivity) 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

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 idealized 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

2

Levitas has observed that “[t]he space/time or geography/history dyad [in Harvey’s Spaces of Hope] gives too little space to social structure and to sociology, tending to collapse the social into the spatial, and the sociological into the geographical – ref lecting the recent intellectual relationship between those disciplines” (“Dialectical” 142). 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).

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“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 of fer 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 architecture is the degree to which the apparent failures of  twentieth-century modern architecture (of the sort identified with the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) and Le Corbusier) are blamed on its supposed attempts to make Utopia take f lesh 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 twentyfirst 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  Ref lections” 13).

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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 of fers an alternative solution to the failures and limitations of the city of modern architecture, 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 ref lection 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 confronting 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, extravagant 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.

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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 architecture 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 contemporaneous 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 society” 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 manifestation 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, as my objective in this introduction is to demonstrate the 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 architecture 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

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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 spectacular 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, radically 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 “representation” and “praxis” with regard to the expression of architectural Utopias 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.

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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 satisfied 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 ef fort 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 struggle 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,

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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 construct a Utopia, rather it is to imagine superior forms (or frameworks) for human inhabitation that emerge out of the critical moment Utopia shelters and which conventional practice obscures. As an example, Diane E. Davis and Tali Hatuka’s contribution to this book develops on the potentialities of a decidedly utopian method for practice in what they call “conf lict 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 of fer a prospect on to another reality. Less likely still is the possibility that such a construction, or constructions, if  they even exist, could uphold a vision of an alternative improved reality, sustainable through 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 urban plans or urban designs) are credibly works of art, of fering perspectives on to the unknown and windows into an augmented reality in the same

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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 existence, 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)? In an attempt to show how this might be possible, it is worth ref lecting on the degree to which the imagination and realization of architecture are ultimately not so wildly dif ferent 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 provisionality 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 interpretation. And if a book only finally becomes “real” in the imagination of readers through reading, a building only becomes “real” through its occupation by inhabitants. Only in an epoch of persuasive practical realism, when

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architecture seems little more than a product of the building industry and architects are mostly little more than technicians, could the fictive quality 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, insights into realty that neither the natural sciences nor the social sciences could ever hope to disclose. It is precisely the fictive and illuminating 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. Valérie Narayana’s, Kerr’s, and Wegner’s chapters also examine intersections between architecture and literature in the invention and representation of utopias. Kerr and Narayana ref lect on this by considering the figure of the temple and the engineer in nineteenth-century French literature, respectively, whereas Wegner considers this by way of  Rem Koolhaas’s explorations 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 any other artistic expression can, but will not always have. All works of creative 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 each first encounter of it. The same individual will also experience any given work dif ferently 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.

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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 consideration 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 most potentially utopian but also its least: how can any claim to the 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 chapter 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 architecture, the social dimension of  the former – its intentionality, gives way, almost completely, to an aesthetics of utopian imagery, which is more like a form of visionary projection than a Utopia. When nominating architecture 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 dif ference between an intentional community of consensus (as much for its inhabitants 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.

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Because the imagined utopian potential of most social housing projects 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 Geddes’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 utopian 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 architecture 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” condition and that to build, to construct, “must” always entail some degree of optimism, or even that public housing inevitably includes social imagining. 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

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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 computer 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 (perhaps all are like dreams), the nineteenth-century German architect and theorist Gottfried Semper’s argument that, akin to music and dance, architecture is a “world-making art” becomes quite revealing.5 For Semper, the apparently static quality of painting and sculpture determined the incapacity 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, Semper understood music, dance, and architecture as “world-making” inasmuch 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).

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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 intersection 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 representation, 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-twentiethcentury painting and sculpture that, although representational, nevertheless opens up perspectives onto alternative realities; the work of Michelangelo comes to mind. However, there was always something “architectural” about Michelangelo’s painting and sculpture (his Sistine Chapel frescoes for example, or his Moses sculpture), which often either augmented an architectural or urban framework or were set within one or the other. His gradual 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).

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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 architecture reveals a utopian dimension (as Bloch and others have noted). Leaving 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 Technical 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 unsatisfied 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 cosmological character of  both. How strange it is now to think of architecture (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 emancipatory potential of architecture that Ersoy attempts to recuperate in 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. No matter how much architects and others pay lip-service to ideas of “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.

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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 be an extremely arid technocratic series of requirements for how to respond 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 failures 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 (provisionally and) partially. Returning for a moment to the connection between literary and social utopias and architecture, it is worth considering that the founding charter of an intentional community must be specific enough to distinguish it as intentional but open enough to withstand conf lict, 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, or as an exemplar of utopian imagination, it must do more than simply look 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.

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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 completely 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, the special capacity of Utopia for instilling purpose to design requires 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.

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Although many writers on art and architecture could aid in the achievement 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 dif ferent conditions of existence, 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 of fer 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 without 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 innovation (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

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possible the kind of social dreaming “licensed” to imagine better conditions, 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 accomplishes 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 alternatives 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 architects tends to deprive architecture and thus the built environment generally 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 ref lecting on architecture and Utopia holds out the hope that not only might Utopia be revealed again (and again) as the “tacit coef ficient of architectural invention” but that by (re)visiting Utopia’s

6

“Ethics is not merely a theoretical study for Aristotle. Unlike any intellectual capacity, 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]”).

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verdurous of ferings, 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 developed 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 architecture 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 contributions 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. Architecture and Utopia. Trans. Deke Dusinberre. Paris: Éditions Hazan, 1997. Brayer, Marie-Ange and Larry Busbea. Topologies: The Urban Utopia in France, 1960– 1970. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2007.

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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 ref lections 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 Architecture, 2003. 13. ——. Modern Architecture: A Critical History, 4th edn. London: Thames and Hudson, 2007. ——. “Rappel à l’ordre, the Case for the Tectonic.” Architectural Design 60.3–4 (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: Princeton 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) . ——. “eqos [ethos].” Philosophy Pages (18 August 2010) . 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 Society.” 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 Raf faella Baccolini. 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.

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Miles, Malcolm. Urban Utopias: The Built and Social Architectures of Alternative Settlement. London: Routledge, 2007. Moylan, Tom. Demand the Impossible. New York and London: Methuen, 1986. ——. Scraps of  the Untainted Sky, Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia. Oxford: Westview 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) . ——. “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.

Part One

Architecture and Fiction

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 ef fervescent wonder excited by the recent discovery of the New World to ignite the imaginations of  his readers. Just so, More’s itinerant philosopher, 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 ef fectively illuminates his fiction by setting it in the radiance of wonder cast by Vespucci’s authoritative and beguiling letters.2 In addition 1

2

Françoise Choay observes that the letters of  Amerigo Vespucci were not merely immensely popular in the sixteenth century, they were also immensely inf luential insofar as they provided an imaginative mirror in which European society would see itself ref lected and thereby objectified (Choay 56–7). 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 of fered in Part II thereby becomes a commentary on and amplification of  the social criticism of fered in Part I.

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to providing his fiction a credible frame, More’s presentation of  the state of  Utopia within a travelogue af fords 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 history Utopians tell themselves about themselves). I do not mean to suggest 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 ef fectively deprives his interlocutors (read: More’s readers) 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 4

5

Although her position dif fers significantly from mine, Marina Leslie’s Renaissance Utopias and the Problem of History was the stimulus that induced me to consider more carefully the role of endogenous history (my term) in the constitution of  Utopia. 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 literary mode of presentation. Even a didactic exposition represents an authorial choice about how to make manifest to a reader the point of  the discourse. Ernesto Grassi’s distinction between rhetorical speech (which has a metaphorical character) and rational speech (which has an apodictic character) has been exceptionally 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 rhetorical speech, because the original premises of an argument cannot ground themselves; the original must therefore be metaphorical in character and so be expressed in rhetorical speech. See especially the second chapter of  Rhetoric as Philosophy.

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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 conf lates 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 conf lation, Sargent posits a fundamental human “hope/desire for a better life in this life,” which defines and animates all “utopian” activity (“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 desire for comparatively better living conditions; this desire, 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 intellectual power, but such a speculation only sharpens the question of why contemporary critics have not attended more carefully to this crucial ambiguity.

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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 assimilating utilitarianism and individualistic liberalism.7 After Adam Smith 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 ongoing 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 ref lection on politics, polemical writing, and literary imagining simply because the agents in question are assumed to prefer a hypothetical state of political af fairs to their current situation. Only we moderns have ever confused rhetorical fictions for legislative proposals and architectural plans, 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 have to account for the inf luence of the unforeseeable as well as the foreseen. We would have to account for the contingent conf luence 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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have to reveal how ideality can emerge out of a history literally built and enacted by human hands. As they are generally deduced rather than built, however, the authors of utopias do not write histories or narratives – they write “descriptions.” 8 Even when an ideal polity appears within a narrative, the polity itself is simply described. As a rule, literary utopias are allergic to both natural history and narrative.9 There does exist, however, at least one historical text which recounts the fictional construction, rather than the cognitive deduction, of an ideal city. Between approximately 1461 and 1464 in Milan, a Florentine architect named Antonio di Pietro Averlino (c. 1400 – c. 1469), nicknamed “Filarete” (Greek for “lover of virtue” or “lover of excellence”), composed one of the Renaissance’s first treatises on architecture, in which he narrates the fictional founding and bricks-andmortar construction of an ideal city.

Design and Construction in Filarete’s Trattato Filarete’s Trattato explicitly sets out to educate its readers – the most important of which for Filarete would have been his patron, Duke Francesco Sforza – concerning “the ordering of buildings” (Filarete vol.1, 3). True to 8

9

The literary technique of description – usually referred to by its Greek name, ekphrasis – boasts a long and rich history. It is one of  the few literary notions to have played an important role in both poetic and rhetoric. Although further investigation of  the link between ekphrasis and Utopia is beyond the scope of  this chapter, it seems worthwhile to note that, to my knowledge, no serious analysis of  Utopia has been attempted on the basis of an archaeology of ekphrasis. When an author combines narrative and Utopia, the inevitable result is dystopia. Literary utopias and literary dystopias both employ descriptions of ideal polities; dystopias simply set a verisimilar narrative within the description of an ideal polity. Prizing verisimilitude above all else, literary narrative models the ordinary indeterminacy of human life, thereby clashing with the stasis of utopian ideals. We can read literary dystopias as polemics against political idealism in general because we do not distinguish between the ideals that guide geometers and theologians from the ideals that guide citizens, activists, and legislators.

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his initial promise, Filarete discusses all the aspects of architecture that a wise prince ought to know: site selection, materials, project management, architectural history and theory, and so forth. In what initially appears to be a strategy for relieving the dryness of the early part of his treatise, which is often quite technical, Filarete intercalates a charming narrative, the main plot of which concerns the ef forts of a “Lord” and “his architect” (a thinly veiled Sforza and Filarete) to plan and construct an entire city according to ideal architectural principles. They name their ideal city Sforzinda. As the Trattato proceeds, the fictional narrative becomes increasingly prominent until, notwithstanding Filarete’s initial concern with the brass tacks of architecture, it has established itself firmly as the work’s centerpiece. (cf. Figure 1). If Filarete’s treatise obviously belongs to the Renaissance project of imagining the ideal city, it must still be admitted that the ideality of  Sforzinda dif fers from the ideality of  the polity laid out in, say, La cittá felice (1553) by Francesco Patrizi da Cherso (1529–97). Patrizi’s happy city is a representative example of a deduced utopia. Beginning with the words, “It is commonly agreed by philosophers,” La cittá felice simply cites a few notions about human being in general and then goes on to lay out the ideal city on the basis of these axiomatic truths (Patrizi). Filarete’s Sforzinda, on the other hand, qualifies as ideal by virtue of the geometrical and historical provenance of  the models that inspire its makers. At the beginning of  his narrative, Filarete explicitly sets forth his particular standard for ideality, which seems at first glance quite straightforward: I shall describe first a city, as I think it can be made good and beautiful. I shall describe its circumference [and] all the buildings […] within. I shall show you the proportion, form, and dimensions of  these according to their quality and I shall show in detail the […] proportions of each one (vol.1, 20).

For Filarete, the ideality of cities and buildings depends upon their proportions and dimensions. As to which proportions and dimensions are appropriate, Filarete is again quite clear. At the rhetorical climax of  the treatise, Filarete narrates a scene in which Duke Sforza admits himself persuaded to Filarete’s opinion on the subject of architectural proportions. The Duke declares:

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The antique fashion is beautiful without a doubt, and let no one ever again argue to me for modern modes. […] [Modern buildings] have many faults and especially in two principal things, proportion and measure. […] It is enough that I understand that the antique mode of building is more beautiful and has better rules and beauty than the modern (vol.1, 222–3).

By “the antique mode,” Filarete means classical Roman, and by “the modern mode,” he means (the then-contemporary) Gothic. Put most simply, Filarete holds that buildings that derive their proportions and measures from old Roman modes are good, and buildings which derive their proportions and measures from Gothic models are bad. Filarete’s confidence in “proportion and measure” as guarantors of both structural strength and cosmic meaning is typical of Renaissance attitudes toward geometry.10 Indeed, Filarete’s sharpest contemporary critics agree that his predilection for simple geometric designs, typically extrusions or manipulations of  the most elementary of geometrical forms (most often the square, but also on occasion the circle), represents one of  his most characteristic traits as an architect.11 Given that geometry is a discipline characterized by its methodological precision and deductive rigidity, one

10

11

Howard Saalman provides a useful framework for understanding the ambivalent status of geometry in Quattrocento architectural practice. According to Saalman, Filarete and his peers were caught on the horns of a dilemma. On the one hand, they could not realize precisely in stone the same geometrical elaborations that, based on traditional Gothic methods, they could demonstrate precisely on paper. Yet, according to the same tradition, it was geometrical precision and transparence that guaranteed the achievement of  both firmitas and venustas (“soundness” and “sensual beauty,” two of the canonical Vitruvian architectural virtues). Renaissance architects could thus not dispense with Gothic geometry in favor of another method, since it served as the basis of  both architectural disegno and stereotomy. (In Italian, disegno first and foremost means “drawing,” both as an activity and as a product of  that activity; during the Renaissance disegno also came to refer to the intellectual process of developing a preliminary vision or idea of a work, as well as to the product of  that process.) Renaissance architectural theory was thus defined, in part, by the irreconcilable tension between these opposing exigencies. See esp. Saalman. See also Spencer, Introduction to Filarete’s Treatise; Lang, “Sforzinda”; and Tigler.

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would expect that Filarete’s architecture of ideal proportions and measures would evince a similar precision and rigidity. Certainly his proposals are always precisely measured and proportioned. Once the initial schema for a building has been prepared, however, Filarete habitually – even “boastfully” – improvises changes during the construction process. The following exchange between Filarete and Duke Sforza is typical: At dinner [my lord] asked me about many things and especially about what would take place the following day. […] He asked me, among other things, why I had narrowed the wall above the foundation from the eight braccia width that I had first determined to seven. “This seemed correct to me, [for] it is reasonable that the foundation should be wider than the wall. It is also true, I believe, that you should leave more foundation outside than inside. Then you drew it back more on the inside than on the outside, because on the outside you plumbed straight up and down and on the inside you diminished it, it seems to me, by three braccia. Why did you do it?”

“I will tell you, my lord. The wall is one braccia high and seven braccia wide at ground level. I subtracted three braccia to make this a covered wall.” “How?” “In this manner. [Filarete sketches his revamped plans for the covered wall.]” “I like this better than the one you first explained to me.” “I certainly did say I would improve it” (vol.1, 50–1).

In Filarete’s understanding, architectural intentions bear a kind of  family resemblance to the architecture they engender. Based on the numerous accounts of architectural design and construction in his Trattato, we can infer that he conceives architectural proposals as being f luid at the margins. The precise dimensions and positions of walls shift; planned decorative features are relocated; even whole rooms can appear and disappear. Throughout the Trattato, Filarete “improves” on his initial plans through onsite alterations, and Duke Sforza evidently understands these “improvements” as part of ordinary architectural practice and is pleased by them. It is tempting to characterize Filarete’s method of construction as one which begins with ideal “designs” and then proceeds to vitiate that genetic ideality by compromising the design according to the dictates of

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earthly practicality.12 Proceeding with a conventionally Platonic conception of ideality, which interprets ideality as having to do with eternal logical “kinds” or “types,” it seems most straightforward to read Sforzinda as a kind of “spoiled” Utopia. If only Filarete (goes this line of thought) had forced his masons to recreate his original designs with exactitude, then Sforzinda might be a truly ideal city. There seems to be no good reason why Filarete, in drafting an architectural “fantasy,” should imagine building a city in which no building exactly matches its original design. For his part, though, Filarete describes (again and again) his practice of modifying his original designs during the construction process in a tone of professional pride. He clearly does not view changes to his original, ideal designs as a kind of despoilment; quite to the contrary, he claims to have “improved” upon them. In fact, Filarete represents the ability to improvise ef fectively during construction as one of  the key qualifications for an outstanding architect. Quite at odds with our own habitual conception of ideality, Filarete conceives ideality as admitting naturally of  both imperfection and improvement. 12

Despite the fact that Filarete boastfully narrates how he continually modifies his designs during construction, Spencer and Lang marshal their considerable erudition to quantify, with impressive precision, the discrepancies between the textual descriptions and the marginal drawings in Filarete’s manuscripts (Spencer, “CentralPlan”; Lang, “Sforzinda”). I cannot see what their goal in doing so might be, apart from conveniently generating a body of  fatuous “facts” about Filarete’s work. That discrepancies exist may, as Spencer suggests, “indicate an illustrator trained in copying but not in architecture” (“Introduction” xvii). Of course, it may also point to an entirely understandable nonchalance about representational precision in the face of  the then customary practice of modifying designs during construction. Descriptions, drawings, and even models were, for Quattrocento architects, generally considered rhetorical means for communicating intentions, not technical instruments used to manage a construction process. Catherine Wilkinson has convincingly demonstrated that Philip II’s Escorial, built between 1563 and 1584 – well over a century after Filarete – was the first building project in European history in which drawings were used to manage the construction process (“Building”). The quantitative degree of discrepancy between drawings and corresponding textual descriptions can therefore shed but little useful light on the thought and work of either Filarete specifically or Quattrocento architects in general.

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My wager is that Filarete’s experience as a practicing architect – that is, as a “builder,” as a “maker” – qualifies his conception and treatment of ideality. Notwithstanding their humanist pretensions to unite geometry and architecture through drawing, Quattrocento architects employed traditional building methods, in which what we think of as the design process was subsumed within the building process. The finished form of  the building was not established at the beginning, then “translated” into stone; instead, the building began as a kind of schematic intention, which was often expressed in drawing, but which ultimately had to be fully realized during the process of construction.13 In describing not simply the finished form of Sforzinda, but the entire, unified process of its conception, design, and construction, Filarete shows us a kind of ideality with which we are generally unfamiliar.

Against the Formalist Fallacy Before of fering my own view, it will be helpful to dispense with some of  the most pernicious misconceptions concerning Filarete, his Trattato, and Sforzinda. Where Filarete’s readers and critics do not simply entirely misread him, they tend to err in two broadly defined ways. (1) The “formalist fallacy”: commentators often mistake formal similitude for categorical identity; specifically, they conclude that because Sforzinda superficially resembles other ideal cities – whether literary, drawn, or concrete – Sforzinda must be ideal in the same way these other cities are. (2) The “historicist fallacy”: commentators often render their analyses as though key terms like “architecture,” “ideal,” “city,” and “plan” have everywhere and always been defined as they are today, in our culture; specifically, despite the fact that the thrust and expression of architectural intentions were quite dif ferent in the Renaissance from today, most commentators incoherently read the 13

For more on the unity of designing and building in the Quattrocento, see Trachtenerg, 124–5.

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Trattato as a proposal or “plan for action” (Spencer, “Introduction” xxxvii). Although these two fallacies usually appear in tandem and tend to reinforce one another, for clarity’s sake I will treat them individually. The vast majority of commentators read Sforzinda as simply one more ideal city of  the Renaissance. Although Sforzinda undeniably represents one of  the earliest ideal cities of  the Renaissance, it must also be admitted that certain of  Filarete’s sketches of  Sforzinda superficially resemble certain subsequent plans for ideal cities.14 Mere formal resemblance, however, provides no ground for inferring either a genetic or mimetic identity. We cannot conclude that two children belong to the same family simply because they look alike; neither can we conclude that two authors must have read one another’s works only because they seem to share a similar writing style. Any reasonably careful reading of  the texts or examination of  the images reveals substantive dif ferences, in both presentation and content, between Filarete’s Trattato and other works describing ideal cities. It would seem, though, that all too many of  Filarete’s commentators have found the formal resemblance between certain of  Filarete’s drawings and certain later images and buildings argument enough to toss them into the same conceptual basket. Perhaps the most egregious example of  the formalist fallacy – which will throw it into starkest relief – appears in Colin Rowe’s essay, “The Architecture of Utopia.” Rowe blithely identifies Sforzinda with the city of  Palmanova, a Venetian outpost designed by the famed architect Vincenzo Scamozzi (1548–1616) and founded in 1593, because both Sforzinda and Palmanova are approximately circular: Filarete’s Sforzinda, the paradigmatic city of so many future Utopian essays, had been projected c. 1460; and although Scamozzi’s Palma Nova, the first ideal city to achieve concrete form, was not realized until 1593, the themes which it employs were a common architectural currency by 1500. As illustrated by Sforzinda and Palma Nova, the ideal city is usually circular (“Utopia” 206).

14

For more information on the manuscript history of  Filarete’s Trattato, including the status of  the marginal drawings in extant manuscript copies, see Spencer “Introduction” xvii.

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I cannot help but begin by noting that Rowe’s general conclusion is demonstrably false. Amaurot, the capital of  More’s Utopia, and Christianopolis, described by Johann Valentin Andreae (1586–1684) in his 1619 book by the same name – two of the most prominent literary utopias in European history – are square. Rowe’s argument faces a further challenge in that its logic is invalid. The mere fact that both Filarete’s marginal sketches of  Sforzinda and Palmanova’s walls are more or less circular allows us to infer, as I have already explained, exactly nothing. A great deal more evidence and far more fine-grained qualification would be required if Rowe were to be justified in claiming any link at all between Sforzinda and Palmanova, which he nowhere of fers. In Collage City (1978), Rowe reveals a curious aspect of the formalist fallacy that is specifically relevant for architectural history: While Enlightenment criticism clearly modified the content of utopia it exercised conspicuously little inf luence upon the form; and, whatever the activities of  the noble savage may have been, utopia’s continuing preoccupation with classical figure and decorum is one of  the more notable characteristics of its early activist phase. The agreed and recognized utopian convention persisted; and thus, for instance, the ideal city of  André c. 1870 (an inf luence of  Fourierist speculation?) is no more dramatically deviant from quattrocento [sic] prototype than is Ledoux’s project of 1776 for his industrial settlement at Chaux (Collage 19).

Once again, I am compelled to begin by noting that Rowe’s conclusion is false. In claiming that Utopia evinces an ongoing “preoccupation with classical figure and decorum” (by which he means a particular conception of the tragic), Rowe implicitly denies the existence of indecorous or comic utopias. But Utopia has a silly, as well as a stern, side. Both the popular tradition of Cockaigne and François Rabelais’s (c. 1494–1553) spectacularly outlandish Abbey of Thélème (described in his 1532 book, Pantagruel) often find their ways into historical surveys of utopias and ideal societies. Rowe thus once again makes a sweeping generalization without qualifying it in reference to famous counterexamples. The point of crucial importance for architectural history in particular lies in Rowe’s distinction between Utopia’s content and form. Rowe’s view seems to be that a utopia’s “social” and “legal” aspects constitute its

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content, while its “architectural” aspects constitute its form. A utopia’s “form” thus comprises the polity’s physical elements and their configuration. Laws, customs, histories, social relations, and the like are the “content” that an author pours into the historically stable, formal, architectural “container” that is Utopia. Seeing as most people (including, it must be emphasized, sociologists and cultural anthropologists) generally consider laws, customs, histories, and social relations as some of the most important “forms” of culture, it is dif ficult to square Rowe’s position with even the simplest and least technical notions of human social life. If Utopia is to be defined according to its form, it seems clear that “both” social and architectural forms must be considered. We can only conclude that Rowe, in fully embracing the formalist fallacy, evidently believes that the bald intuition of  formal resemblance between the visual representations of utopias obviates the need for conscientious research, systematic argumentation, or self-critical ref lection.15 The formalist fallacy also disturbs many otherwise smooth arguments concerning the inf luence Filarete’s Trattato may have exercised, making it dif ficult to establish with clarity the work’s historical importance. Despite the fact that Filarete’s Trattato was not printed in full until the twentieth century, many commentators read it as an important and inf luential precedent for utopian urbanism. While scholars have shown that some few manuscript copies of it may have circulated in Italy, its circulation certainly never rivaled that of  Alberti’s De re aedificatoria (1485) or Serlio’s Regole generali d’architettura (1537), which were both printed. Lang, for example, claims without citing specific evidence that the general shapes and ideas

15

While a growing body of criticism has established the need for a more careful consideration of whether it is form, content, or something else that unifies the category of Utopia, most historical surveys of utopias and ideal cities suf fer from the formalist fallacy to some degree, although works emerging from the disciplines of architecture and art history are generally the worst of fenders. (Within the domain of  Utopian studies, see, e.g., Levitas.) Among the most important surveys suf fering from this fallacy are Lang’s “The Ideal City”; Klein’s “L’Urbanisme utopique de Filarete à Valentin Andreae”; Rosenau’s The Ideal City; the New York Public Library’s Utopia; and Eaton’s Ideal Cities.

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that Filarete laid out in his Trattato exercised “a tremendous inf luence on Italian ideal cities” (“Ideal City” 96). Other scholars similarly defend Filarete’s originality as a creator of inf luential architectural forms (Spencer, “Central-Plan”; De la Croix; Genoni). I would be inclined to defer to their superior erudition in this regard, except that their argumentative method all too often seems an unfortunate hybrid of  the formalist fallacy and the fallacy of correlation (i.e., post hoc, ergo propter hoc). Formal resemblance and chronological precedence may “suggest” inf luence (a fuzzy concept in any case), but they cannot “prove” it. Scholarly opinion as to the inf luence of  Filarete’s work is not unanimous in any case, since at least two other scholars contend that Filarete’s designs did not much inf luence his peers and successors (Kruft; Giordano).

Against the Historicist Fallacy The majority of Filarete’s commentators also labor under the misapprehension that architectural practice in Filarete’s time closely resembles architectural practice today. Specifically, most commentators portray Filarete’s description and drawings of Sforzinda as a kind of comprehensive “plan” or “blueprint,” analogous to a modern architectural proposal with its legally binding drawings and written program. Filarete, however, manifestly understands drawings and descriptions as figurative expressions of architectural intentions. His drawings and descriptions indicate how a given project will begin and suggest a likely developmental path, without constraining the final result in any absolute sense. In general, we would do better to think of Renaissance architectural drawings and descriptions as being more like “symbols” of intention than “plans” for action in the modern sense.16

16

For more on the status of architectural drawings and descriptions in the Renaissance, see Saalman; also, Wilkinson, “New Professionalism” and “Building”.

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Rowe’s identification of  Sforzinda with Palmanova obviously rests on an assumption that buildings and representations of  buildings may be regarded as fundamentally the same. But Filarete’s architectural fantasy and the walls of  Palmanova can belong to a single conceptual category only on the thoroughly modern view that buildings, textual descriptions, and architectural drawings should, can, and do coincide at every important point. (To a large extent, this isomorphism is what marks things as “architectural” for us.) But even comparing Filarete’s descriptions and drawings of Sforzinda to Scamozzi’s descriptions and drawings of Palmanova would be akin to comparing apples and oranges. Filarete conceived Sforzinda as an architectural fantasy, while Scamozzi understood from the very beginning that his architectural intentions would result in some sort of building. Simply to characterize Palmanova as “the first ideal city to achieve concrete form,” is to use the verb “to achieve” tendentiously, since it anachronistically places all fifteenth and sixteenth century ideal cities in a race against history and against each other to make the leap from drafting table to construction site. Rowe does not even attempt to account for the historical nuances in personal, cultural, and political context that are the lifeblood of scholarly history. Without such an accounting, any attempt to compare the works of  Filarete and the works of  Scamozzi is doomed to reveal the preconceptions of  the comparer rather than the essential similarities and dif ferences between the works. Another, more subtle, form of the historicist fallacy is distinguishable in Carroll Westfall’s interpretation of Filarete’s Trattato. Because Sforzinda is unarguably an ideal city, and because ideal cities are generally held to belong to the same category as modern utopias, Westfall apparently takes the view that Sforzinda must possess the same features as modern utopias. He imputes to Sforzinda a number of characteristics that are entirely at odds with Filarete’s text: Filarete’s Sforzinda of 1462–4 is the first city with a fully integrated utopian structure. Its citizens are strictly regulated in their social and political actions because in utopia order must be maintained. It is a radial, symmetrical city because of the timeless, hieroglyphic character of geometric forms. And its form is precisely sketched down to its finest and most mean detail in order to show how completely realized the city is (156).

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Westfall’s interpretive frame aligns with that of other commentators, such as Lewis Mumford and Miriam Eliav-Feldon, who note that the essential innovation achieved by utopias lies not in any particular social advance, but in their understanding of society as an integrated system of discrete parts. Eliav-Feldon writes: The strength and uniqueness of  the utopists lie not in abstract theory nor in any particular details but in their comprehensiveness. Their aim was to ameliorate life in all its spheres, and they were aware, to an amazing extent, of the interdependence of all aspects of the social organism. With a singular insight into the complexities of the social organization [sic], they presented a total picture of community life. In the words of Lewis Mumford: “Utopian thinking […] was the opposite of one-sidedness, partisanship, partiality, provinciality, specialism. He who practised the utopian method must view life synoptically and see it as an interrelated whole: not as [a] random mixture, but as an organic and increasingly organizable union of parts” (133).

Notwithstanding several drams of legislative advice, Filarete retains a consistent focus on architecture throughout his book. Filarete’s description of  Sforzinda bears little likeness to a “fully integrated utopian structure,” which would require, as Mumford and Eliav-Feldon observe, a systematic approach to all issues of civic importance. While Filarete clearly intends for his Trattato to of fer a comprehensive discussion of architecture, its method of presentation is far from systematic.17 As to legislation, the sumptuary laws and miscellaneous rules Filarete mentions hardly qualifies as “strict regulation” as we would understand it. Sforzinda bears little resemblance to, for example, either Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World or More’s Utopia. Further, Filarete’s varied drawings communicate orientations toward an overarching form more or less explicitly acknowledged as indeterminate. Many of  the individual buildings drawn in the margins are shown with enough detail for the viewer to get a solid feeling for the mood and rhythm of their decorative schemes. The few of  Filarete’s marginal sketches that show the entire city of  Sforzinda, however, of fer only a nucleus of conglomerated rectangles

17

The famously methodical De re aedificatoria (1485) of Leon Battista Alberti (1404– 72), as Choay has precisely and exhaustively documented, provides a striking and instructive foil to Filarete’s enthusiastic jumble of a book.

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f loating in a vast lake of blank space; an incomplete image that, obviously requiring the viewer to “fill in the rest,” seems completely at odds with Westfall’s characterization that Filarete has Sforzinda “precisely sketched down to its finest and most mean detail.” The generic city center Filarete draws can hardly be qualified as “completely realized.” Rather, Filarete’s sketches depict seed crystals that inform, without absolutely determining, the reader’s imagination of the remainder of the city. Ultimately, Westfall’s gloss communicates very well how we moderns conceive Utopia, but it completely misrepresents Filarete’s description of  Sforzinda.

The Contemplative Ideal I believe that one crucially unique aspect of  Filarete’s Trattato lies in his narration of the bricks-and-mortar construction of an ideal city, as opposed to the description of its already-deduced form. To my knowledge, no other utopia describes the concrete making of its walls, streets, and buildings. (Too, while utopias often describe particular laws, no utopia that I know of recounts in historical detail the accretive and idiosyncratic development of its legal corpus.) Although Sforzinda’s buildings vary in every particular from the designs with which Filarete begins, we still unhesitatingly qualify the designs, buildings, and city that they comprise as ideal. That we remain committed to Sforzinda’s status as an ideal city despite Filarete’s onsite improvements insists that the Platonic concept of ideality as eternal and unvarying is not the sole kind of ideality. In the lexicon of contemporary English, the word “ideal” and all of its variants, such as “idea” and “ideality,” refer inescapably to Plato’s Theory of  the Ideas (or Theory of  Forms). The Theory of  the Ideas is too well known in its overall outline to need an introductory exposition here, and the importance of  Plato’s Republic, Statesman, and Laws as precedents for More and other authors of utopias is similarly well known. I would like simply to dwell on one aspect of  Plato’s Theory that, while it is also well known, has not generally been properly interpreted vis-à-vis Utopia.

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The three principal Greek words at stake in Plato’s Theory of  the Ideas are theoria (θεωρία), eidos (εϊδος), and idea (ίδέα). The first one means “to view or look (passively),” “to contemplate,” or “to study” in the sense of the English expression, “to study a face,” and the latter two both mean more or less “an apparent indicator” or more generally, “something visible.” Plato evidently organized his “Theory” of “Ideas” around a metaphor of vision. Faithful to Plato’s original metaphor, our philosophical tradition has never really strayed from this conception of ideals as mental “images” seen by the “eye” of the mind. In attempting to define its object, commentary on ideal cities, ideal societies, and utopias has drawn almost exclusively from what might be called an “eidetic” lexicon. Despite the fact that literary utopias published before the nineteenth century rarely enjoyed the accompaniment of more than a single illustration (if  that), the words “image,” “picture,” “figure,” “illustration,” “representation,” “portrait,” “depiction,” “projection,” “vision,” “blueprint,” and the like appear without fail whenever an author attempts to define or discuss Utopia as a category. The ubiquitous use of  the eidetic lexicon refers not to any particular image visible to the eye, but to an image “visible” to the mind. For most of our culture’s history, contemplation (“theoria”) has been explicitly opposed to action. Hannah Arendt claims that “our tradition of political thought began when Plato discovered that it is somehow inherent in the philosophical experience to turn away from the common world of  human af fairs” (“Tradition” 25). Platonic ideals and ordinary human af fairs were held to be perfectly antithetical. On the Platonic view – or at least, the Platonic view as articulated by the German Idealists, which is our view – the ideality of an ideal polity has little if anything to do with its being logically consistent, concretely realizable, or desirable. Just so, we tend to see the ideality of a literary utopia as consisting in its ef fective communication of a clear, timeless concept-image of a socio-political order. The key point here is that while specific literary intentions may vary from author to author, all authors of literary utopias share a commitment to a literary technique that is fundamentally eidetic. That is, authors of utopias all use mental images of  the kind just described, which we might term “contemplative ideals.”

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The Seminal Ideal Although we seem prepared to accept Sforzinda’s ideality as obvious, the fictional Filarete’s practice of  “improving” his ideal designs implies that Sforzinda’s ideality is not an eternal, unchanging, Platonic ideality. I do not mean to become entangled here in the intriguing, but tangential, question of  how f lesh-and-blood authors of utopias are able to describe an eternal idea in the inherently temporal medium of  language. I mean to consider the status of  the ideal “within the fiction of a literary utopia,” which only a fiction that describes the actual building of a utopia can illuminate. That is, I want to draw attention to the fact that the fictional citizens of utopian polities do not generally play the role of  homo faber as Hannah Arendt describes it in The Human Condition. The authors of utopias do not generally describe how ordinary stone and wood become an ideal temple, how ordinary human conduct becomes an ideal custom, how ordinary deliberation becomes an ideal law. In Filarete’s Trattato, however, ordinary humans paradoxically transform the natural world into an ideal city. The image of an ideal city that Filarete of fers to his reader is identical to the image employed by the fictional Filarete to build Sforzinda within the narrative. Indeed, all human making is guided by a kind of ideal image or “mental model,” as Arendt terms it, “The actual work of  fabrication is performed under the guidance of a model in accordance with which the object is constructed. This model can be an image beheld by the eye of the mind or a blueprint in which the image has already found a tentative materialization through work” (Human 140). In the discussion which follows, Arendt notes that homo faber’s mental models enjoy a limited immunity to the corrupting inf luence of time. A craftsperson can use a single mental model repetitively without “using it up” or “wearing it down,” making multiple tangible copies of single ideal vase or table or temple. Perhaps unsurprisingly, though, Arendt tends to overemphasize the formal identity of homo faber’s products. It is all too easy after the Industrial Revolution to gloss over the tentativeness and variability inherent in human handiwork. While every product of a factory manned by robots will be all but identical

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to every other, each product of a single craftsperson will be more or less unique, because it will materially ref lect the normal variability of materials and the potential of  both techniques and designs to evolve. Arendt’s use of  the phrase “tentative materialization” represents an acknowledgement of precisely the issue I am trying to tease out. One of the marks of a skilled, experienced craftsperson is the capacity to take advantage opportunistically of  “unexpected developments” that arise during the process of making. We would regard as embarrassingly mediocre a temple-builder, for example, who did not seize every reasonable opportunity to improve the particular temple he happened to be building at the moment; but we would regard as hopelessly incompetent a temple-builder who made no ef fort to refine his mental models of various types of temples as his career progressed. Homo faber’s mental models can resist somewhat the workaday constraints that condition the activity of making, so that a craftsperson who starts making a house never ends up with, say, a rocking horse; but homo faber’s mental models cannot ignore altogether the extant conditions of his work, meaning that he must be willing to improvise to a certain extent as unexpected developments arise and to learn from experience. It is important to emphasize that “unexpected developments” are part of  the “normal process” of making. All outcomes in handicraft are uncertain. In our contemporary situation, we tend to experience crippling discomfort in the face of such ordinary uncertainty due to expectations conditioned by developments like industrial manufacture, financial risk modeling, and mass propaganda, to say nothing of digital representations of buildings. When humans make things with their hands, each and every intermediate point in the process must be considered tentative. The real possibility of  failure always haunts handiwork. On the upside, though, opportunities for both happy accidents and opportunistic improvement present themselves ceaselessly. A craftsperson might suddenly improve her technique, hit upon a superior design, or discover a vein of superior material embedded in the object she’s making. In short, homo faber must engage the temporality and materiality of the world with “both” his working ideals and his hands.

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So when Filarete elaborates a proportional schema for one of  the buildings in his ideal city, his intention is clearly not to lay down the onceand-for-all limits of that building’s perfection. Rather, he wants to provide an idealized origin for a project whose ultimate outcome depends on facts and forces beyond human control: I think [Sforzinda’s buildings] should be beautiful, with no expense spared, even though the same building can be built in many dif ferent ways. […] I will take the kind that seems most beautiful to me. Anyone who comes later and wishes to make more beautiful buildings or other dif ferent kinds can build them as best he knows how (vol.1, 106).

The ideality of  Sforzinda does not reduce to a mere proportion, nor does it foreclose the possibility of improvement or the inevitability of death. Filarete, in short, does not “project” or “plan” ideal buildings so much as “plant” and then “cultivate” them. Roman models and the canons of geometry together provide ideal “seeds,” as it were, from which good buildings grow. The analogy of generation and growth is particularly apt, since Filarete famously compares building designs to fetuses (with an appropriate gestation period for development) and built edifices to organisms that breathe, eat, and die (vol.1, 13–16). Just as planting an ideal olive does not guarantee the growth of an ideal olive tree, so ideal designs require the propitiation of  forces beyond human control, such as climate and fortune in order to achieve their full potential. To extend the analogy further, the growth of an ideal olive tree follows no single developmental path, and there exists no quantitatively definable size, branching structure, or color scheme that reductively defines perfection for olive trees. For Filarete, there exists no single ideal temple or palace; rather, an ideal temple is one among a family of possible outcomes for a temple building process. For homo faber, ideality admits of improvement and individuation. The kind of ideal employed by makers we might therefore term a “seminal ideal.”

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Seminal Ideality and Partial Utopias In Filarete’s book, seminal ideals inform the ideal architectural projects therein by providing sensitive and legible mental images that symbolize the founding intentions of the project, thereby serving as heuristics as the project unfolds. The imperfection and incompleteness of seminal ideals find a sympathetic double in Nathaniel Coleman’s proposal that architects can and should use “partial utopias” to orient their projects (2). Refreshingly, Coleman approaches human building in general as a complex social project rather than a mere technical achievement. He reminds us that “architecture, which is ever the result of constructive activity is nearly always preoccupied with some ought; yet much contemporary architectural theory and practice is obsessed with expression of how the world is” (9). Building is a contingent activity: we could always choose to build otherwise than we do. Therefore, the question of what to build and how to build it is perennially open, and each building project represents a concrete and highly particular answer to these questions. There can be no general, “scientifically valid” answer as to what and how to build because the circumstances that directly govern each project’s success or failure are geographically, culturally, historically, and in all other ways contingently particular. Although architects would not be recognizable as architects without technical skill in the crafts of building, Coleman has stripped the profession of any fantasy it might have of social or political neutrality. He is especially emphatic – and eloquent – in his insistence that architects honor the richness and sophistication of human sociability of their orienting utopias. Architecture without ethical nuance is simply bad architecture. Coleman recognizes that if  the general truths of science are not well suited to address the highly particular problems that architects habitually face, architects still need an orderly approach to their problems. Reinventing the profession for each project makes no sense. As their key heuristic, Coleman urges architects to imagine every project as “the partial completion of a potential whole,” and he suggests that architects look to utopias for models on how to imagine wholes that are optimistic and socially sophisticated. Thus, the best architecture – what Coleman calls “exemplary architecture” – is “always part of some potential whole imagined by the architect,

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a whole that serves as an organizing model – even if  for the realization of only a single building – conceived of as a partial utopia” (11, 2). Essentially, Coleman argues that architects achieve their best results when they design each project as a step toward a “partial utopia” – that is, toward a future that is imagined as “better” not vaguely, but specifically and concretely, in the particular context of the project at hand. Utopias serve architects (and architecture) by providing a kind of imagined future that the architect can inhabit (in a way analogous to the way readers inhabit works of literary fiction) in order to hone her designs before and as she builds them. In short, Coleman casts Utopia “as a positive informing model […] that need not be fully realized to remain valid or valuable” (5). Coleman’s attempt to recast Utopia as an architectural heuristic incisively critiques the spectacular failure of contemporary architectural practice to produce a humane built environment even as it responds sensitively to the principal current of contemporary Utopian studies, which seeks to rescue Utopia from its associations with absolutism and naïveté and revalorize it as something positive and optimistic. Precisely Utopia’s current associations with absolutism and naïveté, however, raise the question of why Coleman would attempt to rehabilitate it rather than articulating his insights in a more neutral lexicon. But Utopia boasts the nearly unique status of  being both a literary genre and a kind of social experiment. By calling his “positive informing models” “utopias,” Coleman explicitly references a substantial body of extant literary and built works that provide a kind of pedagogical cannon for the autodidact. Any architect attempting to follow Coleman’s advice will find no shortage of canonical material to begin teaching herself how to practice this peculiarly comprehensive kind of imagining.18 If we take Utopia as a comprehensive (but not total) and

18

In Coleman’s book, the principal value of  the term “utopia” is as a source of pedagogical orientation. One is thus left to wonder why Coleman chooses to deploy his analysis of architectural imagination to study three canonical twentieth-century architects (namely, Le Corbusier, Louis Kahn, and Aldo van Eyck) who never claimed for themselves a direct debt to either literary utopias or utopian social experiments. Absent additional evidence, their success in building exemplary architecture would seem to stem from other sources, suggesting that “utopia” might be an exogenous term forced upon a subject more ready-to-hand than appropriate.

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hopeful (but not naïve) imagining of a particular human environment (in both its social and concrete aspects), it begins to look a great deal like the end toward which we cultivate seminal ideals. Put otherwise, a seminal ideal, if  fortunate enough to achieve its potential, would seem to fit right into a Colemanian “partial utopia.” The contrast between the two might be best expressed by saying that an architect working from seminal ideals would tend to harness her comprehensive understanding of a social whole to propitiate a project’s intrinsic potentialities (harnessing the whole to serve the part) while an architect working toward a partial utopia would focus more on using a project’s potentialities to propitiate her comprehensive vision of a social whole (harnessing the part to serve the whole). I contend that architects, notwithstanding their insistence otherwise, actually use seminal ideals rather than contemplative ideals when they design and build. If architects would self-consciously recognize the tentativeness and formal incompleteness of  their work, they would undoubtedly find partial utopias far better heuristics than the pseudo-Utopian concepts of ef ficiency, comfort, and legibility that dominate contemporary architectural imagining.

The Primacy of  Seminal Ideality The contemplative ideal currently enjoys an almost perfect hegemony in our culture. The only idealism we seem capable of acknowledging is the worship of contemplative ideals. The incoherence of contemporary political idealism – which wants to use philosophy as a basis for action – points to our culture’s dif ficulty in conceiving an ideal which is “not” eternal and unchanging. The weight of  the accumulated authority of  Plato’s doctrine makes us forget, however, that it did not arise in a vacuum. In Book X of  the Republic, which contains one of  the most famous articulations of  the Theory of  Ideas, Socrates interestingly explains his newfangled theory by referencing the familiar experience of craftwork: “Aren’t we also accustomed

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to say that it is in looking to the idea of each implement that one craftsman makes the couches and another the chairs we use, and similarly for other things? For presumably none of  the craftsmen fabricates the idea itself. How could he?” (Plato sec. 596b). Socrates goes on to denigrate the craftsmen’s work as derivative, since they simply imitate the mental models that they did not themselves make.19 Still, it is telling that he turns first to the experience of making in order to elucidate his thinking. Socrates’s interlocutors understand his strange notion of an eternal and unchanging Idea because he compares it to the commonplace notion of a “mental model” that guides a human using her hands to make something. The contemplative ideal, as originated by Plato, here reveals itself as semantically descended from the seminal ideal. The chronological and semantic precedence of the seminal ideal signals its appropriateness for political use. If  Arendt is correct in her characterization of our political and philosophical traditions as being antithetical, then it must come as an intense relief to find that the obvious incoherence of using contemplative ideals to think political possibilities has a remedy. Unlike the contemplative ideal, the seminal ideal belongs not to the realm of philosophy, but to the realm of ordinary human af fairs. There is no incoherence or inconsistency in conceiving political ideals as seminal ideals – that is, as families of possible outcomes that must be planted, cultivated, and propitiated. If there exists a “practical” model for thinking the bridge between the real and the ideal, it lies in the activity of human making. The genius of  Filarete’s Trattato, after all, is only the ordinary, sublime genius of architecture, through which stone and wood can miraculously come to

19

A full discussion of the origins of mental models is far beyond the scope of this chapter, but it may be pertinent to point out that the Italian Renaissance saw a revaluation of the role of invention (from the Latin inventio, “to find,” “to discover”). Although originally inscribed in Western pedagogy as the first of  the five canons of rhetoric, invention became increasingly associated with machines and technical creativity in the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance. Where medieval writers would have credited God as the source of all ideas, the Renaissance grew increasingly confident in the power of humans to create ideas by combining and elaborating upon natural objects, historical writings and artifacts, and the products of contemporary culture.

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mean “a great city.” No matter how obvious our premises, how assiduous our inferences, or how pretty our planning drawings, we cannot improve our civic condition in any meaningful way without facing the reality that cities – even and especially ideal cities – come to exist only when, where, and because humans “make” them.

Works Cited Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. 2nd edn. Chicago: University of  Chicago Press, 1998. ——. “Tradition and the Modern Age.” Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought. New York: Viking Press, 1968. 17–40. Averlino, Antonio di Piero, known as “Filarete.” Filarete’s Treatise on Architecture: Being the Treatise by Antonio di Piero Averlino, Known as Filarete. Originally composed, Milan c. 1460 – c. 1464. Trans. and intro. John R. Spencer. Facsimile edn. 2 vols. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965. Choay, Françoise. The Rule and the Model: On the Theory of  Architecture and Urbanism. Ed. Denise Bratton. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1997. Coleman, Nathaniel. Utopias and Architecture. Abingdon: Routledge, 2005. De la Croix, Horst. “Military Architecture and the Radial City Plan in Sixteenth Century Italy.” The Art Bulletin 42.4 (December 1960): 263–90. Eaton, Ruth. Ideal Cities: Utopianism and the (Un)Built Environment. London: Thames and Hudson, 2002. Eliav-Feldon, Miriam. Realistic Utopias: The Ideal Imaginary Societies of  the Renaissance, 1516–1630. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982. Genoni, Mia Reinoso. “Filarete in Word and Image: Persuasion and Invention in the ‘Architettonico Libro.’” PhD diss., New York University, 2007. Giordano, Luisa. “On Filarete’s Libro Architettonico.” Paper Palaces: The Rise of  the Renaissance Architectural Treatise. Eds Vaughan Hart and Peter Hicks. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. 51–65. Grassi, Ernesto. Rhetoric as Philosophy: The Humanist Tradition. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1980. Hansot, Elisabeth. Perfection and Progress: Two Modes of Utopian Thought. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1974.

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Hexter, Jack H. More’s Utopia: The Biography of an Idea. New York: Princeton University Press, 1952. Reprint, New York: Harper and Row, 1965. Klein, Robert. “L’Urbanisme utopique de Filarete à Valentin Andreae.” Les Utopies á la Renaissance: colloque international (avril 1961). Brussels: Presses universitaires de Bruxelles, 1963. 209–30. Kruft, Hanno-Walter. Städte in Utopia: die Idealstadt vom 15. bis zum 18. Jahrhundert zwischen Staatsutopie und Wirklichkeit. Munich: Beck, 1989. Lang, Susanne. “The Ideal City: From Plato to Howard.” Architectural Review 112.668 (1952): 90–101. ——. “Sforzinda, Filarete and Filelfo.” Journal of  the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 35 (1972): 391–7. Leslie, Marina. Renaissance Utopias and the Problem of  History. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998. Levitas, Ruth. The Concept of  Utopia. Oxford and Bern: Peter Lang, 2010. More, Thomas. Utopia. Originally published, Louvain 1516. Famous Utopias of  the Renaissance. Trans. Ralph Robynson. Ed. Frederic R. White. New York: Packard & Co., 1946. Reprint, Hendricks House, 1981. Patrizi, Francesco. La città felice. Originally published, Venice 1553. Trans. Eugene E. Ryan. IstriaNet.org. 6 November 2008 . Plato. The Republic of Plato. Trans. Allan D. Bloom. 2nd edn. New York: Basic Books, 1991. Rosenau, Helen. The Ideal City: Its Architectural Evolution in Europe. 3rd edn. New York: Methuen, 1983. Rowe, Colin. “The Architecture of  Utopia.” The Mathematics of  the Ideal Villa, and Other Essays. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1976. 205–23. Rowe, Colin, and Fred Koetter. Collage City. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1978. Saalman, Howard. “Early Renaissance Architectural Theory and Practice in Antonio Filarete’s Trattato di Architettura.” The Art Bulletin 41.1 (March 1959): 89–107. Sargent, Lyman Tower. “In Defense of  Utopia.” Diogenes 53.1 (2006): 11–17. ——. “Utopia – The Problem of  Definition.” Extrapolation 16.2 (May 1975): 137–48. Schaer, Roland, Gregory Claeys, and Lyman Tower Sargent (eds). Utopia: The Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Spencer, John R. “Filarete and Central-Plan Architecture.” The Journal of  the Society of  Architectural Historians 17.3 (Autumn 1958): 10–18.

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Tigler, Peter. Die Architekturtheorie des Filarete. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter & Co., 1963. Trachtenerg, Marvin. “Building Outside Time in Alberti’s De re aedificatoria.” Res 48 (2005): 123–34. Wells, H. G. A Modern Utopia. London: Chapman & Hall, 1905. Reprint, New York: Penguin Classics, 2005. Westfall, Carroll William. Rev. of  Kunst und Utopie, Studien über das Kunst- und Staatsdenken in der Renaissance, by Hermann Bauer. Journal of  the Society of  Architectural Historians, 26.2 (1967): 155–8. Wilkinson, Catherine. “Building from Drawings at the Escorial.” Ed. Jean Guillaume. Les Chantiers de la Renaissance: actes des colloques tenus à Tours en 1983–1984. Paris: Picard, 1991. 263–78. ——. “The New Professionalism in the Renaissance.” The Architect: Chapters in the History of the Profession. Ed. Spiro Kostof. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. 124–60.

Greg Kerr

Gautier, Boileau, and Chenavard: Utopian Architectures of  the Temple in Mid-Nineteenth-Century France

In an article for the journal Art History, Ann Lorenz Van Zanten identifies two of  the principal elements of utopian architectural representations of  the 1830s in France: the palace and the temple (179–201).1 As her article shows, the latter of  these monuments is a prominent figure of utopian texts of the period, especially in the literary and artistic production of the Saint-Simonian movement.2 In keeping with the contemporary interest in the af fective and social mechanisms of religion among post-Revolutionary French progressives and social radicals, the utopian temple was intended to provide a spiritual setting distinct from the church of Roman Catholicism that would serve to reconstruct social experience and reconcile a divided collectivity with itself.3 Either as a monumental material structure or an abstract figure of human association, the temple occupies a central position in contemporary visions of the future city and society. As utopian textual and visual representations from this period show, this abstract conception of the future temple is associated with a regenerative purpose, for it would

1 2

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I would like to acknowledge the support of  the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences in the preparation of  the present chapter. This movement, which came initially to prominence in France from the beginning of the 1820s, comprised architects and engineers. Its regenerative project centered on a vast program of public works and transport infrastructures which were intended to catalyze patterns of universal association. For an analysis of  Saint-Simonianism, see Picon. The revalorization of religion by nineteenth-century French utopian currents is examined by Behrent.

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serve both as a device for social cohesion and as a monument celebrating diverse manifestations of human culture and ingenuity throughout history. Moreover, the temple would hold an anticipatory function, as for instance in the projections of  the Saint-Simonian economist and engineer Michel Chevalier for whom it served to prophesize the synthesis of diverse strands of knowledge and the realization of the potentialities latent in contemporary scientific discoveries or exotic travel.4 In view of its capacity to confer social meaning on a vast range of human exploits and activities by incorporating them into extravagant ritual or progressive narrative representations, the temple within nineteenth-century French utopianism is therefore invested with considerable importance. In architectural terms, the monument would connote such meanings through the systematic deployment of murals or reliefs devoted to the accomplishments of human culture and civilization, technologically innovative lighting and amplification arrangements, and unorthodox patterns of stylistic allusion. Elaborating on some of  these functions of  the utopian temple, this chapter will discuss the reception by the poet, journalist, and art critic Théophile Gautier (1811–72) of  two artistic and architectural representations. In the first instance, I will consider Gautier’s lengthy discussion in the inf luential Paris newspaper La Presse in September 1848 of a planned decoration for the walls of  the secular temple of  the Panthéon in Paris by the artist Paul Chenavard (1808–95) and, secondly, his text “Paris futur,” which attempts to appropriate stylistic paradigms present in a design for a visionary cathedral by the architect Louis-Auguste Boileau (1812–96).5 In these instances, Gautier’s writings ref lect at length on the cultural meanings communicated by public and utopian architectural projects and explore their aim of constituting and galvanizing a new collectivity. Moreover, they give complex articulation to contemporary aspirations to define a new architectural style appropriate to the conditions of the nineteenth century,

4 5

For a discussion of  Chevalier’s plans for a utopian temple in the 1830s, see Kerr. Chevalier’s poem itself may be consulted in Régnier’s edition of  Le Livre nouveau des Saint-Simoniens. Gautier’s articles are collected in the volume L’Art moderne.

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notably those presented by the increasing secularization of culture and the perspectives opened by new technologies of construction. Although, as the first two sections of this chapter demonstrate, Gautier adopts a stance that problematizes the ideological closure associated with the progressive or utopian intellectual frameworks of Chenavard and Boileau, he nonetheless af firms the considerable imaginative potential of the reconfiguration of stylistic precedents and the renegotiation of  founding cultural narratives that are a feature of  both of  their projects. Gautier may seem an unlikely choice of commentator on these developments, as he is perhaps most familiar to modern readers of  French as an apologist of  the aesthetic doctrine of  l’art pour l’art who denounced modern material culture and progressive ideologies in the preface to his early novel Mademoiselle de Maupin of 1834. For the Gautier of that preface, progressive and utopian movements were strongly identified with a strict utilitarian outlook that contrived to stif le any assertion of the sovereignty of  the work of art in the broad Romantic sense: Il n’y a de vraiment beau que ce qui ne peut servir à rien; tout ce qui est utile est laid, car c’est l’expression de quelque besoin, et ceux de l’homme sont ignobles et dégoûtants, comme sa pauvre et infirme nature (Œuvres 193).6

Similarly, in the article “Utilité de la poésie,” which originally appeared in the Musée des familles in January 1842, he writes: Tous les utopistes à grand jargon, les économistes saint-simoniens, phalanstériens, palingénésiques, mystagogues, et tels autres gâcheurs de néologismes et de mauvais français, auront beau crier à l’inutilité et à la folie contre les poètes, ils n’empêcheront personne de faire rimer amour et jour (Fusains 212).7 6

7

“Nothing is truly beautiful unless it cannot be put to any use; everything that is useful is ugly because it is the expression of a form of need, and those of man are vile and disgusting, like his poor, debilitated nature.” All English translations in this chapter are my own. “All those utopianists so enamoured of jargon; the Saint-Simonian, Phalansterian, Palingenetic, mystagogue economists, and such other utterers of neologisms and poor French hopelessly deplore the uselessness and madness of poets, for they will never prevent anyone from rhyming ‘amour’ (love) and ‘jour’ (day).”

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Gautier here expresses deep antagonism towards any ef fort to systematize aesthetic values consistent with utilitarian criteria or in accordance with the utopian schemes of Saint-Simonianism, Fourierism (designated by the reference to “phalanstériens”), or the palingenetic philosophy associated with the writer Pierre-Simon Ballanche (1776–1847). The sheer polemical force of  Gautier’s stance is evident, but it is hoped that the analysis of  his art criticism and other journalism in the present chapter will help to nuance somewhat his problematic relation to these utopian frameworks. The texts under consideration here belong to a period of Gautier’s writing career which spanned the French Second Republic and Second Empire and can be said to reveal an aesthetic attitude which is at once more accommodating and more ambivalent.

Paul Chenavard and La Palingénésie sociale In view of the uncompromising positions he enunciates in the passages cited above, it may be surprising to discover Gautier’s enthusiasm for the plans for the decoration of  the Panthéon, a project whose themes are in keeping with much contemporary progressive and utopian thought. Designed by the architect Jacques-Germain Souf f lot (1713–80), this edifice was formerly the Roman Catholic Church of  Sainte-Geneviève before it was transformed by decree of the Constituent Assembly into a secular temple in 1791. One of  the most prominent monuments of  French neo-classical architecture, Souf f lot’s church is remarkable for its reconciliation of aesthetic motivation and a structural technique rooted in the application of geometrical hypotheses applied to problems of construction, while its Greek cross-plan and monumental Roman temple front ref lect a broader range of sources for ecclesiastical architecture. Upon being rededicated to the memory of  the heroes of  the Revolution, the Church of  SainteGeneviève assumed the Greek term for a shrine to all the gods, Panthéon. Over the subsequent years, under the reign of Napoleon Bonaparte and the period of constitutional monarchy which followed, the monument once again served ecclesiastical functions intermittently until the Revolution

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of 1848. Thereafter the government of  the Second Republic selected controversially the little-known artist Paul Chenavard to decorate the interior of  the rechristened “Temple of  Humanity.” While Gautier’s acquaintance with Chenavard’s project is described in some detail in a recent book by James Kearns, the present analysis will deal selectively with the poet’s reception of aspects of  Chenavard’s plans, whose principal relief was to be entitled La Palingénésie sociale (Social Palingenesis) (Kearns 80–7).8 Acquainted with the philosophies of Hegel and Ballanche, Chenavard envisaged a didactic mural which would give pictorial expression to the progress of  humanity through successive historical cycles.9 Following his abundant notes and cartoons for the project, which Gautier studied closely, the walls of  the Panthéon would be covered with scenes describing the history of man from Adam and Eve to Napoleon Bonaparte; the dif ferent spatial divisions of the panorama would correspond to Chenavard’s understanding of the chronological progression across ancient and modern eras. Chenavard’s vastly encompassing scheme would serve to articulate in one continuous account a multiplicity of historical phenomena which might be excluded from traditional religious chronicles of  the origins of  humanity (cf. Figure 2). As Gautier notes in one of  his reviews of  Chenavard’s plans for La Presse, the artist furthermore attempted to reinstate the figure of  Jesus Christ within a secular narrative of  the ascent of reason and understanding across the ages: “Il ne s’agit pas ici du Christ dogmatique et théocratique tel que le catholicisme l’a arrangé pour ses besoins […] mais du Jésus tendre et bon, de l’ami des petits enfants et des femmes, du blond rêveur qui se fût volontiers promené sous les ombrages de l’Académie entre Platon et Socrate.” (“This is not the dogmatic and theocratic Christ whom Catholicism suited to its needs […] but the kind and tender Jesus, the friend of  little children and women, the blond dreamer who had gladly strolled amongst Plato and Socrates in the shade of  the Academy.”) (L’Art moderne 17). In addition, Chenavard’s plans describe a series of increasingly humanized figurations of  the divine; Gautier writes that their aim is to illustrate “l’histoire synthétique de ce grand être collectif, 8 9

On Chenavard, see Sloane 134–41. Incidentally, Chenavard’s chronicle of  the great thinkers of  the modern age culminates in likenesses of  the utopian socialists Saint-Simon and Fourier.

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multiple, ondoyant, ubiquiste, éternel, composé de tous les hommes de tous les temps, dont l’âme générale est Dieu” (“the synthetic history of that great collective, multiple, heaving, all-pervading, eternal being, composed of all men from all ages, whose general soul is God”) (L’Art moderne 5). His design appeared to sanction the contribution of diverse cultures, races, and nations to the advancement of universal understanding throughout history.10 Gautier thus notes that the multifarious historical and mythical spectacles selected for the murals tend to mobilize large masses of individuals in collective movements: Tous les Olympes, tous les paradis, tous les Walhallas y ont passé, sans compter les cosmogonies, les jugements derniers, les fêtes babyloniennes, les orgies et les triomphes romains, les invasions de barbares, les conciles, les grandes scènes de la Convention, les batailles de l’empire, tous les sujets où il faut remuer de grandes masses, et dont le personnage principal est la foule, personnage que nul ne s’entend à faire agir comme Chenavard (L’Art moderne 4).11

Later, although he notes that Chenavard intended to delegate the de facto materializing task of painting the mural to a team of workers, Gautier applauds the originality of the artist’s almost “mathematical” compositional

10

11

Gautier writes that “Toutes les nations du monde ingénieusement personnifiées y célèbrent l’agape de la fraternité universelle. Ce n’est plus au fond des catacombes que les hommes s’embrassent et s’appellent frères. C’est à la pure lumière du soleil, qui s’en réjouit, que les peuples sans distinction de race, de couleur ou de caste communient dans l’intelligence et l’amour” (“Here, all the nations of  the world are ingeniously represented celebrating the feast of universal fraternity. It is no longer in the depths of  the catacombs that men embrace one another and call each other brothers. It is by the bright light of  the enchanted sun that all peoples irrespective of race, color or caste come together in love and understanding”) (L’Art moderne 58). “All the Olympuses, all the heavens, all the Valhallas are there, without mentioning the cosmogonies, the Last Judgements, the Babylonian festivals, the Roman orgies and victories, the Barbarian invasions, the councils, the great scenes from the Convention, the imperial battles, all those subjects for which great masses have to be stirred and whose main character is the crowd, a character whom no one can make perform like Chenavard.”

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ability in assimilating a multitude of pictorial strategies appropriate to the task of negotiating and circumscribing the mass entities described above: On dirait que, par une analyse sagace et patiente, il s’est rendu compte de la manière de composer de tous les maîtres, qu’il a désarticulé leurs groupes, pénétré le secret de leurs lignes, mis à jour leurs artifices, découvert leurs habitudes et leurs tics même. […]; il a combiné toutes les manières possibles d’assembler des figures, il connaît les types générateurs des groupes, le point de départ et d’arrivée des lignes, et peut mettre un géomètre au service de l’artiste (L’Art moderne 92–3).12

Here, Gautier is attentive to Chenavard’s appropriation of diverse compositional practices from the most illustrious figures in the history of painting. Recourse to these practices enables Chenavard to maximize aestheticizing processes of spatial expansion and delimitation in order to ref lect the complex and collective quality of  his subjects. It is worth noting that the assimilatory quality of  the painter’s method is common to contemporary utopian visions of a future temple, as his integration of an array of compositional techniques is comparable to the way in which Michel Chevalier’s poem “Le Temple” assimilates tropes from manifold textual idioms of mystical, utilitarian, orientalist, and other orders of representation. In a manner in keeping with the way Chevalier’s text petitions its reader, Chenavard’s sweeping mural scenes seem intended to solicit the gaze from diverse angles, while challenging attempts to categorize their content according to traditional historical or religious frameworks. As it prophesizes humanity’s rise towards an apotheosis of harmony and universal comprehension, La Palingénésie sociale aims to incite the viewer to a consciousness of  the variety and profuseness of  the human phenomenon through the modalities of  historical experience.

12

“It would seem that through patient, shrewd analysis, he took stock of the compositional practice of every one of the masters, that he dislocated their groups, fathomed the secret of their lines, exposed their artifices, discovered their habits and even their tics […] he has brought together all the possible ways of combining figures, he knows all the types which generate groups, the starting and finishing points of  lines, and can make the geometrician serve the artist.”

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While Gautier’s concern is principally with the planned decorations by Chenavard, his descriptions indicate moreover that Chenavard’s plans tended to complement facets of  Souf f lot’s design for Ste Geneviève. This is not least since the church’s dynamic structural synthesis of  Greek and Gothic is interpreted as a striking embodiment of an Enlightenment perception of the progressive advancement of humanity throughout history. According to Allan Braham, Souf f lot’s design “had always been less a church for the worship of God than a symbol of intellectual endeavour” (82). In this perspective, Souf f lot’s ecclesiastical design may be seen already to invite the kind of re-evaluation of the relationship between past and present in which Chenavard’s drawings are engaged; in attempting to restore to meaning the unrefined materials of  history and culture in an age of secularization, La Palingénésie universelle therefore implicitly valorizes inherent aspects of  Souf f lot’s composition. Whether or not Chenavard’s complex treatment of the philosophy of  history would have been intelligible to the lay viewer is disputable, as Joseph C. Sloane argues (138). Progress on this ambitious project was hampered by strong Catholic opposition and by December 1851 the government of the Second Republic which had commissioned it was brought to an end by the coup d’état of Louis Napoleon. Seeking to buttress popular support, Louis Napoleon restored the monument to its ecclesiastical use once more. The cartoons of Chenavard’s project were exhibited at the Universal Exhibition of 1855 and are now held at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Lyon.13

Louis-Auguste Boileau and the Nouvelle forme architecturale The divisiveness elicited by La Palingénésie sociale is characteristic of  the reaction to projects of  this type at the mid nineteenth century. A design which met with similar controversy was Louis-Auguste Boileau’s cathédrale 13

In addition, Kearns notes that Gautier’s several newspaper articles were condemned by a Catholic group called the Congrès des Diverses Académies de France (Kearns 85).

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synthétique, which was made public in the early 1850s and presented in a report entitled Nouvelle forme architecturale (Boileau, Nouvelle forme). Boileau was a follower of the Christian social reformist and former SaintSimonian Philippe Buchez (1796–1865), and he attempted to link the thought of  Buchez to his own systematic explanation of  the historical evolution of architecture (Boileau, Histoire critique). In the remainder of  this chapter, I will dwell brief ly on Boileau’s intellectual debt to Buchez and describe how the cathédrale synthétique represents an ef fort on Boileau’s part to intervene critically in contemporary debates on eclecticism, before ref lecting on Gautier’s own imaginative appropriation of aspects of  this project. Buchezian doctrine depicted history as a dynamic progression towards ever more just and sophisticated forms of social interaction and cooperation under the direction of religious faith. According to Buchez’s Introduction à la science de l’histoire of 1833, in setting a general objective for the collectivity, religion provided a coherent framework around which individual conduct and social structures could be based. In this perspective, the distinctiveness of historical periods could be explained in terms of the successive ascendancy of diverse systems of belief as humanity progressed towards the aim of fraternity most successfully exemplified by the Christian model. History was not simply the ever-increasing accretion of knowledge of actions and events but could be seen to articulate fundamental principles according to which the complexity of social evolution could be rationalized. For Louis-Auguste Boileau, the purposive understanding of  history within Buchezianism provided a model for the systematic interpretation of  the historical evolution of  the discipline of architecture.14 In Boileau’s view contemporary practice was hampered by what he saw as a crisis of 14

“Les classifications méthodiques qui ont si puissamment contribué à l’avancement des sciences naturelles font défaut dans l’enseignement de l’architecture, ce composé de science et d’art. […] Pour moi, l’hypothèse générale de Buchez sur le progrès est celle qui répond le mieux à la vérité des faits” (“The methodical classifications which have contributed so powerfully to the progress of  the natural sciences are missing from architecture, that composite of science and art. […] In my view, Buchez’s general hypothesis on progress is the one which best corresponds to the circumstances”) (Histoire critique 33).

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modern architecture, of which eclecticism was the expression. Academic exploration of a variety of past models was, in his view, symptomatic of an increasing isolation of architectural practice from any consensus of  belief and signalled the waning of the historical dynamic. Therefore, Boileau’s aim was to construct a new compositional order for the nineteenth century that would be cognizant of its position with respect to preceding architectures and of its function as a symbolic expression of  the continual unfolding of universal history. Before attempting to describe this “new architectural form,” Boileau contended that it was necessary to conduct a systematic historical classification of successive architectural styles in the manner of  the Buchezian periodizations described above: [L’auteur] s’est attaché à déterminer à l’aide de l’histoire universelle, les progrès successifs qui ont eu lieu dans l’art monumental, ayant soin de n’isoler jamais, dans cet examen, les deux éléments constitutifs de cet art: la construction et la décoration. De la sorte, il n’a reconnu comme termes de la progression que les phases où le progrès de l’ensemble résulte du progrès simultané de chacune de ses parties ; et il a classé seulement comme perfectionnements de détail, les modifications ou améliorations qui ne se sont manifestées que dans l’un ou l’autre de ces éléments. Ces termes de progression une fois épuisés, il a constaté quel est aujourd’hui le dernier terme connu, ou si l’on veut celui qui marque le point le plus élevé auquel l’art monumental soit parvenu dans sa marche ascendante. Ce degré qui n’a pas été dépassé, c’est, aux yeux de l’auteur, celui que l’art monumental du christianisme a atteint aux XIIIe et XIVe siècles. Il faut se rappeler qu’il s’agit toujours des inventions capitales, marquées du sceau d’une phase de civilisation, ou, selon les termes de classification adoptés par l’auteur, des synthèses, qui comportent un nouveau système de construction et un nouveau style de décoration (quoted in Marrey 26–7).15

15

“[The author] set out to determine, with the aid of universal history, the successive progressions that have occurred in monumental construction, taking care never to isolate in this analysis the two constitutive elements of  that art: construction and decoration. In this way, he took into account as terms of the progression only those phases in which the progress of  the whole results from the simultaneous progress of each of its parts; and only modifications or enhancements that occur in one or other of these elements were classified as improvements of detail. Once these terms of progression were exhausted, he established the last acknowledged term, or rather the term which marks the highest point that monumental art has reached in its ascending course. In the author’s view, the stage which has not been surpassed is

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Boileau concludes that hitherto the highest historical instance of the interrelation of constructive “system” and decorative “style” is present in the Gothic cathedral. His outlook is in keeping with the Buchezian valorization of  the socially regenerative function of  the Gothic cathedral, as summarized by Neil McWilliam: “the collaborative labor mobilized in fashioning its monumental form embodies the submission of individual will to a collective goal, while the mass celebrated within its walls represents a supremely organic, unifying experience, in which the ‘faithful are at once actors and spectators’” (137).16 For Boileau, it would be possible to further enhance the structural and aesthetic potential of the Gothic ogival arch by nineteenth-century technological advances; his model for the cathédrale synthétique thus makes unprecedented reliance on complex configurations of overlapping iron arches and stained glass, materials which would maximize color, luminosity, and space, thereby heightening the emotive and sensuous impact on the congregation. As Bruno Foucart writes, Boileau’s attempt to define architectural practice in a Buchezian historical perspective represented a “remarquable pouvoir libérateur à l’égard des distinctions stylistiques, géographiques et chronologiques” (“a remarkable liberating power with regard to stylistic, geographical, and chronological distinctions”) (240). It provided a comprehensive conceptual scheme that purported to endow nineteenthcentury architecture with a framework to meaningfully validate Roman, Byzantine, Islamic, Hindu, and other architectural traditions as successive ascending “syntheses” ref lecting a fusion of constructive “system” and decorative “style”. The architect saw potential for the nouvelle forme to become

16

that which the monumental art of  Christianity reached in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. One must remember that it is always those inventions of capital importance which are marked by the seal of a phase of civilization, or, according to the terms of classification adopted by the author, by the syntheses, that entail a new system of construction and a new style of decoration.” Marrey’s edition presents a series of  texts dating from a polemic over eclecticism and the use of iron in architecture which followed the publication of  La Nouvelle forme architecturale. The discussion of  Boileau’s Nouvelle forme architecturale in this chapter is indebted to McWilliam’s study.

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a paradigm of broad cultural pervasiveness and he forecasted that aspects of  the new composition could be implemented in numerous examples of civil and public architecture, “depuis le palais jusqu’à la maison d’habitation la plus humble” (“from the palace to the most humble home”) (quoted in Marrey 45) (cf. Figure 3). Unfortunately for Boileau’s project, the plans met with strong resistance. The publication of the Nouvelle forme architecturale elicited a polemic between French architect, theorist, and restorer of Notre Dame, Eugène Viollet-le-Duc (1814–79) and Boileau over the validity of  the eclectic method and the use of iron in architecture; opposition from the Conseil des bâtiments civils was also a problem, and Catholic authorities were dissuaded from endorsing the project. For Foucart, the principal failing of  Boileau’s conception for the cathédrale synthétique is that aucune confession particulière ne peut s’en réclamer: temple d’une religion universelle, comme on avait pu la rêver un instant en 1848, faisant appel pour cela à la fusion de toutes les formes architecturales jugées spiritualistes, elle ne pouvait rencontrer l’unanimité nécessaire et s’imposer comme style par l’absence même du public qui devait l’habiter (250).17

Gautier and “Paris futur” At the time of  the polemic with Viollet-le-Duc, Gautier, together with Michel Chevalier and other former Saint-Simonians, was one of a limited number of socially eminent supporters of Boileau’s radical designs.18 In an

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“it cannot be claimed to be representative of any specific faith: as a temple of a universal religion of  the kind dreamt of in 1848, and in that way appealing to a fusion of all those architectural forms deemed to be spiritualist, it could not attain the necessary unanimous support nor be received as a universally acknowledged style due to the absence of  the very audience which was supposed to occupy it.” For a discussion of Boileau’s design for the church of  St Eugène Ste. Cécile in Paris, see Chevalier, “Le fer et la fonte.”

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appreciative commentary on the plans for the cathédrale synthétique for La Presse, Gautier draws the reader’s attention to the project’s reconfiguration of stylistic references: Sur le mur de notre chambre est accrochée une épreuve daguerrienne sur papier d’une perfection rare, et représentant un monument étrange: cathédrale, basilique, pagode, église moscovite – un peu de tout cela, – sans être précisément rien de cela. […] En ef fet, ce monument n’appartient à aucune civilisation, à aucun peuple. À aucune époque d’architecture. Il participe de toutes les traditions pour les assimiler et en dégager un certain absolu rare et curieux (Gautier, “Théâtres”).19

For Gautier, Boileau’s design suggests comparisons, on a stylistic level, with sources as culturally distant as Russian churches or pagodas, and like other contemporary observers, Gautier shares the view that the design does not appear to celebrate any specific religious style of architecture, despite appearing to draw on the combined resources of multiple religious and spiritual traditions. Foucart argues that Gautier’s account of Boileau’s project in La Presse is oblivious to its underlying Buchezian rationale and tends to regard it rather as a mere stylistic “potpourri”; however, I wish to argue here that Boileau’s design nonetheless suggests a complex referential function that prompted Gautier to meditate extensively on the interrelation of the social, cultural, and historical dimensions of human experience by and within the aesthetic work (Foucart 249). Similarly, although it is likely that the erudition on display in the articles on Chenavard’s plans for the Pantheon are more the result of Gautier’s resourceful use of the artist’s own notes for the project than of a systematic understanding of its inherent philosophical scheme, La Palingénésie sociale appears to have given Gautier similar pause for ref lection.20

19

“On our bedroom wall hangs a daguerreian print of rare perfection, depicting a strange building: cathedral, basilica, pagoda, Muscovite church – a little of all of  these – without being precisely any of  them. […] This building does not in fact belong to any civilization or people, nor to any architectural period. It shares in every tradition so that it may assimilate them all, eliciting from them a rare and peculiar absolute quality.” Reproduced in Boileau, Nouvelle forme 27–8. 20 This interpretation is advanced by Douphis.

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A characteristic of  both of  these projects (and of  Michel Chevalier’s “Le Temple”) is that they delimit and dramatize the activity of consciousness as it attempts to organize and relate an immense variety of experiences belonging to historical, mythical, religious, scientific and other orders, and to project their latent significance. Gautier is cognizant of this in evoking the cyclical, progressive regenerations of  history traced by Chenavard’s cartoons, noting that “le présent est la matrice où le passé procrée l’avenir et il doit exister dans les régions impalpables, sous l’obscurité des futuritions une ébauche invisible de ce qui sera; les éléments de l’avenir, les combinaisons du hasard, les accidents de l’histoire, sont déjà en préparation sur un fourneau mystérieux.” (“the present is the matrix where the past procreates the future, and there must exist in an impalpable domain, in the darkness of  futurity, an invisible sketch of what shall come to pass; the elements of  the future, the combinations of chance, the accidents of history, are already in preparation in a mysterious furnace” (L’Art moderne 70–1). Of particular importance here is Gautier’s implicit suggestion that La Palingénésie sociale deliberately foregrounds an inherent orientation of  the aesthetic work towards the projection of  future horizons; this is suggested by the reference to the “ébauche invisible,” or “invisible sketch,” which denotes the aestheticizing processes mobilized for such a purpose. In an essay entitled “La Construction de l’image comme matrice de l’histoire” (“The Construction of  the image as a matrix of  history”), Éric Michaud argues that from the nineteenth century onwards, the function of  the image is no longer restricted to the documentation of  the past; rather the image itself assumes a determining role as an “actor” of  history. For Michaud, this arises from a growing perception that images “réorganisent chaque fois le mémoire humaine sur la surface matérielle de leur support” (reorganize human memory in every instance on the material surface of their medium) (42). Citing Saint-Simon’s endorsement of an aesthetic avantgarde, Michaud contends that the image henceforth acquires a transformative quality and a heightened social and cultural valence by virtue of  the mobilization of aesthetic activity in the constitution of  the future community. It is this evolving cultural perception of the function of the image as identified by Michaud which arguably informs the passage by Gautier cited above. For Gautier, La Palingénésie sociale is implicitly “matrixical,” for

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it functions simultaneously to mediate miscellaneous data of past perception and to elicit projections of  transformative desire. The aesthetic work therefore has the potential to impel the viewer or reader towards a radically altered perspective by initiating new orders of discourse and modes of relation to the real. This may be related to another passage by Gautier on the novelist Honoré de Balzac in which he appraises the particular “modernity” of  that author: De cette modernité sur laquelle nous appuyons à dessein provenait, sans qu’il s’en doutât, la dif ficulté de travail qu’éprouvait Balzac dans l’accomplissement de son œuvre: la langue française, épurée par les classiques du dix-septième siècle n’est propre lorsqu’on veut s’y conformer qu’à rendre des idées générales, et qu’à peindre des figures conventionnelles dans un milieu vague. Pour exprimer cette multiplicité de détails, de caractères, de types, d’architectures, d’ameublements, Balzac fut obligé de se forger une langue spéciale, composée de toutes les technologies, de tous les argots de la science, de l’atelier, des coulisses, de l’amphithéâtre même. Chaque mot qui disait quelque chose était le bienvenu et la phrase, pour le recevoir, ouvrait une incise, une parenthèse, et s’allongeait complaisamment. […] Il avait, bien qu’il ne le crût pas, un style et un très beau style, – le style nécessaire, fatal et mathématique de son idée (Portrait 102)!21

Here Balzac is applauded for his success in constructing a literary idiom mediated by exceptional lexical and dialectal multiplicity and having the potential to relate a range of phenomena which would be dif ficult to classify by the conventional rhetorical means of French classicism. Significantly here, the assignment of an active role to literary style in the construction of 21

“We deliberately stress modernity, because Balzac’s dif ficulty in the completion of  his work arose unwittingly from this; purged by the seventeenth-century classics, the French language is only appropriate, when one wishes to conform to it, for the expression of general ideas and for the depiction of conventional figures in an abstract setting. In order to express this multiplicity of details, characters, features, architectural styles, and furnishings, Balzac was compelled to forge a special language for himself made up of all the forms of technology, and of all the idioms of science, the workshop, the backstage area, and even of  the lecture hall. Any word that expressed something was welcome and to accommodate it the sentence would open up a slit or parenthesis and lie down obligingly. […] Although he did not believe so, he had a style and a very beautiful one – the necessary, fatal and mathematical style of  his idea!”

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a complex subjective environment in the work of  Balzac is not presented as a metaphysically oriented project but one immanently grounded and dispersed through language and its manifold figurations. It is a similarly complex awareness of the factors which mediate creative activity and of the interrelated imaginative and historical dimensions of  the aesthetic work which inform Gautier’s “textual” appropriation of some of those stylistic paradigms present in the work of Boileau. In the last part of this chapter, I therefore wish to suggest that Boileau’s plans for the cathédrale synthétique in particular serve as a potential model for a prose text composed by Gautier approximately one year after his article on Boileau for La Presse. “Paris future,” which appeared in Le Pays on 20 and 21 December 1851, is a gentle yet somber caricature of contemporary utopian visions of  the city, replete with mummies and a dark underworld of defeated peoples who reside in the underbelly of a vast metropolis. Two passages of  “Paris futur” are devoted to a description of an enormous temple: Il n’y aurait qu’une seule église qui occuperait la place du Panthéon. Ce faîte serait consacré à la Divinité. Cette église aurait des proportions démesurées: toute la montagne latine, taillée en assises, lui servirait d’escalier. Ses tours et ses coupoles feraient au bord du ciel une entaille si profonde que les étoiles s’épanouiraient comme des f leurs d’or aux acanthes des chapiteaux du premier étage. Notre-Dame pourrait entrer par le porche géant sans baisser sa tête. Dans ce temple hybride seraient concentrées toutes les architectures du passé, celles du présent et celles de l’avenir: on y retrouverait, sous des formes plus savantes, les vertiges granitiques d’Ellora et de Karnac, les aspirations désespérées des ogives de la cathédrale de Séville ; l’aiguille gothique, le campanile romain, la coupole byzantine, le minaret oriental, formeraient d’harmonieux accords dans cette vaste symphonie de pierre chantée à Dieu par tout un peuple. – Les mythes génésiaques, les allégories de la chute et du rachat, la rémunération du bien et la punition des forfaits, les symboles des puissances célestes, exécutés en mosaïques, revêtiraient les murailles de teintes chaudes et riches. L’or scintillerait aux parois intérieures avec une profusion digne des Incas […]. Au lieu des cloches dont les capsules de bronze n’ont qu’une psalmodie lugubre et monotone, on établirait dans les tours des orgues immenses avec des tuyaux gros comme la colonne de la place Vendôme, dont les souf f lets seraient mis en mouvement par des machines à vapeur de la force de huit cents chevaux. Des musiques religieuses, composées exprès, seraient exécutées aux dif férentes heures du jour, et des trombes d’harmonie passeraient sur la ville, dominant toutes les rumeurs et rappelant l’idée de Dieu à la foule distraite. À l’intérieur du temple, les voûtes, disposées selon les

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lois de l’acoustique, donneraient une sonorité merveilleuse aux cantiques sacrés, le prédicateur, du haut de sa chaire géante, aidé du téléphone, souf f lerait la parole divine, comme du bord d’un nuage, un de ces grands anges à clairon que les peintres placent dans les jugements derniers (Caprices 315–16).22

In this description, the recourse to manifold technological and ornamentative devices such as gold, murals, organs and the telephone reveals an awareness on Gautier’s part of contemporary utopianism’s aspiration to enhance emotive and sensuous impact on the spectator through amplification and incandescent color. Under the inf luence of the preacher’s persuasive rhetoric, disciples of  the temple of  the future Paris will be caught in a vortex of

22

“A single church would occupy the Place du Panthéon. This hilltop edifice would be devoted to the Divinity. The church would be of extreme proportions, and the entire summit of  the Latin Quarter, carved into steps, would serve as its stairway. Its towers and domes would be so deeply engraved into the edges of the sky that the stars would blossom like golden f lowers in the acanthus leaves of  the capitals on its first f loor. Our Lady could enter through the enormous porch without lowering her head. This hybrid temple would combine all the architectures of  the past, present and future: throughout it could be rediscovered, in more complex forms, the dizzying granite features of  Ellora and Karnac, the desperate voids of  the arching vaults of  Seville cathedral, the Gothic spire, the Roman campanile, the Byzantine dome and the Oriental minaret; all would form harmonies in this vast symphony of stone sung to God by a whole people. – Mosaics of  the myths of genesis, the allegories of  the fall and redemption, the rewarding of good deeds and the punishment of terrible crimes, and the symbols of the celestial powers would cover the walls with rich warm shades. Gold would sparkle across the walls of the interior with an abundance worthy of  the Incas. In place of  those bells whose caps merely produce a monotonous and mournful pitch, enormous organs would be erected in the towers, with pipes as thick as the column in the Place Vendôme, while their bellows would be set in movement by steam engines with the power of eight hundred horses. Specially composed pieces of religious music would be performed at dif ferent hours of  the day, and torrents of harmony would pass over the city, soaring over its babble and reminding the distracted crowds of the idea of God. Assembled in keeping with the laws of acoustics, the vaults of the temple would accord a marvelous sonority to sacred hymns; finally, with the aid of  the telephone, the preacher would blast the divine word from the enormous pulpit, as if  from the edge of a cloud, like one of  those great trumpeting angels that painters insert into pictures of  the Last Judgment.”

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sound and sensation causing them to render their individuality and merge into an organic community of  the faithful. Like Boileau’s cathédrale synthétique the edifice relies on a stylistic amalgam of diverse registers to elicit the architecture of the future: here, the examples are drawn from Egyptian, Gothic, Byzantine and a host of other traditions. This paradigm of stylistic amalgam serves as a model for the broader topographical structure of  the future Paris. In another passage Gautier writes: La ville sera d’une magnificence architecturale dont on ne peut se faire une idée […] telle rue af fectera le style byzantin, telle autre le style gothique, une troisième le goût mauresque, l’autre celui de la renaissance. […] Les architectes de ce temps-là, au lieu de chercher à dissimuler les pièces de leurs constructions, leur donneront beaucoup de relief et d’accent ; ils tireront des toits, des fenêtres, des portes, des poutres, nettement accusés, des motifs d’ornementation pleins de caractère et de nouveauté (Caprices 319–20).23

Here, the narrator of “Paris futur” envisages that both structural composition and aesthetic form will be simultaneously available to perception by the city dweller. The active interplay of form and structure in the pursuit of what is emphasized here as “nouveauté” confounds interpretative gestures according to stable referential categories; indeed the narrator reminds us that the temple will be of unimaginable architectural splendor. Here, Gautier seems to be attentive to the possibility within the utopian text to pursue what Paul Ricoeur calls “an experience of  the contingency of order” (300). On this point, given strong similarities in terms of thematic content and of  the euphoric idiom of  both texts, “Paris futur” warrants comparison with Michel Chevalier’s “Le Temple,” which has been referred to at numerous instances in this chapter. However, despite such similarities, unlike “Le Temple,” Gautier’s text is not concerned with integrating the 23

“The city will be of indescribable architectural splendor […] while one street may imitate the Byzantine style, another will resemble the Gothic, a third will be Moorish, and another again will be in the style of  the Renaissance. […] Rather than seeking to conceal the components of  their designs, the architects of  this age will confer on them marked prominence and emphasis; and from the distinctly defined roofs, windows, doors and beams, they will elicit ornamental motifs full of character and novelty.”

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conceptual triumvirate of science, art, and industry that underpins SaintSimonian ideology. Gautier seems convinced rather that the elsewhere to which poetic language aspires is ultimately more immanently figured in its own plasticity and materiality. He is however sensitive to the fact that the utopian idiom provides a privileged means towards the pursuit of that elsewhere. Accordingly, in another long passage from “Paris futur,” it is possible to observe how Gautier begins to conceive of  the text of  the printed page itself as a complex spatial arrangement: Souvent, lorsque je me promène dans quelque plaine sombre à l’heure du crépuscule, et que l’horizon livide est encombré de grands écroulements de nuages amoncelés les uns sur les autres, comme les blocs d’une immense ville aérienne tombée en ruine, il me vient des rêveries babyloniennes, des fantasmagories à la Martinn [sic] me passent devant les yeux. Je commence à tailler dans les f lancs des collines lointaines des tranches gigantesques pour le soubassement des édifices ; bientôt les angles des frontons s’ébauchent dans la vapeur, les pyramides découpent leurs pans de marbre, les obélisques s’élancent d’un seul jet comme des points d’admiration de granit ; des palais démesurés s’élèvent sur des superpositions de terrasses en recul, escalier colossal, que pourraient seuls enjamber les géants du monde pré-adamite. Je vois s’allonger sur des colonnes trapues, fortes comme des tours et rayées de cannelures en spirales où six hommes se cacheraient, des frises faites de quartiers de montagnes et couvertes de zodiaques monstrueux, d’hiéroglyphes menaçants ; des arches de pont se courbent au-dessus du f leuve qui reluit à travers la ville qu’il tranche, comme un damas dans un col à moitié coupé ; les lacs d’eau salée, où sautent les léviathans privés, miroitent sous un rayon de lumière, et le grand cercle d’or d’Osymandias étincelle comme une roue détachée du char du soleil ! Baigné par sa base dans une brume ardente et rousse que soulève l’activité sans repos de la ville en ébullition de travail ou de plaisir, le temple de Bélus envahit le ciel, où il va défier la foudre, par huit ef forts convulsifs dont chacun produit une tour énorme plus haute que l’aiguille de Strasbourg ou la pyramide de Gizeh ; les nuages coupent ses f lancs de leurs bandes zébrées, et sur les entablements du dernier étage blanchissent des filets de neige éternelle (Caprices 309–10).24

24 “Often when I wander in some dark plain at dusk, while the pale horizon is strewn with great crumbling clouds banked one on top of  the other, like the wedges of an enormous ruined city in the sky, Babylonian reveries and phantasmagorias in the style of  Martinn [sic] f lit before my eyes. Into the distant hillsides I begin to carve

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As this reverie shows, the expressive démesure or excess of  the utopian idiom of fers the potential to “radicalize” the dynamic interplay of spatial and textual structures. The passage’s many images of visual appropriation and concentration: “frises faites de quartiers de montagne” (“friezes made from segments of mountains”), “leviathans privés” (“private Leviathans”), “le temple de Bélus envahit le ciel” (“the temple of  Belus invades the sky”) ref lect the increasing sophistication of this interplay. Although the phrase “Je commence le oiller” (“I begin to carve”) indicates an “artisanal” command to initiate the construction, such a paradigm is immediately displaced by a shift into the passive tense. This instead suggests a paradigm of voyance, that is, a “channeling” of  the urban space’s apparently autogenous expansion. As can be seen through the allusions to the “monde préadamite” (“preadamite world”), “Osymandias,” “Bélus,” and “Gizeh,” the narrator’s multiple attachments to dif ferent objects of his imagination and to diverse spiritual and mythological traditions serve here to maximize expressive resource. Insofar as he exposes himself  to “autant de langages qu’il y a de désirs” (“as many languages as there are desires”), the narrator warrants comparison with the remorseless, uninhibited utopian subject

huge sections for the foundations of the buildings. Soon the angles of the pediments are sketched in the vapor; the pyramids segment their marble blocks, the obelisks shoot upwards in one shot like granite exclamation points; disproportionate palaces rise up on the overlays of descending terraces, like a colossal stairway that could only be climbed by giants of the preadamite world. Stretched out on the dense columns, which are as strong as towers and streaked with spiral f lutes inside which six men could hide, are friezes made from segments of mountains and covered in monstrous zodiacs and menacing hieroglyphs; bridges arch above the river which gleams throughout the town it divides in two, like a damask woven into a trimmed collar; the saltwater lakes, where private Leviathans leap, shimmer under a ray of  light, and the great golden circle of  Ozymandias sparkles like a wheel loosened from the sun’s chariot! Bathed at its base in a fiery russet mist raised by the interminable movement of  the city in a fever of work or pleasure, the temple of  Belus invades the sky, where it will defy lightning, by eight convulsive ef forts, each of which produces an enormous tower higher than the Strasbourg steeple or the pyramid of  Giza; the clouds bisect its sides with their zebra stripes, and the entablatures of  the top f loor are whitened by a dusting of eternal snow.”

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later evoked by Roland Barthes, who has at his disposal “deux instances de langage” (“two instances of  language”) which are deployed as a function of desiring impulses in defiance of discursive norms (Barthes 436–7). In “Paris futur,” the narrator’s vatic utterances derive their potency from the complex tissue of identifications which mediate the language and structure of the text. Since the prophetic voice that is the source of these utterances cannot be accessed directly in print, the passage from which I have just quoted foregrounds a number of implicit references to the construction of  the printed page.25 Thus, in the phrase “les obélisques s’élancent d’un seul jet comme des points d’admiration” (“the obelisks shoot upwards in one shot like granite exclamation points”) there are implicit and explicit suggestions of links to print through the reference to exclamation marks and the “d’un seul jet.” Allusions to the visual immediacy of print are present in the reference to “découper,” while the line “sur les entablements du dernier étage blanchissent des filets de neige éternelle” (“the entablatures of the top f loor are whitened by a dusting of eternal snow”) might hint at the white borders of the page. More generally, the reference to the hieroglyph in the context of  this description of a visionary city suggests an intricate textual and visual structure that, although not lending itself readily to interpretative decoding, nonetheless pushes expressivity to new planes and prompts figurations of  the new. As this consideration of a range of texts by Théophile Gautier shows, although it is unlikely that he gave firm credence to the conceptual schemes of either Chenavard or Boileau, he is highly attentive to the fact that the progressive historical logic implicit in their projects is determined to an unprecedented degree by aesthetic criteria. In this way, “Paris futur” attempts to mobilize the generative and aestheticizing potency of  the utopian utterance while suspending its subordination to a conceptual or ideological construct. The posture Gautier implicitly adopts however 25

De Spoelberch de Lovenjoul records the following note from Gautier which accompanied the two installments in Le Pays: “Ce Paris de l’avenir ne figurera peut-être pas trop mal en feuilleton, et produira-t-il l’ef fet d’une gravure anglaise à la manière noire” (This future Paris will maybe not fit so badly in a newspaper column and will have the ef fect of an English engraving in the gloomy style) (462).

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suggests that although La Palingénésie sociale and the cathédrale synthétique might justifiably be accused of naïvely privileging the elaboration of their ideological frameworks over the pursuit of creative insight, they nonetheless invite an upwelling of imaginative activity. A design such as Boileau’s cathédrale synthétique encourages an active perception of  the conditions for architectural practice in which public meanings and the pursuit of imaginative innovation are valorized as much as concerns of economic and technical expedience. Thus, in ostensibly engendering “multiple” af finities with “diverse” moments and places the architectural structure of a design such as the cathédrale synthétique projects aesthetic paradigms of “thinking out” or “thinking through” complex multiplicities of  historical fact and cultural reference in a manner that solicits latent dynamics and energies within collective consciousness.

Works Cited Barthes, Roland. “Leçon.” Œuvres complètes. Vol. 5. Ed. Éric Marty. Paris: Seuil, 2002. 427–48. Behrent, Michael C. “The Mystical Body of  Society: Religion and Association in Nineteenth-Century French Political Thought.” Journal of  the History of  Ideas 69.2 (April 2008): 219–45. Boileau, Louis-Auguste. Nouvelle forme architecturale. Paris: Gide & J. Baudry, 1853. ——. Histoire critique de l’invention en architecture. Classification méthodique des œuvres de l’art monumental au point de vue du progrès et de son application à la composition de nouveaux types architectoniques. Paris: Vve C. Dunod, 1886. Braham, Allan. The Architecture of  the French Enlightenment. London: Thames & Hudson, 1980. Buchez, Philippe. Introduction à la science de l’histoire, ou science du développement de l’humanité. Paris: Paulin, 1833. Chevalier, Michel. “Le fer et la fonte employés dans les constructions monumentales.” Journal des débats (1 June 1855).

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Douphis, Pierre-Olivier. “Le Poète et l’artiste-philosophe: une collaboration retrouvée entre Gautier et Chenavard.” Bulletin de la Société Théophile Gautier 23 (2001): 21–36. Foucart, Bruno. “La ‘cathédrale synthétique’ de Louis-Auguste Boileau.” 1969. Essais et mélanges en l’honneur de Bruno Foucart. 2 vols. Paris: Norma, 2008. Vol. 1. 235–64. Gautier, Théophile. L’Art moderne. Paris: Michel Lévy, 1856. ——. Caprices et zigzags. 1852. Paris: Phénix, 1999. ——. Fusains et eaux-fortes. 1880. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2000. ——. Œuvres: Choix de romans et de contes. Ed. Paolo Tortonese. Paris: Robert Laf font, 1995. ——. Portrait de Balzac. Montpellier: L’Anabase, 1994. ——. “Théâtres.” La Presse (23 December 1850). Kearns, James. Théophile Gautier, Orator to the Artists: Art Journalism in the Second Republic. London: Legenda, 2007. Kerr, Greg. “‘Nous avons enlacé le globe de nos réseaux …’: Spatial Structure in Saint-Simonian Poetics.” Histoires de la Terre: Earth Sciences and French Culture 1740–1940. Eds Louise Lyle and David McCallam. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008. 91–104. Lorenz Van Zanten, Ann. “The Palace and the Temple: Two Utopian Architectural Visions of  the 1830s.” Art History 2.2 ( June 1979): 179–201. McWilliam, Neil. Dreams of  Happiness: Social Art and the French Left, 1830–1850. Chichester: Princeton University Press, 1993. Marrey, Bernard (ed.). La Querelle du fer: Eugène Viollet-le-Duc contre Louis Auguste Boileau. Paris: Linteau, 2002. Michaud, Éric. “La Construction de l’image comme matrice de l’histoire.” Vingtième siècle 72 (October-December 2001): 41–52. Picon, Antoine, Les Saint-simoniens: raison, imaginaire, utopie. Paris: Belin, 2002. Régnier, Philippe (ed.). Le Livre nouveau des Saint-Simoniens. Tusson: Éditions du Lérot, 1991. Ricoeur, Paul. Lectures on Ideology and Utopia. Ed. George H. Taylor. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. Sloane, Joseph C. French Painting Between Past and Present: Artists, Critics and Traditions from 1848 to 1870. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951. De Spoelberch de Lovenjoul. Histoire des oeuvres de Théophile Gautier. 1887. Geneva: Slatkine, 1968.

Valérie Narayana

Du Génie en Utopie: The Figure of  the Engineer in Balzacian and Zolian Utopias

One of  the pleasures of reading The Seeds of  Time is seeing how Fredric Jameson punctuates his carefully developed analyses of literary texts with aphoristic remarks on Utopia and philosophy. Among these, one of  the most memorable is his remark that “the most powerful arguments against Utopia are in reality utopian ones, expressions of a utopian impulse qui s’ignore” (54). This quip may be seen as particularly apropos in those historical periods where a positivist will to reduce social forces to a few axioms or hard “facts” has led to ambiguous or even catastrophic results. In times such as these, it is interesting to look back to other periods of upheaval in order to explore the ways in which the essential links between positivism and Utopia manifest themselves. These bonds are often revealed in projects intended to vivify societies that might otherwise be overwhelmed by the complexity of  the planning processes at hand. Of particular interest, in these contexts, are the discourses of architects investing the concrete and symbolic structures of given societies with utopian values, acknowledged or latent. Indeed, the apparent antinomy between “positivist” and “utopian” thought can be challenged through architectural creation, uniting as it does the material and abstract aspects of representation. In what follows I will explore this problematic in two works of utopian fiction, Le Curé de village (1841), by Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850), and Travail (1901), by Émile Zola (1840–1902). This chapter will examine a figure that both challenges and supports that of the architect: the engineer. While it is customary, especially in a nineteenth-century context, to oppose the roles of architects and engineers, this chapter will attempt to show that in the texts chosen, many of the symbolic and social functions normally manifested by

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the figure of the architect are here embodied by the figure of the engineer. The growing importance of the engineer in post-revolutionary France has been discussed by architectural historians such as Kenneth Frampton, who links this emergence (and the ensuing encroachment of engineering on the role of  the architect) to the establishment of  the École Polytechnique. During the Napoleonic Empire, this institution adopted a design method “whereby a rationalized Classicism could be brought to accommodate not only new social demands but also new techniques” (Frampton 31). Here, however, I take a slightly dif ferent perspective, exploring the rationalizing impulse especially with regard to its impact on post-revolutionary scientism in the social sphere, ultimately situating the symbolic importance of  the Polytechnicien against this epistemological backdrop. I examine the fascination exerted on the nineteenth-century imagination by the Polytechnicien in relation to an inf luential doctrine elaborated by one of  the institution’s most notable students, Auguste Comte (1798–1857), whose positivism inspired several generations of  French thinkers. In discussing the emergence of  the engineer as a symbolic and social force, I shall draw upon Alberto Pérez-Gómez’s discussion of rational reductivism, maintaining, as this architectural historian and theorist does, that the positivist perspective adopted after the French Revolution generally resulted in an ambiguous attitude towards the phenomenal world, one privileging analysis as a means of accessing the world but also of dominating it, in a constant quest to maximize the utilitarian potential of matter (273). In addition, I shall argue that Comte’s early positivism deployed a discourse of rationality, while sidestepping the methodological and conceptual gap inherent to the reigning inductivist conception of sciences. As an intellectual movement, the Comtian doctrine nevertheless retained its appeal in France, seemingly blind to its own logical f laws and vastly more interested in promoting a celebrated ideological construct: the “Pyramid of Progress” (Comte, Cours 47–95). This representation of  the future of man’s intellectual destiny detailed the interdependent evolution of dif ferent branches of sciences, culminating in sociology. It is striking that this pyramidal mental construction displayed “architectural” features. This fact is even somewhat surprising when one recalls Pérez-Gómez’s observation that in the epistemological conjuncture

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surrounding positivism, architectural ref lection was seen as a form of “decoration,” “frivolous, expensive and relatively useless” (279). Extending his viewpoint, I will argue that such an attitude was predictable, even “necessary,” if one considers the technocrat’s need to uphold positivism’s own facade of objectivity. Indeed, only a dismissive stance of  this sort could detract from the fact that a mere pyramidal “thought structure” was a substitute for actual (methodo)logical coherence in one of the nineteenth century’s most inf luential movements. Thus, while the unavowed aesthetic principle at the core of  the Comtian vision gave it a semblance of scientific legitimacy, the rhetoric required to uphold its constructs gave rise to subtle inconsistencies which lent positivism a certain indefinable quality, no doubt contributing to its appeal. What I wish to show here is that the transcendent perspective claimed by the positivist technocrats was bound to betray the rhetorical elements underpinning two of its most cherished articles of  faith: 1) the scientific formalization of social laws, and 2) the growth of science (Comte, Cours 16–18). This said (and epistemological conjunctures operating as they do), it was highly unlikely that positivism’s logical f laws might be neatly identified as such by logicians of science. The shortfalls of positivist thinking were more likely to be suggested by the proximity of other (often competing) rhetorical constructs. It is in this capacity that the proto-sociological tradition of utopian literature can reveal itself  to be a precious indicator of ideology. Indeed, in post-revolutionary France, such writing shared with positivism a crucial and powerful element of construction: “words.” Obviously, in overtly using this building material, novelists did so in a spirit quite dif ferent from those laying claim to more transcendent means of expression. Realist prose, in particular, carefully documenting ambient discourses and re-presenting them through its craft, could deliberately (or at times even fortuitously) draw attention to the covert exploitation of  language by ideologies qui s’ignorent. It must be said at the outset that to their contemporaries, Balzac and Zola were seen as defenders of realist and naturalist æsthetics, respectively. Such predilections makes their fictional utopias particularly intriguing, especially in light of the fact that both Le Curé de village and Travail, grant a significant role to fictional engineers. On the one hand, the representation

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of such a figure could be expected, considering the engineer’s importance in nineteenth-century France and given the keen interest these two novelists displayed in documenting the mores of their respective times. Indeed a faithful depiction of society could not have excluded this important social figure, hailing from the institutional structures created by the French government after the Revolution. In the decades following 1879, the École Polytechnique in particular played a crucial role in the training and establishing of an elite destined to administer the nation. Through this administrative capacity, engineers were asked to conceive of projects encompassing far more than the technical aspects of  building. Moreover, graduates of  this particular institution gave impetus to the Saint-Simonian movement and its plans for social reform. In their concern for human wellbeing, the members of  this sect insisted not only on the critical role of industrialists but also that of artists and scientists, whose shared vision was to provide a template for the design of society. Thus, the suggestion that art and politics might some day reign together over France could also have explained Zola and Balzac’s interest in the figure of  the young engineer, as these protagonists often had close links with the Saint-Simonians. Yet another, more elusive, but equally compelling reason might have attracted these authors to the figure of  the Polytechnicien: the engineer’s mystique. As mentioned earlier, the positivist discourse promoting the École’s elite corps harbored logical inconsistencies which consecrated these young men’s technical achievements while never quite revealing how their contributions might directly condition the laws promised by the nascent “science” of  Comtian sociology. In the wake of scholars like Antoine Picon and Robert Carlisle, this study adopts the view that the technical and scientific knowledge dispensed at the École Polytechnique created an epistemological climate conducive to a rhetoric of social progress (Picon 179–94; Carlisle 455–7). However, it will also show that this same institutional culture did not provide thinkers like Auguste Comte with a method capable of  linking the forms of  knowledge mastered at the École with the social projections he envisaged as “laws.” As a consequence of this, the positivist notion of progress eventually naturalized by the Polytechiciens and promoted by the Saint-Simonians put forth unclear sociological models, resting on hazy criteria of scientific legitimacy. To explore the relationship

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between the fictional representation of the engineer in a literary utopia and the utopian, programmatic writing of Auguste Comte, it will be useful to invoke philosopher Paul Ricoeur’s important distinction in considering ideology and utopia. According to him, utopias can have both a pathological and/or a constitutive dimension (Ricoeur Lectures, Coleman Utopias 10–11, 56–62). The first tendency yields immediate, unrealizable, totalizing visions while the second seeks to bridge past and present in a more supple stance, challenging and situating engaged desire (Ricoeur 16). It might be tempting to assume that Comte – being an engineer and disseminating a vision of society projected into a “real” future – could be associated with constitutive utopianism. However, this chapter will argue that in fact Balzac and Zola, in their attempt to situate social projects, albeit in a fictional mode, tackle the daunting question of how scientific knowledge might be related to the “laws” governing social destiny and action. In establishing a parallel between words and building materials, I wish to draw on a conceptualization of fiction touched upon by Nathaniel Coleman when he writes that “plans, sections and elevations (among other expressive representations) are the rhetorical means by which the nonreality of design is persuasively proposed as real long before, if ever, being constructed” (46). In emphasizing the importance of actively approaching the process of planning in a way that prizes both the potentialities and limitations of design, Coleman notes how the sheer materiality of a creation continues to evoke latent design (47). The present reading of Le Curé de village and Travail exploits a similar notion of active conceptualizing. Obviously, a novelist’s finished product, contrary to an architect’s, is crafted using the same linguistic material as that used in its initial manuscripts. Furthermore, the writer’s fiction cannot be considered a means leading to a concrete end, but rather an end in itself. Yet here lies the specificity of  literature and of its utopian variant in particular, being an endeavor in which aesthetics and ambivalence are irrevocably linked; herein also lies the power of a projection destined to only ever allude to concrete reality. In this regard, the fictional inclusion of an elite Polytechnicien – a social engineer bound by a world of words – is highly interesting and potentially subversive.

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With its habit of deploying what Raymond Ruyer has aptly named an “exercice mental sur des possibles latéraux,” utopian writing can mimic and critique discourses of social engineering (9). In this regard, it can of fer a unique perspective on nascent sociological thought. Indeed, the formal similarities between scientific and utopian thinking have long been recognized and abundantly characterized by writers such as Suvin, Moylan, Ruyer, and Cioranescu. Far from being paradoxical then, “realist utopias” allowed authors such as Balzac and Zola to document aspects of postrevolutionary France. In this regard, their utopian fictions are precious indicators of epistemological and ideological boundaries. It should be stressed here, however, that these authors cannot be seen as having had a special sort of prescience, enabling them to denounce methodological lacunae left undetected by scientists themselves, given the pre-Popperian inductivist framework of the time.1 Nevertheless, in referring to words as a “medium,” as I did earlier, I am suggesting that words, through their materiality (through their tendency to be deployed in linear form, for instance, or through their auto-referential capacities), can fortuitously expose tensions and gaps in reasoning. In what follows, I will show how Balzac and Zola, through the character of the Polytechnicien, evoke the methodological vagaries of studying a social object of inconceivable complexity. By engaging in utopian writing, which can mimic scientific discourse, they document a logical impasse at the heart of positivism. They accomplished this by variably exploiting an elusive principle: that of verisimilitude. I wish to highlight the crucial importance of  this aesthetic property at a time when inductivism, the reigning model of scientific praxis, relied on an equally elusive principle: that of verification. To illustrate how the convention of verisimilitude can challenge the f lawed premise of verifiability, the present study proceeds in two stages. The first is dedicated to a historical and epistemological overview of positivist scientism. The second will outline aesthetic strategies mimicking this movement’s lacunae. 1

Karl Popper’s work explores the limits of  “verifiability,” a concept often invoked in positivist discourse. He argues, following Hume, that one cannot justify inferring universal statements from singular ones (through induction), regardless of  how numerous the latter might be (Popper Conjectures 4–9; Logic 55–7).

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The first historical part of this study comprises an analysis of the discourses and disciplines prevailing at the École Polytechnique, including consideration of  the writings of  two prominent Polytechniciens, August Comte and Henri Poincaré (1854–1912), who were contemporaries of  Balzac and Zola, respectively. Examining the stance adopted by these scientists will highlight the rhetorical and philosophical strategies used by them to manage the logical f laws inherent to positivist inductivism. The second – literary – section of  this study will provide a brief summary of  Le Curé de village and Travail, highlighting crucial parts of  these utopian novels. This study will show that in two distinct but complementary ways, Le Curé de village and Travail give formal expression to a kind of doubt regarding positivism.

Of  Math and Men To understand the analogy that can be drawn between scientific thinking and social merit emerging in the early years following the Revolution, it is helpful to recall Michel Foucault’s description of  the epistemological contours of eighteenth-century science. He writes in Les mots et les choses that at the end of this period one finds, on the one hand, “a field of a priori sciences, of pure and formal sciences, of deductive sciences that rely on logic and mathematics” and on the other, “an emerging domain of a posteriori sciences, empirical sciences whose recourse to deductive structures is limited to fragments and in highly localized regions” (259).2 In this dichotomy, the boundary presumably separating the analytic (a priori) and synthetic (a posteriori) disciplines is a highly elusive one, dividing purely abstract constructs from those having undergone a concrete assessment of their validity; in other words, it could be seen as analogous to the problematic threshold separating “fictional” constructs from “fact”based entities. To be sure, the dialectic relationship existing between the 2

All English translations in this chapter are my own.

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symbolic and the phenomenal thwarts any attempt to situate this boundary precisely. To be convinced of  this, one need only consider the disciplines actually taught at Polytechnique. As Charles Coulton Gillispie has noted in his discussion of  this institution, one of  the most notable branches of science developed at the École was mathematical physics, which he argues would have seemed a “conf lation of unlike divisions of knowledge” to an eighteenth-century mathematician and Encyclopédiste like Jean le Rond d’Alembert (1717–83), editor of the Encyclopédie, one of the great projects of the French Enlightenment (676). Gillispie’s assertion is certainly true if one considers that the physics taught by Laplace at the Polytechnique was of Newtonian inspiration, being founded in analysis and making ample use of algebra and calculus. Here, concrete problems like spheroidal attraction were broken down into thought experiments involving limits, systematically invoking the infinitely small or the barely existent. Laplacian celestial mechanics, while applying to visible entities like planets, relied heavily on what Denis Diderot (1713–84) would have called a “métaphysique” in his Pensée sur l’interprétation de la nature (10). In this humorous and subtle work, the author (d’Alembert’s collaborator on the great project of  the Encyclopédie) warned against mathematical truths generated in the absence of material confirmation. However, Diderot also surreptitiously invited the “metaphysician” into the world of  “les chimistes, les physiciens les naturalists” who also found their “jugements” assailed (“outrés”) by experience (10). Such tensions suggest that the a priori / a posteriori opposition was already equivocal in Diderot’s and d’Alembert’s time, in spite of the Encyclopédistes’ penchant for Lockean theories of  knowledge. If anything, a sensationalist approach, while privileging experimental validation, reactivated this ambiguity. Indeed, science is (and was) rarely governed by a tidy dialectic ensuring that each abstract, deductive step was systematically imported into the “real” world to be tested – hence the dif ficulty of aligning a conceptualization / realization dichotomy onto methods still bearing the mark of an Aristotelian model of vertical reasoning involving induction and deduction. It was nonetheless clear that the momentary uncoupling of the symbolic order from the phenomenal one did not result in poor science, a fact attested to by the work of the Abbé René-Just Haüy (1743–1822), also

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of the Polytechnique. His work generated renewed interest in the structural aspects of matter through a theory of geometric crystallography in which formal coherence was as much a marker of  theoretical strength as it was a referential predictor. Again, this probably would not have been a surprise to d’Alembert. In the Discours préliminaire that this philosophe contributed to Diderot’s Encyclopédie, he recognizes the “sciences pures.” However, he still refers to them as “phantôme” of  “matière” (v–vi, xlix). So, just as a posteriori sciences allow for f lights of abstraction, a priori sciences harbor concrete cores, for d’Alembert saw matter as conditioning the very existence of numbers, arithmetic, and algebra (xlix). With this fundamental ambiguity underlying the definition of a priori and a posteriori sciences, it is not surprising to see semantic slippage af fecting the use of these terms in an early piece of writing by August Comte, the Catéchisme des industriels, inf luenced by his years at Polytechnique. Here, Comte attempts to distinguish between “metaphysical” and “positivist” thought. In the first case, he writes, “observed facts are explained, that is to say, seen a priori, according to invented facts.” In contrast, he adds, in the “positivist” approach, “facts” are “linked according to ideas or general laws of an entirely positive order, suggested and confirmed by facts themselves”; these “often are merely simple facts general enough to become principles” (376–7). This explanation is obscure to say the least. Its language makes situating the scientific object in terms of a priori or a posteriori practices nearly impossible. In his af firmation that “facts themselves” “confirm and suggest” “laws,” Comte seems to have minimized the subjective presence responsible for the elaboration of such “laws.” Nevertheless, he subtly appeals to such a presence by providing elements of a methodology, specifying how to deal with such “laws”: to do so one must “always reduce them to the smallest possible number, but without ever imagining anything hypothetical that is not amenable to being verified one day through observation” (376–7). In considering Comte’s attempt to distinguish between metaphysics and positivism, many readers will recognize a problematic analogous to that of  “demarcation,” addressed by Karl Popper’s The Logic of  Scientific Discovery. This text highlights the dif ficulty of distinguishing between science and metaphysics based on the elusive notion of verification, for this concept presupposes an ability to reach levels of universality through

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induction. However, this process could be relied upon to make any given scientific statement demonstrable, because a definitive enumeration of all existing and future behaviors of any given phenomena could never be guaranteed (Popper, Discovery 4–20). Popper’s position, that of exploiting the asymmetry between the modus tollens of deductive reasoning and the modus ponens of induction, resulted in a proposal to use falsification as a vector of scientific growth and a criterion of demarcation. Falsifiability certainly provides a framework for analyzing the lacunae in Le Catéchisme des industriels. In several passages of this text inspired by Saint-Simon, inductivism’s inability to secure truly “general” laws is painfully apparent, and Comte seems doomed to make a fetish of synthetic reasoning. Not only does he ef fect a type of censorship on imagination (“without ever imagining anything hypothetical”), but he does so by invoking means of “verification” that may “one day” exist, thus putting the onus on scientists to know future modes of assessment (377). One could hardly imagine how such verification might be made in the absence of an immediate arbitrating protocol. Indeed, in conditions of deferred arbitration, an isolated event could indefinitely claim an imminent second occurrence. Equally problematic in Comte’s program is the need for things “imagined” to undergo a preliminary assessment of  their future potential for actualization. It may be said that Comte manifests pathological utopian expectations when, in his attempt to evacuate metaphysics, he imagines conditions in which science’s complementary modes of reasoning might be reunited as a static whole (ideally fusing the predictability of a priori constructs with the pragmatic import of a posteriori data). Positivism is indeed impracticable if  “simple facts general enough to become principles” must consequently be shielded from both faltering subjectivities and material contingency, so as to accede to a fictitious, coercive semblance of universality (Comte, Catéchisme 377). In addition, one sees here the ransom of an ill-defined notion of verifiability: in a science aiming to accumulate definitive “facts,” there is little opportunity to discuss the crucial role of scientific error in the growth of knowledge; a serious omission, to be sure, and a clear deviation from what Coleman identifies as constitutive utopianism, with its capacity to embrace “action, practice, obstacles and incompatibility” (60).

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The methodological imprecision that characterizes Le Catéchisme des industriels also appears to have had an impact on Comte’s view of science in a broader sense. The illusory closure sought (with respect to individual “facts”) in Comte’s early writing also marked his later “Pyramide du progress.” This construct, found at the beginning of  the second volume of  the Cours de philosophie positive, represents human destiny in its relationship to the growth of science. It ref lects a heuristic insularity analogous to that found in Comte’s conception of  “facts” (entities somehow “prescreened” in function of  “future” verifiability). In the pyramide, sciences are represented with math as the base, with other sciences (astronomy, physics, chemistry, physiology, and social physiology) placed above it as steps. In this conception, each science has to rely on the establishment of  the discipline preceding it on an inferior level of  the pyramid in order to thrive (Tort 272). Thus, “physiologie sociale” (or sociology) – seen as the consecration of  humanity’s positivist destiny – relies on all the other sciences for its constitution. Critics have pointed out the circularity of  this conception whose structure, while claiming a natural or empirical basis, ultimately relies on discretionary schematization (Tort 272; Conry 415). Indeed, one could ask why the laws of social behavior should only appear when “scheduled.” Paradoxically, on this very basis, one could contest any theorization (political, economic, etc.) of  human behavior (including Comte’s own models) until such time as physiology might be suf ficiently developed. It would seem that the pyramid drew its appeal not from logical coherence, but from a structuring principle, which, in the end, could be seen as “aesthetic”; far less engineered than “architectural”. It may come as no surprise that Comte’s desire to banish the metaphysical – itself a metaphysical impulse qui s’ignore – made it impossible for him to sustain a dialogue with those representing a view of science tainted by contingencies, as he saw it. Most notable were his exchanges with the other Saint-Simonians, who in reference to the Catéchisme complained that Comte had “minced” the words of Saint-Simonian poets with the “scalpel of science” (Comte, Catéchisme 374). While they praised the beauty and utility of science, they defended the intuitive and faith-based dimensions of  their doctrine without feeling a need to classify these aspects as scientific. In this respect, certain members of the group argued with their former associate from a more tenable perspective, logically speaking, their doctrine was

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defensible to the extent that its fundamental axioms were held as articles of faith. Predictably perhaps, Comte’s ideology af fected his ability to deal with employment and contributed to the equivocal quality of  his discussions on mathematics in his Cours de philosophie positive. Nevertheless, the logical insuf ficiencies of inductivism appear to have been ef ficiently masked by positivism’s unavowedly aestheticized stance on progress; or at least this is what emerges when one considers the public reception of  Comte’s Cours de philosophie positive. Although the scope of  this chapter precludes an in-depth discussion of  the popular perception of Comte’s doctrine, the réédition of Comte’s works in 1864 by the highly respected lexicographer and Senator Émile Littré suggests that his vision did correspond to some generally shared perspective. Furthermore, in his prefatory text, Littré insists on how topical the Cours is (6). It is also significant to consider how Philippe Régnier describes the post-1848 fortunes of  the first generations of  Polytechniciens who largely embraced Saint-Simonianism. In the second half of  the century, many of  the ideas associated with technological progress and social engineering end up “secularized,” “dispersed,” and “diluted” by the social integration of their main proponents into the twin hallmarks of Second Empire industry: the railway and banking systems. Here, they contributed to a “determinant and durable reality” in France and to a veritable “material and hegemonic force” (Régnier 100). It is against this backdrop – of industrial expansion and its hegemonic vision of social progress – that one must consider the writings of the mathematician Henri Poincaré, arguably the most celebrated Polytechnicien of  the latter half of  the century. Under the Second Empire and Third Republic, the reputation of the Polytechnique as an institution of research started being superseded by that of  the École Normale Supérieure whose new modes of production of knowledge included modern laboratories and doctoral guidance (Belhoste and Chatzis 223). After 1870, Polytechniciens were mainly channeled into staid administrative positions to coordinate state or private initiatives (Belhoste and Chatzis 222). It is therefore striking that in the last decades of the century, the logical tensions haunting the compact between positivism and inductivism might be questioned. Giving familiarity and mere convenience (“le plus

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commode” and not “le nécessaire”) as the basis for geometrical hypotheses, Poincaré provoked a new set of debates about the elusive boundary between a priori and a posteriori forms of  knowledge in a famous article on nonEuclidian geometries. This he did by privileging idealism and the agency of scientists in establishing conventions (Poincaré, “Fondements” 261). In so doing, he loosened the grip of a naïvely realist perspective on “facts,” such as is latent in Comte’s writing when he alludes to these being so “simple” that they might be dispensed from the necessity of having to be subjected to “anything” “hypothetical” or “imagine[d]” (Catéchisme 376–7). At the same time, Poincaré did not dismiss the importance of concrete reality but sought to re-inscribe subjective agency in its choice of a material criterion – “commodité”– invoking both the logico-aesthetic criterion of simplicity and the ideologically equivocal term of  facility. With this conception, Poincaré revisited the principle of adequacy habitually governing the relationship between the phenomenal order and the symbolic one in scientific modeling. Here, a type of verisimilitude was favored over verification. This point is a critical one in a study seeking to examine how scientific ideology might be mimicked by utopian fictions – creations also modulating conventions of verisimilitude, but in a primarily aesthetic context. This is therefore an appropriate point at which to ref lect on the strategies that realist authors of utopian fictions might deploy to comment on ambient social discourses. One could expect such utopias to resort to discourses sharing structural characteristics associated with the prestigious practice of science. These could af fect what Barthes, in his famous essay on the realist novel, “L’Ef fet de réel,” has named the “predictive” and “descriptive” facets of prose (83). As he points out, these two functions are never mutually exclusive, both being founded in mere convention. Nevertheless, predictive aspects often move a plot forward, while descriptive ones generally have a stage-setting function. One sees how these facets could be modulated to simulate an experiment in a fictional work, which might include a textual staging of  the following: initial “conditions” (isolated through simplification); a breakthrough (portraying a coincidence between theory and practice); and stability of results achieved (suggesting ongoing adequacy between model and phenomenon). In addition to such elements contributing to

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the “thematic” content of  the novel, as it were, one could also expect to see the following features, af fecting its “form”: passages of mimetic intent (including allusions to contemporary science); principles of parsimony anchoring causalities in conventionally defined (“axiom-like”) statements; and an elaboration of  theories (or “laws”) through deductive reasoning. In consideration of such aspects of  the novel, the following section will demonstrate how Le Curé de village and Travail both resort to these strategies, though in dif ferent ways, and in so doing, mount a challenge to the rhetoric of positivism.

To Deduce and Seduce Balzac and Zola’s choice to include Polytechniciens in their utopian fiction presumably results from their exposure to individuals having links to the celebrated engineering institution. Balzac, as Anne-Marie Meininger has pointed out, had a close and thought-provoking relationship with his brother-in-law, Eugène Surville, who was a graduate of  the school and found himself utterly disillusioned during the transition from school to industry (Meininger 242–3). As for Zola, it is not insignificant that his close personal friends, the Halévys, had very strong links to the Polytechnique (Soulié 200). This is especially important in light of  the fact that Léon Halévy launched with Léon Brunschvig the Revue de Métaphysique et de morale in which Poincaré’s article on conventionalism appeared. Xavier Léon, their collaborator, also had deep familial ties to both the Polytechnique and institutionalized science. Léon claimed to have been raised “in awe of  hygiéniste thinking and polytechnique” (Soulié 200). During the Af faire Dreyfus, Zola defended the Jewish of ficer wrongly accused of high treason, publicly adopting the stance that intellectuals should speak out against injustice. In turn, the young editors of  the Revue supported him and the Dreyfusards. Both Balzac and Zola, then, through friends or family members were exposed to the culture and prestige of  the Polytechnique. Considering these novelists’ vivid interest in the science of their time, it is fitting that they should pick École graduates as characters.

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At the same time, both authors, in the prefatory materials to the novels considered here, allude to forms of  truth that require a vision exceeding that of pure rationalism. In the preface to the first edition of  Le Curé de village, Balzac states that he is not intent on disseminating “new and useful truths” (637). In fact, he contests the idea of  “new truths,” referring to the “nonsensical experiments of  his age” which have given new charm to the “old truths” (637). He further criticizes philanthropy, comparing it to religion, saying that the first is “purely human,” the second “divine” (637). Similarly, Zola’s work is infused with a type of religiosity from the start, though his comments lack the conservative overtone of Balzac’s. It must be mentioned that Travail belongs to Zola’s Évangiles (Scriptures), the term under which the author regrouped his last utopian novels. In the outline (Ébauche) to Travail, the novelist lays out his vision for his four Évangiles, writing with a prophetic intent: “I have the whole next century ahead of me, until utopia” (978). Here, the conf lating of time and space in the term “utopia” is striking, almost implying a limit to be reached by the triumphant march of science. Further on, Zola alludes to “errors receding” and “science” becoming “more and more triumphant” (978). Significantly then, both authors’ utopian fictions contain allusions to progress, be it through a reference to social experimentation (in Balzac) or science (in Zola). At the same time, in both cases, this vision is subsumed as a more or less successful means to a greater end (“truth” and “utopia,” respectively). Le Curé de village (1841) is the story of  Véronique, an unhoped-for but adored child born in 1802 to two frugal fairground coppersmiths. This shrewd couple, the Sauviats, manage to amass a certain wealth and status in their village in the Bas-Limoges. As a child, the little girl is all but revered for her almost supernatural beauty, until the age of eleven, when she contracts smallpox. Only traces of  her stunning beauty remain but the villagers notice her piety, especially because the young woman, when in the throes of deep religious passion, undergoes a transformation whereby her former beauty seems to pierce through her marred complexion. Her parents marry her of f  to a hugely wealthy but miserly old man, Graslin, who is more concerned with his wife’s dowry than her modesty, intelligence, and subtly irradiating beauty. Véronique (now Mme Graslin), having moved to Limoges, starts languishing, barely noticing her husband’s decision to sell all the trinkets and luxury items he initially purchased to

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woo her into marrying him. Around 1829, in the last years of  Charles X’s monarchy, Véronique nevertheless enjoys a sudden return to health and her mysterious unearthly beauty mesmerizes the city. Soon afterwards she becomes pregnant. Around the same time, a great drama takes place in Limoges. A porcelain worker from the neighboring community of Montégnac, Jean-François Tascheron, has stolen money and killed a man to elope with his beloved, a woman whose identity he never reveals. He repents under the moral guidance of a country parson before being guillotined. Shortly thereafter, Véronique gives birth to a son, Francis. The advent of  the constitutional monarchy in 1830 af fects Graslin’s investments, leading him to lapse into ill health, leaving his wife widowed shortly afterwards. In the meantime, Mme Graslin acquires the community of Montégnac. It is at this point in the story that her close friend, M. Grossetête, advises her to hire the Polytechnicien Grégoire Gérard who will help her fructify her investment by developing an irrigation system for the community. It is in similar conditions that Zola places his Polytechnicien, Martial Jordan, who is trying to find a source of energy for his forge. Unlike Véronique, who is looking for expertise to second her leadership, Martial turns to the leadership of  his good friend, Luc Froment, whom he met in Paris years ago, to supplement his own research expertise. Luc also has training as an engineer, though it is stressed that he is a tradesman, a stonecutter and house builder, being an “architecte constructeur” (549). He presumably has some training in industrial chemistry as well, because while in Paris, he worked alongside a celebrated chemist whose research in the purification of metals interests Soeurette, Jordan’s sister. She trusts Luc a great deal and fosters a hope that the two men will collaborate. This is because the family forge, La Crêcherie, is running low on iron and steel, its lodes increasingly bearing poorer ore. To make matters worse, the community is depressed as a result of a long workers’ strike. Upon arriving in Beauclair, Luc learns that Jordan has immersed himself in research on electricity, trying to save money for the forge by reducing heating costs and labor. It can be seen, then, that both Balzac and Zola provide an initial set of conditions in which two engineers, each committed to an essential material resource – water and heat, respectively – are expected to transform

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their community. Thanks to dif ferent breakthroughs, both will manage to transform their environment. In the case of Gérard, Montégnac is irrigated because of a discovery: a hidden gutter-like canal is channeling water away from the plains, rendering them too dry to cultivate. By damming this natural “gutter” nestled in a mountain range adjoining Véronique’s terrain, and redirecting a torrent towards it, Gérard turns the former obstacle into a huge reservoir, nourishing the land. As for Jordan, after discovering a highly ef ficient way of conducting electricity, he eventually taps into solar energy, enabling La Crêcherie to out-produce its competitors. In both communities, the results attained remain constant. While the content of  Le Curé de village and Travail can be likened to a social experiment, catalyzed by and achieved through scientific competence, the form of  these novels leaves a far more ambivalent impression. This is because both texts deal with the immediate conditions of the experiment quite dif ferently from the way in which they deduce its social consequences. In the case of Balzac, elements used to describe Grégoire’s project are directly inspired by Surville’s real work on canals, a choice contributing to the sociological dimension of this utopia (Meininger 230). Initial estimates are precise, stating materials and costs (Balzac 826). During the damming itself, Balzac describes “fifty masons” building a wall “20 feet thick” and “60 feet at its highest point of elevation” buried “twelve feet” below the ground (832). Later, rental incomes, forestry revenues, and agro-chemical plans are recorded, contributing to the verisimilitude of  the project (835, 836, 833). Curiously though, the social laws invoked by Grégoire in a long letter initially sent by the young Polytechnicien to Grossetête appear oppressive. In this extraordinary letter, Grégoire details the devastating ef fects of  the Polytechnique, a factory of “incapacity” in which young men “molded, from a very young age, to the absolute simplicity of  theorems,” “lose the sense of elegance and ornament” (799, 800). He describes its entrance exam (the “Concours”) as a “mutilation”: “the State, after having obtained its special men, cannot invent for them 300 bridges to build” (801). Its senior engineers waste their talent in administrative tasks: “science walks” but these men “remain stationary” (799). Bemoaning the wasted maxima of  talent, he also ponders its minima (“it is impossible to make a whole

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nation study Kant”), after having declared that “the laws of Nature are ruthless,” never yielding “to the enterprises and wishes of  Society” (807, 795). All of  this precedes a highly revealing tirade, in which he asks: “prior to establishing the special schools” did some “great thinker,” bearing in mind the “immensity of  total relations” between an “institution” and “human forces” ever “balance” their advantages and inconveniences,” finding in the “past,” “the laws of the future” (807). In this question, posed by the talented and envied figure of  France’s new elite, lingers the now familiar impasse of inductivism. Anxiety reigns in a conjuncture where scientific breakthroughs are expected to be distinctive, definitive, and somehow decisive enough to overcome the lag of uncertain arbitrations. Grégoire wonders about “the fate of exceptional men” who, through a “fatal twist of  fate,” “knew about the human sciences before their time” (807). This phrase is haunting, of course; the necessary corollary of positivism’s view of science as a cumulative practice. In this teleological construct, successive models inevitably graft themselves onto previous discoveries, leaving in limbo premature truths. This malaise further suggests that while Grégoire’s role in revitalizing the commune might illustrate the positivist “law” of evergrowing progress, one can hardly induce this overarching principle from the young Polytechnicien’s individual destiny. One sees here a disjunction between a topical notion of a posteriori merit (established by a Concours dislodging the previous aprioristic social axiom of  birthright), and the inductivist’s broad view of  “laws” in a posteriori disciplines – those supposedly achieving a synthesis between complex phenomena and their representations. Even when Grégoire moves to the small commune of  Montégnac (presumably simplifying the social calculus imposed on a “great thinker”), his insights into science remain punctual, while the Commune’s transformation remains local, resisting universalism. If anything, one senses in the young man a wistful longing for a new aprioristic view of rank: one which, after having instated scientific ability as a criterion, would freeze time, preserving the chosen few in a pure theoretical space of univariate criteria of merit. In fact, Gérard’s reactionary side emerges when, praising the ancien régime, he states that in such a system the true genius of men “springs forth” regardless of “their social milieu,” urged on not by regulated competition but by the nobler principle of  “Vocation” (796).

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Another feature of  the text’s conservative discourse is the role of  Bonnet, the parson. Though Gérard realizes the project, one learns that the clergyman conceptualized it. This is highly significant in a utopian novel whose narrative voice declares, “Thought is constantly the starting point and destination of any society. The story of  Montégnac is proof of  this axiom in social science” (708). This principle is echoed in the descriptions that Farrabesche, a repentant criminal converted by the parson, gives of the priest. The ex-convict mentions that “M. le curé” infers the presence of the hidden mountain gutter “without having proof ” making “M. Bonnet” “not just a saint, but a savant” (778). Lest the reader mistake Le Curé de village for a dogmatic Roman Catholic utopia, revelations at the end of the novel add further layers of meaning. Véronique confesses a long-suspected fact, namely that her son is the child of the criminal Tascheron. Le Curé de village now appears quite ambiguous: religion, through its association with the ancien régime, subverts the power of a Polytechnicien, symbol of  the Revolution; yet this same historical event permits the social ascension of  Véronique, whose parents became rich dismantling the copper decorations found in the castles abandoned by the aristocracy after the Terreur and by cleverly profiting from the volatile post-revolutionary stock market. Interestingly, the new-found social status of  Mme Graslin is debased by an adulterous relationship whose tragic consequences nonetheless result in her stewardship of Montégnac through Parson Bonnet, who ultimately empowers Gérard. Thus, the utopian transformation of  the commune, enabled by a careful modulation of predictive and descriptive elements so as to yield a plausible (though simplified) model of wealth distribution, is bound by a chain of contradictory meanings. Though concrete technical knowledge and rationality lie at the heart of  Montégnac’s ideal transformation, an infinite loop of signifiers circling this event is inscribed in the novel’s symbolic architecture which enshrines, as it were, the anguish of an engineer, the adultery of a chatelaine, and the blessing of a black-robed savant. If  Balzac’s utopia can be seen as countering reductive rationalism through an aesthetic of ideological f luidity, Zola’s Travail, in contrast, can be seen as subverting this vision by a type of stasis. The novel, in its very structure represents an involution. Its protagonist, Luc, bears the name of an evangelist, a reference that inverts the normal rapport of scripture-

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writer to text: here, the Word generates the bearer of news, etymologically speaking. This performative stance inscribes Travail as a new foundational text while simultaneously evoking the vestigial (and often apocryphal) nature of religious texts. Right from the very first pages of Travail, Luc Froment muses upon a better future after seeing workers broken by a strike: “Work, Work, Who would raise it to its rightful place, reorganize it according to the natural law of  truth and equity” (547)? Contained in these lines is of course the entire project of the text, reiterated similarly throughout. After a meeting with Jordan, he cries, “it is high time to […] reset history and to launch the new era with a great act of equity […] with work re-established as a law for human society, as it is for the universe” (674). This speech “deeply moves” the Polytechnicien who, according to the narrator, “still doubts that the march of humanity can be quickened, but can no longer deny the value of ef fort” (675). Quite telling is the view of history proposed here by Jordan who sees discoveries as predetermined in some overarching process. It could be argued that such a vision is linked to an inductivist view in which science is cumulative, with its discoveries “verified”; but, as stressed previously, positivism fails to provide means of verification and, in compensation, requires that scientific growth be pre-determined. Jordan’s vision of science both ref lects and resists this logical gap through an “ethos” of ef fort (which is both a responsible but commode response to the anguish of Balzac’s Polytechnicien Gérard, who wonders whether he is pre-scripted to make a discovery that will go down in history). In this regard, Jordan’s view is generally opposed to that of his colleague Luc, who sees science as the “great revolutionary,” marching towards social reform (949). This belief, while more optimistic than Jordan’s, is problematic, if only because it appears to simultaneously promote “innovation” and “predictability.” In a highly revealing passage, Travail seems to try to overcome the incompatibility between these two principles by delegating them to the protagonist and the narrator, respectively. On the one hand, Froment exclaims, “To determine facts, [one] needs a free-thinking, rebel genius, bringing the new truth” (675). Here, then, Luc tries to accelerate the “determination” of facts. Yet, in the next paragraph, the narrator refers to these same facts as having been “demonstrated scientifically” (675). The past tense here reinforces the idea that science’s course is “already” known.

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Fiction here documents the perennial paradox of predictive utopias, which often claim the presence of a law that, “natural” as it may be, somehow still needs to be prompted to manifest itself. Likewise, facts having been “demonstrated” still somehow need to be realized. These mutually exclusive assertions contribute to a kind of stasis in the book, as their competing claims neutralize each other. All the while, as if to mask such tensions, the narrative voice invokes the historical “logic” deployed, or insists on how work “logically” aligns itself, following the “structure” of a new social order (675, 917). A complementary dynamic can be found in Martial Jordan’s relationship to death. In his profession, the young engineer works in the blind hope of contributing to science, his actual posterity presumably fixed by science’s teleology. As if to compensate for this lack of agency in the greater scope of  things, Jordan at times displays a strange omnipotence. Zola’s frail and sickly Polytechnicien, in a fierce moment of (self-) determination states that “Those who die, want to die, and one does not die as long as one has things to do” (943). Embodying the contradiction of an illness which only requires such words to be kept at bay, and bolstered by a narrative “allowing” him to die the morning after having discovered a way to eliminate all solar energy loss, Jordan exemplifies the ultimate fantasy of positivism, now strangely static. This is because Jordan’s perfect adequacy of purpose and practice (in the great social experiment here conducted) is too stark an enactment of  the inductivist premise underpinning Comte’s view of progress. Lacking a means of verification, reductive rationalism simultaneously claims the predictability of purely conventional a priori constructs and the satisfaction associated with a posteriori confirmations of outcomes. Zola’s Polytechnicien, paradoxically surrendering to a death brought on by him no longer “having things to do” comes uncomfortably close to stripping the rhetorical device of its ability to sustain positivism’s vision of achievement. Moreover, Jordan’s neat death eerily complements Grégoire Gérard’s anguish. Indeed, strictly speaking, if scientific progress and innovation follow a charted course, and if collective memory is fated to dismiss those insights not coinciding with human knowledge’s unfolding destiny, no amount of worry or will should alter its trajectory. In this sense, chafing at the bit, as Grégoire initially does, is somewhat absurd.

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Thus, through the accumulating triumphs of Luc and Martial Jordan in the world of La Crêcherie, the “Word” ultimately trumps any scientific modeling of “Work,” ever present in Travail (Zola 724, 859, 869, 877, 948, 955). Obviously, such a feat is only tenable in the pure textual space of  fiction, in which the “known” can paradoxically be “discovered.” All of  this hearkens back to the strange self-fulfilling circularity of a text creating its own evangelist. Much as Poincaré blurred the line between a priori and a posteriori representations of the world, Zola reinforces the ideal of the symbolic order resisting the phenomenal and transcending its limitations. As I have attempted to demonstrate in this chapter, post-revolutionary France’s emerging positivism links progress to scientific growth. In this context, rationalism and scientific ability are vaunted as elements of merit, replacing the apriorist criteria of heredity operating in the ancien régime. In the practice of science itself, however, adequate arbitration protocols properly defining verifiability are wanting. As a consequence, a rhetoric of progress develops, substituting a vast teleology for an immediate criterion of scientific growth. In these circumstances, the rhetoric of scientism disowns science’s more speculative dimension, as the latter evokes all past models, adopted or rejected and, in so doing, begs a discussion of what ultimately distinguishes the former from the latter. For this reason, positivism tends to privilege successes achieved in its a posteriori disciplines. This bias, however, overlooks an essential – symbolic – element in the dialectic of scientific growth. Hence, while seemingly favoring concrete or “factual” knowledge, Comtian positivism covertly aspires to a type of  transcendence; one ultimately dispensing with arbitration in favor of a mystique of rationalism. In this regard, its stance is not unlike that of post-revolutionary bourgeois society. Keen to distance itself from the symbolic stronghold of the ancien régime’s hereditary aristocracy, it claims the adoption of a posteriori social models of merit. Yet dismissing apriorist social axioms does not necessarily translate into ef forts to perennially foster talent. This is attested to by the controlled conditions of the Polytechnique experiment, resulting in candidates being shuf f led away into bureaucratic positions precluding the sort of social experimentation proposed by the Saint-Simonians (if ever such a template as theirs was even realizable). In response to this hegemony and the dystopian expectations of progress it produces, Balzac and Zola provide their Polytechniciens with fictional societies in which change can actually be ef fected.

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Le Curé du village’s commune is transformed by Gérard Grégoire but only after allowing the character to denounce the stagnation of  the postrevolutionary civil service through a host of sociological details. Through these, the novelist hints at the fact that true progress is very dif ficult to achieve, at least without religious faith. This ref lects the conservative opinions of Balzac, who ran for the monarchic party. Nevertheless, the author subverts many tenets of ancien régime propriety through complex characters. By creating a society whose driving forces include sin, redemption, talent, and obeisance, Balzac creates a work whose textual architecture is circular and mobile, rising to the heavens but simultaneously disintegrating like the spray of a fountain. In contrast, Zola creates a circularity of another kind. Here, a perfect adequacy between social theory and social “experimentation” creates a type of stasis, through which performative language transcends the contradictions of secular prophecy. Subscribing to a visibly eudemonic logic and stressing agency through the symbolic order, Zola was likely trying to formulate an antidote for the heavy-handed but dubious arguments employed by the Anti-Dreyfusards persecuting him in the years preceding the writing of Travail. In this regard, his choice to formalize society simply and predictably can be seen as an ethical gesture. The circularity of  both novels is suggestive. Obviously bound by the epistemological conceptions of their time, Balzac and Zola could not have been expected to pinpoint the impasses of positivism. Yet, by documenting the discourses hovering in their respective societies, their representation of science bears the marks of  the f laws inherent to inductivism, in its pathologically utopian aspects. Situated in the medium of  the word, their utopias are constitutive to the extent that they attempt to plan societies while seeking out the intractable aspects of sociological modeling. As fictional figures, Zolian and Balzacian engineers simultaneously support and signal the shortcomings of nineteenth-century conceptions of science. Through stasis and iterative displacement, respectively, they encircle the gaps in positivist logic like complementary bands. The twin architectures of  these novels articulate the consequences of  hoping for progress while observing the frailty of  human will: they claim both a right to embrace doubt and the courage to resist it.

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Works Cited d’Alembert, Jean le Rond. Preface. Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers. Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert. Vol.1. Paris: Briasson, 1851–65. 17 Vols. Gallica. 8 July 2010. . Balzac, Honoré de. Le Curé de village. La Comédie humaine. 12 Vols. Vol. 9. Eds Pierre Georges Castex et al. Paris: Gallimard, 1979. Barthes, Roland. “L’Ef fet de Réel.” Eds Gérard Genette and Tzvetan Todorov. Littérature et réalité. Paris: Seuil, 1982. 81–90. Belhoste, Bruno and Konstantinos Chatzis. “From Technical Corps to Technocratic Power: French State Engineers and Their Professional and Cultural Universe in the First Half of  the 19th Century.” History and Technology 23.3 (2007): 209–25. Carlisle, Robert. “The Birth of Technocracy: Science, Society and Saint-Simonians.” Journal of  the History of  Ideas 35.3 (1974): 445–64. Cioranescu, Alexandre. Voyages aux pays de nulle part. Paris: Gallimard, 1979. Coleman, Nathaniel. Utopias and Architecture. Abingdon: Routledge, 2005. Comte, Auguste. Catéchisme des industriels (troisième cahier. Système de politique positive. Ed. Henri de Saint-Simon. Paris, 1824. Gallica. 8 July 2010. . ——. Cours de philosophie positive. Vol.1. Paris: Anthropos, 1968. 12 Vols. Conry, Yvette. L’Introduction du darwinisme en France au XIXe siècle. Paris: Vrin, 1974. Daston, Lorraine. “The Physicalist Tradition in Early Nineteenth-Century French Geometry.” Studies in the History and the Philosophy of  Science 17.3 (1986): 269–95. Dhombres, Jean. “L’Analogie dans les mathématiques analytiques selon Auguste Comte.” Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger 132.4 (2007): 451–70. Diderot, Denis. Oeuvres complètes de Diderot. Ed. Jules Assézat. Vol.1. 1875–7. Nendeln: Kraus, 1966. 20 Vols. Gallica. 8 July 2010. . Foucault, Michel. Les mots et les choses: une archéologie des sciences humaines. Paris: Gallimard, 1966. Frampton, Kenneth. Modern Architecture: A Critical History. London: Thames and Hudson, 1992.

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Gillispie, Charles Coulton. Science and Polity in France: The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Years. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. Jameson, Fredric. The Ideologies of Theory. Essays 1971–1986. Vol.1. Situations of Theory, Theory and History of Literature Vol.48. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988. ——. The Seeds of  Time. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Littré, Émile. “Préface.” Principes de philosophie positive. Auguste Comte. Paris: Baillière, 1868. Meininger, Anne-Marie. “Eugène Surville, ‘Modèle reparaissant’ de la Comédie humaine.” Année Balzacienne (2006): 195–250. Moylan, Tom. Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia. Boulder: Westview, 2000. Pérez-Gómez, Alberto. Architecture and the Crisis of  Modern Science. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1983. Pickering, Mary. “Auguste Comte and the Saint-Simonians.” French Historical Studies 18.1 (1993): 211–36. Picon, Antoine. Les Saint-Simoniens: Raison, imaginaire, utopie. Paris: Belin, 2002. Poincaré, Henri. “Des Fondements de la géométrie.” Revue de métaphysique et de morale 7 (1899): 251–79. ——. “La Mesure du temps.” Revue de métaphysique et de morale 6 (1898): 1–13. Popper, Karl. Conjectures and Refutations, 1963. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2007. ——. The Logic of  Scientific Discovery. 1959. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2007. Régnier, Philippe and Nathalie Coilly. Le Siècle des Saint-simoniens: du Nouveau Christianisme au Canal de Suez. Paris: BNF, 2006. Ricoeur, Paul. Lectures on Ideology and Utopia. Ed. George H. Taylor. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. Ruyer, Raymond. L’Utopie et les utopies. Paris: PUF, 1950. Shinn, Terry. “From ‘corps’ to ‘profession’: The Emergence and Definition of Industrial Engineering in Modern France.” The Organization of  Science and Technology in France 1803–1914. Eds Robert Fox and George Weisz. Paris: Cambridge University Press and Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 1980. 183–208. Soulié, Stephan. “La Belle Époque de la Revue de métaphysique et de morale: horizon académique et tentation du politique (1892–1914).” Le Temps des médias 11.2 (2008): 198–210. Stamos, David N. “Popper, Falsifiability, and Evolutionary Biology.” Biology and Philosophy 11.2 (1996): 161–91. Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of  Science Fiction. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979.

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Tort, Patrick. La Raison classificatoire: quinze études. Les complexes discursifs. Paris: Aubier, 1989. Vatin, François. “Auguste Comte, les sciences d’application et la formation du peuple.” Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger 132.4 (2007): 421–35. Zola, Émile. Travail. Oeuvres complètes. 15 Vols. Vol.8. Ed. Henri Mitterand. Paris: Cercle du Livre Précieux, 1968.

Ufuk Ersoy

To See Daydreams: The Glass Utopia of  Paul Scheerbart and Bruno Taut

Building Narrative If architecture can be defined as simply the art of  building (Baukunst), should the task of  the architect be conceptualized as limited to the act of  building alone, which, in the present day, is usually read as limited to only encompassing the technique of putting together the solid components of structures? Although the original meaning of the term “architect” refers to a chief craftsman (archi-tekton), the true nature of architectural operations has been under nearly constant debate since publication of  Renaissance architect Leon Batista Alberti’s (1404–72) treatise, On the Art of Building in Ten Books (De re aedificatoria, 1452). More recently, the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur (1913–2005) contributed to this persistent debate by demonstrating a link between the “configurative” act of  “narrating” with that of “building” (“Architecture” 9). In particular, Ricoeur read the act of  “building” as a spatial ref lection of  “narrating,” and drew a parallel between inventions of authors and architects. According to Ricoeur, the author who writes a novel dreams a series of events which no one has yet experienced. In a similar way, the architect who imagines and designs a project dreams into existence a place yet to be experienced. In these dreams, distant from present reality, both the architect and author activate the same human faculty – “anticipation” – and occupy the same human dimension of time – “present of the future” (Ricoeur, Time and Narrative 65). According to this line of  thought, architecture represents a kind of  fiction, and buildings stand as a possible reality so long as their imaginary potential persists, even once they are inhabited. Following Ricoeur’s analogy

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between narrating and building, it might be possible to claim that utopian thinking, which combines the dream of a better place with the dream of a good life (as a secularized form of  human longing for paradise or an age of gold), establishes an intersection between literature and architecture (Coleman 46–63). In 1914, the passionate young German architect Bruno Taut (1880– 1938) and the bohemian German poet Paul Scheerbart (1863–1915) were already aware of  the parallel between the two imaginative disciplines of  building and narrative and thus decisively committed themselves to a shared vision of Utopia. Both sought to represent an archetype of “glass architecture”; one by narrating, the other by building. Highly critical of existing architecture and social conditions, they were in search of an inspiring alternative, as were many of  their more progressive contemporaries. Yet, what made Taut and Scheerbart’s shared approach more sophisticated than that of  their contemporaries also left it open to criticism. In particular, their choice of glass as the idiosyncratic constituent of  their imaginary world, because of its utopian character, far exceeded its more limited role as the rising icon of industrialization and bourgeois culture. For them however, glass was much more than an emergent modern building material; rather, it was the concrete substance of  transcendence, permitting the consciousness access to another, better, world. And where the consciousness goes, the body will follow, until it too is transcended. In a short autobiography, Scheerbart described himself as the spirit of  the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) who watched contemporary human life from the future-anterior through a satirical lens. For Scheerbart, akin to the future-anterior, architecture is a gifted art, able to transform the environment. He was convinced that through its contemplative beauty, architecture could create some significant spiritual changes in human beings, and even bring them to a condition of universal brotherhood with each other and their surroundings. Scheerbart saw the architect as a community organizer in macro scale; in other words, as a contemporary demiurge. Intriguingly, the majority of  Scheerbart’s fiction involved the adventure of an architect (or a creator) building in fantastic cosmic settings. However, in 1913, after publishing Lesabéndio: Ein Asteroïden-Roman (Lesabéndio: An Asteroid Novel), Scheerbart made

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the decision to come down to earth. Thus, while searching for the glass architect who could implement his ideas, he began to write his last two works: Glasarchitektur (Glass Architecture, 1914) and Das graue Tuch und zehn Prozent Weiß: Ein Damenroman (The Grey Cloth and Ten Percent White: A Ladies’ Novel, 1914). Quite the reverse of Scheerbart’s macro vision, Taut’s utopian view of glass architecture stemmed from an experience at the micro scale: building the Glashaus (Glass House) Pavilion for the Werkbund (Work Federation) Exhibition at Cologne (1914), which was his first and only work in collaboration with Scheerbart.1 It is likely that while Taut was drafting the sketches of  this pavilion in July 1913, Gottfried Heinersdorf f, a famous glass painter from Berlin, introduced him to Scheerbart, who was already celebrated for his visionary tales of glass architecture (Rausch, 70 Trillionen 455–7; Ikelaar 87–144). As Taut acknowledged, he already knew of  Scheerbart before this meeting and was an “admirer” of the poet. Moreover, Scheerbart’s glass architecture fantasies inspired Taut’s idea for a glass house (Taut, “Glaserzeugung und Glasbau” 9). Similarly, after learning about Taut’s engagement in a glass house project, Scheerbart became excited to meet “the glass architect” (Rausch, 70 Trillionen 457). The close friendship that instantly developed between the two turned into an intellectual mission of encouraging architects to make use of glass as a transcendent material. In 1914, right after Taut built the Glashaus, Scheerbart published his Glasarchitektur, which Taut accepted as a programmatic account of his building, they even went so far as to dedicate their respective works to each other. For both Scheerbart, who called his involvement in this project “the greatest event” of his life, and Taut, who called Scheerbart his “Glaspapa,”

1

The Werkbund exhibition of 1914 in Cologne was organized by the Deutscher Werkbund (German Work Federation), which was an important early-twentiethcentury association of artists, architects, designers, and industrialists, initially dedicated to establishing partnerships between manufacturers and design professionals to improve the quality of German products; it was not so much an artistic movement as a state-sponsored endeavor to assimilate traditional crafts to industrial mass-production techniques in an ef fort to improve competiveness with other more advanced industrialized nations at the time.

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the Glashaus was a remarkable survey of imaginative possibilities that glass of fered to architecture by means specific to it (Rausch, 70 Trillionen 460–4; Scheerbart, “Das Glashaus” 3). Like a rehearsal on stage, in the Glashaus, Taut had a chance to implement the glass architecture Scheerbart envisioned and to test its immediate bodily ef fect on visitors. In brief, the Glashaus resulted from a utopian practice that attempted to give physical manifestation to Scheerbart’s fiction and thus expose it to the uncertainties of daily life. Nevertheless, in architectural literature (primarily in the English speaking world), the Glashaus is overshadowed, on the one hand, by the technological utopianism of  the Werkbund, based on near-blind faith in industrial progress, and on the other, by the shortcomings of Taut’s later macro-scale speculations on a new society and world (Banham, “The Glass Paradise”; Whyte, Bruno Taut). Indeed, Taut’s exaggerated expectation of achieving a faultless world simply by adorning the Alps with crystalline glass buildings, such as he proposed in Alpine Architecture (1919), demonstrated an escapist attitude that ultimately served conservatives more than reformists by confirming, unintentionally perhaps, just how dif ficult it was to of fer concrete alternatives to existing conditions. Brief ly, as an unachievable abstraction, it is fair to describe Taut’s Alpine vision as a pathological utopia, in the sense developed by Ricoeur, who asserted that Utopia can have both pathological and constitutive dimensions (Ricoeur, Lectures). Despite this, in what follows, I will endeavor to draw out the constitutive dimension of  Taut and Scheerbart’s utopian enterprise, and thus reveal its potential continuing relevance to the invention of architecture even in the present day. Thus, my objective here is to comprehend the constitutive utopic value of  their creative ef forts, rather than merely reading their fantastic visions as a fruitless satisfaction of naïve desire. The main way in which I will attempt to accomplish this is by concentrating on Scheerbart and Taut’s critical engagement with existing conditions, primarily by focusing on the Glashaus as a configurative act, in particular illuminating how glass nourished their utopian imagination.

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Something Missing Although at first glance Taut and Scheerbart’s utopian approach to glass might seem to fetishize a new industrial material of  their period, they were actually rather critical of  the industrialization of glass and even of  the prevailing use of  transparent glass. In their view, by the end of  the nineteenth century, the misuse of industrial materials had “mechanized” the interior of  buildings and individuals alike (Scheerbart, “Licht und Luft” 13). During the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, the use of glass was generally identified with heightening or widening window openings. Taut maintained that the attractive gleam of recent industrial buildings, such as train stations, factories, exhibition halls, and film studios, could be appreciated only from a distance. In most instances, a “terrible scenery of junk” lay in wait behind the transparent surface, ready to assault the senses of  those who came closer (Taut, “Das Bauen” 36).2 It was clear that the iron structure of such buildings had already been perfected, but the main problem for Taut was “the smooth glass surfaces in between iron frameworks” (“Das Bauen” 37). According to him, the architect’s employ of  the stuf f should not have been limited to attaching sheet or plate glass panes to structure. Instead, they ought to have considered the glass covering of structure in view of  the material’s “outstanding conditionality,” in the sense of  the changeable character of glass, dependent on ambient conditions external to it (Taut, “Das Bauen” 37). According to Taut, architects needed to re-invent the architectonic quality of glass by working with it in harmony with light and air, which would require intense sensitivity to the surrounding world. Taut’s presentation of  the Glashaus in the pamphlet he prepared for its visitors hints at his and Scheerbart’s critical attitude. In this building, one should look for nothing other than beauty; that was its only purpose (Taut, Glashaus: Werkbundausstellung Cöln). In articulating beauty as the 2

All translations in this chapter from German to English are by the author, unless otherwise noted.

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exclusive goal, Taut manifested his and Scheerbart’s endeavor to exempt this building from the overriding pragmatic and material concerns of  the modern industrial world. As a result, while their exploratory approach to glass stimulated the interest of some contemporaries, such as the young German art critic Adolf  Behne (1885–1948), it seemed unorthodox to both technocrats and conservatives. The conviction that technology was the formative agent of  the current culture, and that the artist’s task was to enunciate it, governed the 1914 Cologne Exhibition. Sharing this basic conviction, Taut asserted the inf luence of production processes and methods on the configurative capacity of  the architect. Having witnessed the increased manufacture and use of glass, he concluded that its increasing pervasiveness was “the determined will – entschlossener Wille” of the architecture profession (Taut, “Das Bauen” 37). Yet, Taut was not a fatalist with no hopes for the future; far from yielding to technology, he invited his colleagues to join him in his commitment to creatively attune industrialized glass and architecture to a higher purpose than a banal imaging of the industrial progress of modernity. The Glashaus stood directly behind the entrance to the Cologne Exhibition as the first building welcoming visitors. However, its location did not signal any privilege given to it as a result of its prestige or patronage. In contrast, it was a sign of the polemic which took place during the approval process of it as an exhibition building. The Glashaus was listed among “radical” projects that were rejected at the outset for contradicting the guiding principles and integrity of  the Werkbund (which had something to do with ideas of  “good form” and standardization). In fact, it was not shown on the first two master plans of  the exhibition. In an essay Taut wrote almost six years after the exhibition, he admitted his frustration at its planning process. In a cynical tone, he underlined the consistency in the placement of the Glashaus. In the Cologne Exhibition, which he saw as an arena of artistic will and industrial norms, the Glashaus opposed these standards upheld by the Werkbund and, therefore, deserved to be separated from more “serious” buildings representing industry, so that it could be closer to the amusement area near the entrance (Taut, “Glaserzeugung” 9). Paradoxically, exclusion of his project from the main core of  the exhibition highlighted the distinctive character of  his design

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and obliquely confirmed its achievement. Taut’s intent for the Glashaus was that simply by visiting it, serious visitors would be released from their entrapment within a banal and profane world of commerce. As alluded to above, he explicitly stated the transcendental aims of  his work in the opening sentence of  the pamphlet that he prepared for the exhibition, proclaiming that his building “ha[d] no other purpose than to be beautiful” (Herzogenrath 287). These words echoed the thoughts of  Taut’s advocate, art critic Adolf Behne. The main reason for Behne’s appreciation of  Taut’s building was its having only an “inner-artistic” purpose, which freed technology from its pragmatic concerns (Behne, “Bruno Taut” 183). Taut’s building was a purpose-free – zweckfrei – art work. In practice, Taut provided concrete models which helped Behne to reinterpret the principle of Sachlichkeit (objectivity) as a synthesis of artistic creativity and matterof-factness, and thus define a new kind of architecture closer to crystalline, abstract, non-historical forms, distinct from the pseudo-symbolic buildings of technology, such as the industrial designer Peter Behrens’s (1868–1940) well-known AEG Turbine Factory (1908–1909) in Berlin. At the turn of  the twentieth century, Sachlichkeit referred to a norm used to measure the appropriateness of architecture to contemporary life conditions and was in general used to invoke “a straightforward attention to needs” missing in the world of daily life (Anderson 340).3 Yet, practical reality and the range of needs that architecture addressed were phenomena open to diverse interpretations and so could be extended to extreme points. For instance, read from a “technocentric” standpoint, Sachlichkeit would mean matter-of-factness and privilege some aspects of buildings that largely passed into the control of industrial agents, such as construction materials and engineering techniques. This would not only justify the exigency of  technology, but also legislate that buildings should be treated as industrial works so that they would manifest pure Sachlichkeit. On the other hand, Sachlichkeit could be directed to a more introverted artistic understanding

3

As a noun that derives from the adjective sachlich and the noun Sache, Sachlichkeit has been translated in numerous ways: “objectivity,” “thingness,” “practicality,” “straightforwardness,” “functionalism,” “realism,” and “matter-of-factness.”

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that encompassed the inner needs of human beings. Then, instead of limiting a building to being a unique object with a specific technical function it must fulfill, the focus could turn to the expressive capacity of architecture, and how it was experienced in terms of sachliche Kunst (literally matter-offact art, but suggestive of  the intersection of reason and fantasy). Together with the Glashaus, Taut’s previous building, the Monument of  Iron, Das Monument des Eisens (1913), which was in the shape of an octagonal ziggurat crowned by a sphere nine meters in diameter, could help to illustrate his artistic approach (cf. Figure 4). Behne observed that Taut’s work was expressionist architecture that emancipated buildings from all non-artistic considerations by exposing them to “the reality of the arts,” defined as the regulation of surface by means of color, line, and light. To achieve this, Taut “left aside all conventions and derivative elements,” especially conventional ornament. Instead, he “returned to the primal elements of building,” which were “the wall and the opening” (Behne, “Bruno Taut” 183). Even so, Taut animated the primal elements of  his buildings with a third element, which was “the joy of adornment,” accomplished with pure “ornamental forms” such as color, light, and line. In other words, he freely invented his own modern ornament which was stripped of all excess and was purely expressive. Taut supplemented “the primal elements” of  his buildings with color schemes that functioned aesthetically and attained the “architectureplastic,” or the “architectonic” quality that transformed building into art (Behne, “Bruno Taut” 183). Taut well understood that the main preoccupation of contemporary architects was form-making, and exemplified this by subduing construction techniques to artistic expression. In both the Glashaus and the Monument of  Iron, the regular frame structure revealed the overall geometrical form of  the building, whereas colored glass covering the openings softened the rigidity of the structural frame. Behne thought that, while the steel or reinforced concrete frame manifested the rational side of the design, it would be dif ficult if not impossible to discuss the colorful elements in a matter-of-fact tone. For him, they were “built out of  fantasy” (Behne, “Bruno Taut” 183). Cohabitation of  the objective and the subjective in the same work confirmed the viability of Behne’s apparent oxymoron, sachliche Kunst, a synthesis of Sachlichkeit and fantasy.

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Glashaus and Reinvention of  the Gothic Dome In the essay “Eine Notwendigkeit” (“A Necessity”), which Taut wrote in February 1914, before the construction of  the Glashaus began, he clearly stated that the current need was for an architecture whose purpose was to reveal artistic spirit to people by integrating all of  the arts. Taut may have been introduced to this idea by his mentor at the Technical University of  Munich, Theodor Fischer (1862–1938). Fischer developed these ideas in his concept of a Volkhaus as a new type of communal building. What Fischer had in mind were what he called “houses for all” that would include multiple “colored and multiform” halls, suited to accommodating various artistic activities open to the public (Fischer 5). Although Fischer’s vision was of a modern progressive structure, Taut’s dream of a future shelter for community derived from a retrospective image, “the Gothic Cathedral.” Since the early days of romanticism, the Gothic cathedral had been idealized as the supreme cultural product because it was believed to have been perhaps the last great example of authentic communal work encompassing art and architectural expression. More specifically, what Taut identified in Gothic cathedrals was an act of “construction heightened to the point of passion.” The Gothic master builders constructed very simply and economically, but they “transcended practicality” and converted “the most primitive form to a symbol” (Taut, “Eine Notwendigkeit” 174). The art historian Wilhelm Worringer (1881–1965), who wrote the key manifesto of expressionist art, provided a historical justification for the Gothic Taut imagined. In Worringer’s view, artwork represented the “world feeling – Weltgefühl ” of artists and their periods. This was a feeling that he generalized into two categories: “empathy” and “abstraction.” Empathy, which he borrowed from the psychologist Theodor Lipps (1851–1914), resulted from a feeling of security, from being at home in the cosmos. This was evident in the works of  the Italian Renaissance and French Impressionism, for example, which liberally depicted the natural world. On the other hand, abstraction referred to a spiritual agoraphobia that he saw in archaic and Byzantine arts. This feeling evoked an urge to transcend perilous

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surroundings. The Gothic cathedral, which Worringer advocated as a paradigm for a new northern art, combined these two urges by dematerializing the stone. According to Worringer, “all expression to which Greek architecture attained was attained through the stone, by means of  the stone,” whereas, “all expression to which Gothic architecture attained, was attained … in spite of  the stone” (106). While the essence of stone is weight and its suitable use is “based on the law of gravity,” the great achievement of  Gothic cathedrals was to have overcome the laws of gravity. Stone, released from its weight, became spiritualized. In Worringer’s words, in the Gothic cathedrals, stone was turned into a vehicle of “an immaterial expression,” a bearer of “an uncontrolled upward movement” (106). The act of building such structures was a struggle to awaken the dormant energies in the massiveness of  the stone, and in the Gothic cathedral, “there [were] no walls, no mass […] only a thousand separate energies speak to us” (107). Although Worringer may not have described his preoccupation with the Gothic as utopian, it is worth noting that the idea of spiritualized, reformed, and disalienated community that Gothic life and culture came to stand for, most profoundly in the achievement of  the cathedrals, was drawn upon again and again by utopian socialists such as Pugin, Ruskin, and Morris, before Taut, and in the founding ideals of the Bauhaus, more or less contemporaneously with him (Donahue 1–12).4 A pastel sketch made by Taut in 1904, at the Collegiate Church of  Stuttgart, provides a clue as to his understanding of  Gothic architecture (cf. Figure 5). For the sketch, Taut chose a light brown drafting paper and articulated the structure with nothing more than the dif ferent tones of  background color. This technique gives the impression that the colored background light that bathes the nave in the sketch softens the solidity of  the structure making stone, the symbol of gravity, dematerialize. As a result, although the supporting piers are not easily discernable, the con-

4

Unsurprisingly, Taut was a reader of  Ruskin, whose Stones of  Venice (1851–3) was translated into German by 1904. In turn, Taut’s ideas, specifically the manifesto he wrote for the Working Council for Art (Arbeitsrat für Kunst), paved the way for the foundation of  the Bauhaus.

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verging vault ribs soar even higher above the nave-like latticework. The diaphanous nave denies the material limits of construction but still succeeds in setting spatial limits. In the composition, the dominant reddishbrown hue loses its strength against the brightness that grows after the transept, which reaches an end at the upper windows of the apse. Among luminous terrestrial elements (lumen ref lected from surfaces), the stained glass stands out as the most vividly articulated image, allowing one to visualize light – lux. If  the Glashaus is read in light of  this painting, the aim of the colored prismatic glass wall, which wraps its prominent dome, was to remove any feeling of heaviness, of earthliness, by transforming the solid surfaces of the structure into a weightless layer of colored light, like a foil. However, the physical quality of the result is more than a thin, transparent diaphragm; rather, even in his pursuit of dematerialization, Taut favored thick, colored diaphanous walls that absorbed and stored light. In Scheerbart’s words, he and Taut were interested in the “diaphanous (not transparent) – lichtdurchlässigen (nicht durchsichtigen)” – qualities of glass (Scheerbart, “Glashäuser” 105). For Taut, industry, the Luxfer Prism Glass Syndicate in particular, already provided him with a handy means to develop an alternative to conventional glass applications. Prismatic glass, which was produced in Chicago in 1897, was destined to fill “monotonous openings of the unpromising and garish sheet of plate glass,” with an “opaque appearance” that would extend the substantial surface of the facade with “a fine textile-like ef fect,” capable of  turning the “scientific prose” of glass “into the language of poetry and art” (Crew and Basquin 6, quoted in Neumann). The prismatic glass treatment could be compared with the ornamental stone carvings that adorn Gothic cathedrals. In a similar way, in the Glashaus, Taut handled glass like a lapidary working with precious stones. He wanted to craft a complicated “network” that interweaved colored prismatic glass tiles with ferro-concrete ribs, with the ultimate aim of making the Glashaus jewel-like. Taut saw the dome that covered the whole building as a most complex and refined arrangement, because it let glass speak like a diamond. The reinforced-concrete ribs of  the dome carried two separated layers of rhomboid-shaped glass panels. While the outer layer was thin, transparent plate glass, the inner layer consisted of blended prismatic tiles of dif ferent

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colors. In Taut’s words, after “the ref lective panes” scattered the light rays, and while the colored prismatic glazing captured and projected them, “the inner face of  the dome was composed of small thick glass plates with an uneven surface. These plates ef fectively kept out external views and turned the daylight coming in into a soft powdery luminosity without shadows” (“Farbenwirkungen” 266). The Luxfer prism became active during the day and created a chromatic pattern in the interior as a hidden source of light. Consequently, the domed room was forever f looded with colored light: “there was always a dif fused glow, in colors that began with a deep blue at the bottom and progressed upwards through moss-green and golden yellow to the peak, where they culminated in brilliant creamy white” (“�������� Beobachtungen” 13). Just as the word “Luxfer” connoted, Taut believed “color and light! Both are in glass” (“Beobachtungen” 13). Colored glass embodied light and promised to reenact the ef fects of  the diaphanous Gothic nave and the luminous walls enclosing it. As Scheerbart observed, the Gothic cathedral, in which the wall was dissolved by light to become a “light filter,” was Taut’s “prelude” (Taut, Glashaus) (cf. Figure 6). The nineteenth century’s “ferrous and concrete constructions” challenged the definition of rooms based upon the law of gravity – as an enclosure surrounded by solid walls – and gave momentum to the idea of using glass once again as the actual space-cladding element that could achieve a nearly Gothic manner of enclosing space (Taut, “Das Bauen” 35). For Taut, who called glass “melted earth,” what distinguished this substance from others was its paradoxical nature: its simultaneous chthonic and phantasmal performance. Glass, specifically colored glass, emanated from the earth. It recorded epochal transformations of the earth’s surface: human beings recover gradually their earth, and from this earth they make the carrier of  their subtle feelings, the glass. Depending on the excess of  their work on the soil, they can carve out the opulence of color in glass by adding metals whose preciousness is ranked according to the luminosity of  the color; gold for red, silver for yellow, copper for blue and green, nickel for violet and iron for brown (Taut, “Glaserzeugung” 12).

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Glass is made of earth; nevertheless, it could act as if it were intangible like “air, water, fire” and could overcome the heaviness of  the earth. To depict this quality, Taut called upon the image of  the crystal, as a metaphor of creativity. Like a delicate piece of crystal, which incorporates play between revealing and hiding, a glass wall could engage in countless mutual interactions with the surrounding world while displaying these to the eye. It is important to keep in mind that the dematerialization promised by way of reference to the achievement of  the Gothic cathedral builders was, for Taut, concrete expression of the utopian moment of his endeavor: Utopia nearly always requires distanciation, that is, the attainment of some remove from present conditions so as to be able to ref lect on them critically and to begin rethinking them, with an eye toward overcoming or transcending them. As Karl Mannheim (1893–1947) explains, “orientations transcending reality” characterize the utopian “state of mind” even though they are incongruent with actual conditions. (quoted in Coleman 34). In this respect, as noted earlier, key to an understanding of Scheerbart and Taut’s utopian project is grasping how for them overcoming gravity in building was analogous to overcoming one’s body (or given conditions) in the world. The hazy conditions Taut strove for in his Glashaus illuminated the first steps in the direction of individual and societal transformation.

Colored Glass, Scheerbart’s Rhetorical Tool Scheerbart and Taut were in agreement that colored glass could alter the face of the earth for the better, even – perhaps especially – the depressingly gray atmosphere of industrial cities. As soon as architects could grasp the “true” architectonic quality of glass, Scheerbart was certain that “the whole of nature in all cultural regions [would] appear to us in quite a dif ferent light. The wealth of colored glass is bound to give nature another hue” (Glasarchitektur 58). Thus, he took it as his mission to persuade architects to this view, which is why he wrote Glasarchitektur. Surprisingly, amongst

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all of Scheerbart’s works, the best-known Glasarchitektur was also the most atypical. It is composed of 111 independent aphoristic chapters. And just like the architecture of which he dreamed, the text did not have an easily readable structure or style. However, in terms of its content, rather than sitting comfortably as a fiction, it reads more like an advisory, descriptive Sachbuch (non-fiction book) on glass, which likely explains why it was rejected by Scheerbart’s regular publisher, Georg Müller. Written in an authoritative and sophisticated tone, Scheerbart’s book gives detailed instructions for the correct use of glass throughout. The last paragraph ef fectively summarizes his objective in this work as aiming to conquer the field of architecture so as to have “fewer opponents” (119).5 Scheerbart was very well aware that contemporary architects had to compromise with technology by taking on its beneficial attributes while mitigating its more negative ones. Yet, in advocating glass he was not so much promoting a new industrial building component as extolling the precious stone-like qualities of the material – more akin to crystal – that architects could use to color the dull urban landscape of nineteenth-century cities. Therefore, he felt it necessary to explain to his new publisher Herwarth Walden (1879–1941) – owner of  the famous expressionist art gallery and publisher of its journal Der Sturm – that this work did not originate the idea of glass architecture but had amended it in order to af firm its appropriateness to material comfort and technical needs at the time. In fact, Scheerbart was not interested in writing realist Sachbücher (non-fiction books). Likewise, he did not hold pure Sachstil (objective) buildings in high esteem, which, in his view, looked like stripped down structures. When he was writing Glasarchitektur, Scheerbart lived in Lichterfeld, a southwestern suburb of Berlin, not far from the botanical gardens at Dahlem (Ikelaar 25). For him, the frame structures of glasshouses in botanical gardens, like the Palmenhaus or Kalthaus, showed the possibilities of glass architecture, but did not yet fulfill his fantasy, precisely because they lacked “color” (Glasarchitektur 13). Admittedly, he admired their 5

The famous motto reprinted in the preface of the book: “Honi soit qui mal y pense (Shame be to him who thinks evil of it),” gives an early clue to Scheerbart’s objectives.

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magnificent look at sunset, yet, without intrinsic, rather than ref lected, color they appeared “cold.” Had the designers of  these buildings used color, he was certain they could have overcome the cold look, and then, no words would have been adequate to praise the wonder of glass. Strictly speaking, Scheerbart did not like these inartistic Sachstil buildings “without ornament,” but they could be accepted temporarily since, “any how [they did] away with copying older styles” (Glasarchitektur 26). With this statement, Scheerbart expressed his support for Sachlichkeit on one hand, and his worries about the prevailing blind trust of engineering on the other. His key objective was to advance neither an entirely utilitarian use of technology nor a nostalgic or reactionary renouncement of it. Evidently, Scheerbart walked in the same direction as Behne and Taut, in pursuit of sachliche Kunst and sought the reconciliation of  “scientific curiosity” and “artistic creativity” (Scheerbart, Lesabéndio 137). He did not credit technology as being the formative agent of  human life which could generate a culture. On the other hand, in his eyes, architecture corresponded to a cosmic worldview and constituted the primordial spiritual source that he considered to be prior to technology. Nevertheless, technology and science continually nourished Scheerbart’s writings. Many of  his plots involved the latest machinery, such as airships, automobiles, and elevators, which had transformed daily life remarkably. A first glance at his texts might seem to reveal him as simply dreaming enthusiastically about a modern world in a “prognostic” rather than “anticipatory” way, or to have been a fetishist of modern tools and techniques. In fact, Scheerbart observed the widening gap between science and society from a critical distance. He uneasily detected the process by which technological innovations that had become increasingly incomprehensible moved quickly from practical utility to take on the status of myth in the eyes of  laymen. In reaction to this situation, he attempted to exploit this knowledge gap as an opportunity to redefine technology in a completely dif ferent, that is to say, imaginary context. The enigmatic structure of  his tales, which ambiguously slipped in and out of  fantasy, aimed to convey to the reader a dilemma between what is “possible” and what is “appropriate.” Sometimes, the absurdity of  the plots he wove cast doubt on the seductive power of  technology, mostly by way of an epigrammatic

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tone.6 Brief ly, Scheerbart’s most significant and unchanging literary tactic was “fictional estrangement.” He made the reader move back and forth between the given “scientific-technological context” and an unknown and relatively unpredictable “alternate reality” (Partsch 204). Ultimately, Scheerbart’s ef fort was to liberate a range of cultural values from the pragmatic rationality and hegemony of technology. The “freedom of discretion” in writing fiction enabled him to easily transcend the given reality of present conditions in a mood of  “reality as if ” (Schutz vol.1, 234). In particular, through a metaphorical language free from the logical constraints of an ordinary worldview, he released the things and events of daily life from their empirical and pragmatic meanings. In his literature, Scheerbart freely played with the referential link between words and the world. Through a series of metaphorical utterances, he created semantic ambiguities which destabilized common postulations that had been mostly taken for granted by the general population, and thus stimulated his readers’ imaginations. Perhaps the most ef fective way by which Scheerbart attempted to loosen the link between words and world was with color. For example, Scheerbart’s novel Lesabéndio: Ein Asteroïden-Roman, which chronicles the adventures of a genius astronomer (and visionary technician) who also turns out to be a master builder, begins with a description that overwhelms ordinary vision. In the very first line of  the novel, Scheerbart depicts Lesabéndio’s world: “violet was the sky. And green were the stars. And the sun was also green” (17). It is conceivable that, by means of  his “violet sky” and “green sun” metaphors, Scheerbart successfully eliminates any attempt to read his text literally from the outset. Instead, he creates a puzzle of  “semantic dissonance” open to interpretation and imagination (Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory 52). By virtue of its capacity to change the literal meaning of  things, color had an exceptional utopian value for Scheerbart. Particularly, in his fantasies, the “semantic dissonance” 6

For instance, in his pamphlet “Die Entwicklung des Luftmilitarismus und die Auflösung der Europäischen Land-Heere, Festungen und Seeflotten (The Development of Aerial Militarism and the Dissolution of the European Land-army, Fortresses and Navies),” Scheerbart tried to warn his readers against the detrimental power of advancing technology and increasing militarization, by depicting some catastrophic scenarios of mass destruction (Partsch 205). In this way, he openly attacked technocentrism and the idea of  “progress.”

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suggested by unexpected colors helped him to describe mysterious imaginative variations of  landscapes that could not be mapped out or analyzed in terms of objective knowledge. Color verbally enriched his poetic language and increased its semantic ambiguity. Attracted to late-nineteenth-century experimental psychology and the artistic movement of  Symbolism, which rejected realist arts, Scheerbart advocated color and light as capable of substantially augmenting artistic creativity in the visual arts and architecture by increasing the perceptual ambiguity of  both. Simply put, he described color as a tool of  fantasy for painters. Critical of impressionism, he argued that the lack of imaginative enthusiasm in naturalist arts kept artists from painting “a blue field and reddish trees whose branches reach up into a yellow sky” (“Die Phantastik” 289; translated in Bletter, “Vision” 138–9). According to Scheerbart, artists saw the world in dif ferent hues from other people. By means of color, artists could deny the material attributes of things and transform the plain everyday world into a work of art. Color was the tool to abstract and spiritualize objects conventionally neutralized in terms of utility. Creative artists who furnished themselves with a language of color knew how to say something spiritual by circulating color’s inherent energy. Essentially, prior to developing his general interest in color, Scheerbart had already been fascinated with colored glass; specifically its dramatic ef fects. By the end of  the nineteenth century, Richard Wagner’s idea of  Gesamtkunstwerk (“total work of art”), which had greatly inf luenced opera and performing arts in Europe, had reached its climax. Consequently, Symbolist artists aspired to design a stage for a multi-sensory performances which would take one back to “the indoor religious rituals of  the Middle Ages” (Gage 178). Scheerbart conceptualized colored glass as being uniquely suited to achieving such a transcendent milieu. He believed that as an artistic medium with powers far beyond those of any other material, it could give “a new direction to theater art.” In his essay, “Das GlasTheater,” Scheerbart describes the scene in a director’s dream: a theater in which colored glass plays the dominant role spreads its radiance around by projecting the hues of various colors into the environment (913). He was convinced that such a splendid bath of color would overwhelm the senses and thus could transport not only the performers on the stage into a dramatic atmosphere but anyone in the theater as well. Nineteenth-century

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psychological studies on responses to colored light sustained Scheerbart’s belief  that colored glass had not lost its traditional therapeutic virtues. In medieval cathedrals, the light penetrating through stained glass windows contributed to indoor rituals which engaged all the senses by its direct ef fect on the human state of mind. Depending on weather conditions, the f luctuation of principal red and violet light could stimulate as well as calm the congregation during liturgical activities (Gage 166). But, beyond its therapeutic power, what made colored glass unique for Scheerbart were its super-sensuous ef fects which might of fer a chance to transcend the corporeal self. In his view, one who was successfully exposed to a harmony of colored lights could turn into an astral body whose wild desires and emotions would then come under the full control of the mind. Accordingly, through colored glass, Scheerbart sought a milieu, or stage of  transfiguration, where the Christian religious drama could be reenacted, and a metaphysic of  light reconstructed, even in a secular context. In fact, it was just this that Lesabéndio, Scheerbart’s genius astronomer and visionary technician, discovered as having been achieved in the double-cone-shaped star called Pallas, which figures prominently in the asteroid novel. After the shocking introduction familiarizes the reader with the imaginary cosmic setting, which serves also to de-familiarize the world as it is, Scheerbart explains the details of the architectural drama that takes place in the violet atmosphere. Pallasians, unisex and mutable inhabitants of the star, live peacefully in their very lively beautiful space free from any political authority and administration. Like every Pallasian, the young astronomer Lesabéndio is perpetually intoxicated by the rich play of light and color (Lesabéndio 34). However, having learned about the disgraceful planet Earth inhabited by semi-evolved aliens called human beings, Lesabéndio becomes terrified. Considering Earth to be blighted by ignorance of spiritual values and the “human propensity for destruction,” he realizes that to maintain the virtues of his own planet, Pallas needs a building that could refine its star by giving the population access to a “more spiritual, and complex sphere” (95). Lesabéndio thus undertakes the construction of a tower tall enough to reach the luminescent cloud which hovers over Pallas and hides the “secret” of  life. Through his impressive powers of rhetoric, the master builder succeeds in persuading many Pallasians to participate in this sacred mission and to work in harmony.

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When the frame structure designed by Lesabéndio (made of  the recently discovered unbreakable metal called Kaddimohn) is erected, an experienced builder, Peka, who is dedicated to peppering the topography of  Pallas with crystalline shapes, warns Lesabéndio, “the form of your tower […] is crystalline […] But the crystalline substance is missing” (47). On the other hand, Labu, an expert builder of irregular organic forms, shows more sympathy for the tower project. Finally, following passionate argument about the artistic merits of  the tower, Peka (who believes it is necessary to combine engineering with artistic creativity) decides to “dissolve in Lesabéndio” as an act of devotion. Following Peka’s act of sacrifice all Pallasians commit to the project, because they can now see the “new forces” growing in Lesabéndio (156). Scheerbart’s story ends with the opening ceremony of  the tower. As part of  the novel’s dénouement, the master builder is the first to climb the tower, and does so with great passion. Upon surmounting the final step, Lesabéndio begins a painful transformation into a de-individualized astral body and utters a last prophetic message: “knowledge does not bring [one] to an end. The world […] is so complexly constructed that everything leads to the eternal” (180). Pallasians who watch their leader’s fascinating metamorphosis, comprehend that this tower, which brought them together, has led them to reconsider their world. It unified them while broadening their imaginative capacity, which had become progressively more restricted as a result of the monotony that came with the comfort that characterized their routine life. After Lesabéndio’s process of transformation and transcendence is completed, the citizens of  Pallas return to their newly colorful world more harmoniously. In his story’s conclusion, Scheerbart portrays the art of  building at the apex of its capacity for catalyzing, sheltering, and analogizing genuine communal purpose; in this instance by contributing to “a higher truth,” manifested in the overcoming of architecture’s technological and artistic limitations as analogous to individuals transcending themselves.

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Taut and the Apex of  Architecture In Taut’s treatise on city planning, Die Stadtkrone (The City Crown, 1919), published six years after Scheerbart’s asteroid novel, it is possible to detect a rhetorical intent comparable with that of the fictional character of Lesabéndio. Explicating his idea of Kristallhaus, Taut called attention to towers as the type of  building “new cities” needed. In his view, despite healthier conditions and increasing standards of comfort, the new city was still like a “torso without a head – Rumpf ohne Kopf ” (Die Stadtkrone 56). “The comfort and elegance” of modern cities could not satisfy everything. For example, in observing antique cities, Taut identified modern urban society’s lack of “a foundation to lean on.” In ancient times, the Athenian Acropolis was the site of worship and of  the areopagus (or the central governing body of Athens, later the criminal court), which gathered the community together by way of its gods and laws. Only “romantics” such as the German Painter and Architect, Karl F. Schinkel (1781–1841) had been sensitive to this essential civic provision of ancient cities, so much so that he attempted to create an architecture “which would unite the wishes and hopes of men,” whereas in the present they could find no “echo” of their desires. According to Schinkel, community longed for “something superior, something that would rise above […] mundane existence […] with pure celebratory intentions” (Taut, Die Stadtkrone 57). In a number of important ways, Taut’s own convictions were quite close to Schinkel’s. In Taut’s view, “the church” is missing from “the idea of  the new city.” More explicitly, he argued that “in all epochs, we have gravitated to the house of  God; as the only building capable of representing our deepest feelings about mankind and the world” (Die Stadtkrone 58). Although “the liturgical ceremony” no longer possesses its “cohesive strength” in the way it did during the medieval period, for Taut, this did not mean that “the religious life [had] lost its ardor” (Die Stadtkrone 59). He had no doubt that “faith” persisted; even if it had been lost or obscured by modern materialist values. In modern times, human spirit was awaiting “its resurrection, its radiant transfiguration and crystallization in […]

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glorious edifices,” and architects had to recover their “priestly and divine profession and try to dig out the treasure which [lay] in the depths of  the human spirit” (Die Stadtkrone 59–60). Taut accepted that, “without religion there [was] no true culture, there [was] no art” (Die Stadtkrone 59). For his contemporaries, religion could be translated as socialism in an “apolitical” or “suprapolitical” sense and understood simply as a brotherhood. Now, instead of abusing creative talent by “aestheticizing” industrial things, it was time to convert ideas of a new brotherhood of men into material. In Taut’s eyes, architects’ “final objective” should be to create an architecture that would awaken “the faculties of the soul [now] hidden behind the veil of  faith” and to “crown the city” with “the act of construction in a more elevated sense,” which would make all people “conscious of being members of a great architecture” (Die Stadtkrone 60). Although Taut imagined that the religious traditions of  the church could be returned to by way of architecture, he did not propose monuments of stone as the means to achieving this end, as had been the case in the past. Rather, what he imagined was an architecture that would free the city from its “pale gray” urban texture by awakening the love for brightness. Correspondingly, he recommended that architects should build a colorful, lustrous tower away from old prejudices, and spread their creative energies outward from there. Furthermore, he explained that when he wrote his treatise, “some small beginnings” of  this architecture “[had] already existed,” but for it to become a tradition would take some time (Die Stadtkrone 61). In Taut’s mind, the most significant prototype for the new form of expression leading to a new great cathedral was the Glashaus. Thus, following in the footsteps of  Scheerbart, Taut developed his dream of  “the house of art” as analogous to a towering city crown. As early as 1915, Behne had already asserted that the Glashaus had an “ethical function” and deserved to be called a “sparkling skull” (Behne, “Gedanken” 4).7 In his eyes, the colored glass dome was the roof which

7

In neo-romanticist discourse, the creative spirit was symbolically associated with the brain. For instance, the symbolist writer Alfred Jarry described Vincent van Gogh’s brain as a philosopher stone (Bletter, “Glass Dream” 30).

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sheltered and represented the creative spirit of humanity and thus should crown the new city that Taut identified negatively as a disembodied torso, as a way of  both completing and reforming it. According to Behne, the Glashaus proved that “building as an elemental activity has the power to transform the individual. And now, indeed, building with glass! This would be the surest method of  transforming the European into a human being” (quoted in Bletter, “Paul Scheerbart” 97). Simply put, for Taut, Scheerbart, and Behne, the Glashaus was the stage upon which the religious drama they imagined could be rehearsed. In their view, the Glashaus could draw one to an aesthetic experience which would reactivate the homo religiosus’s vision of  the world inevitably obscured in the daily activities of ordinary modern life. Ultimately, they believed that a creative microcosmic reproduction could remind people of  the correspondence between architecture and the universe, a renewed awareness that would result in a self-crystallization of  the individual as well as the community. As Scheerbart made clear, to achieve such a transformative aesthetic experience, the architect had to neutralize all extraverted sensations and thoughts of  the world. Accordingly, in the Glashaus, Taut’s primary concern was to distance the body from the outside realm in order to provide a moment away from the hustle and bustle of daily life. In utopian terms, this was an attempt to translate the semantic dissonance Scheerbart used in his fantasies into architecture as an aesthetic experience with symbolic as much as social potential. As Scheerbart used color to de-familiarize everyday objects by challenging their literary meaning, Taut used colored glass to generate a spatio-temporal experience that would challenge the limits of visual perception and add an aesthetic and symbolic meaning to the homogenous, banal space of  the industrial city. Obliquely, the importance given to aesthetic experience ref lected the basic premise of Scheerbart and Taut’s utopia: the substance of a collective change depended upon individual change which would enable one to see the world through dif ferent eyes. Unsurprisingly, movement through the Glashaus was meant to evoke a rite of passage that would end in individual transformation. From a distance, the Glashaus looked like a gemstone which grew up from the ground. Coming closer, one would notice a substantial transformation from the bottom upwards. The building emerged from a

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sculpted, organically shaped concrete base. Translucent glass brick walls rested on this solid base, infilling the voids between the columns, which supported the fourteen-sided diaphanous colored glass dome above. To emphasize the crystalline geometry of  the polyhedral cupola, which was composed of rhomboids, Taut struggled to make the frame disappear, so that it would appear as though it were f loating. The reinforced concrete ribs carrying the glass panes of  the dome were hidden in between transparent and prismatic layers. The transformation from soil to crystal, from base to dome, hinted at the relationship between the two basic parts of  the building, which aimed to mirror the structure of  the universe, while also analogizing Taut’s imagined transformation of  the mundane human body into a transcendent spirit (by way of architecture). Taut’s overarching program for the structure was to integrate the dome, which characterized the celestial order, with the hidden cave-like interior housed within the concrete base, which symbolized the fecundity of  the earth. In a romantic way, Taut attributed the talent for establishing continuity between the two symbolic parts of  his Glashaus to the artistic eye. According to him, not every eye was gifted enough to distinguish the intrinsic properties of  things: only a transcendent “great eye” of insight could know these properties and comprehend the creative force behind them. In Taut’s view, the artistic genius had a capacity to share in the knowledge of the transcendental eye, enabling him or her to train the mundane eye of sight by revealing the intrinsic properties of its surroundings to it, primarily through works of art. Taut’s related architectural formula was to bring into visibility the cosmic connections of  his building with the indistinct complex structure of  the landscape. Consequently, while the Glashaus removed its visitors from their immediate environment, it simultaneously reintroduced them to the same landscape as if it were seen through the great eye. For visitors, a spatial as well as a corporeal transition began once they had climbed one of the glass brick stairs on either side of  the building’s terrace. Even though the thicker faces of  the ribs carrying the glass bricks and other infill materials were exposed, when seen from inside, the crystalline polyhedral lost its geometrical rigidity. In turn, the prismatic colored walls, which refracted the daylight in various hues, created a dynamic surface that came into prominence by apparently absorbing

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the frame (cf. Figure 7). And the cupola continually changed its appearance in harmony with the movements of sunlight, which was intended to analogize the sky. Apparently, this dazzling play of  light on translucent surfaces created an illusion that challenged not only climatic conditions but also the earthly burden of gravity. Just as the thick diaphanous glass walls did not allow for any visual contact with the outside world, neither was there any horizontal nor any vertical reference in the hall that would direct the eyes to the cupola’s connection with the ground. Through colorful luminous surfaces in constant f lux, Taut created perceptual ambiguity, which encouraged the impression of an architecture without earthly limitations that must have disrupted visitors’ sense of horizon. Consequently, after visitors entered the glass hall, their contact with mundane reality was hypothetically suspended. In this unearthly, weightless hall animated by light and color, Taut sought to bring the cosmic spirit into view. Under the sunlight, the glass wall opalesced and the cupola seemed to dissolve into a spectrum of colors, which developed from a deep blue, to a moss-green, and then to a golden yellow. Their culmination at the peak was a dazzling creamy white. In short, in the glass hall, Taut aspired to reproduce the experience of dif ferent stages of daylight, and, at the apex of  the dome, to convert it to an apparition of pure light. On the other hand, in the relatively darker, earthly level of  the Glashaus, his interest lay more with the ref lections on the surface. Here, descending the curving stairs wrapped by silvered glass bricks, visitors transmigrated from the celestial to the earthly order. Upon descending the stairs, visitors would have entered into a circular space roofed by a conical ceiling. The ceiling was patterned with a mosaic made of stained and gilded glass tiles centered on the oculus opening upward to the brighter glass hall. The light coming from this oculus was ref lected directly on the first step of the water cascade located at the center of the room. According to Taut, the running water of  the cascade sparkled like gold, with glinting colored lights in it. Although the gold-like shining water was the most prominent element of  this grotto-like descending room, the most dominant color, and perhaps the most prominent feature, was red. The walls surrounding the cascade were all covered with red and polychrome glazed or enamel tiles. The last episode along the walk downward was the dark niche at the

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lowest level. Lined in purple velvet, this niche directed visitors’ eyes toward an opaque glass screen displaying the colorful projections of a hidden kaleidoscope. While at the entrance to the grotto, the lightest stained glass paintings, free of any shadow, made the light visible, and thus in the deepest corner of  the space, the colors hidden in darkness were revealed. Overall, there can be no question that Taut’s building program was based on a hierarchy of light. For Taut, the Glashaus demonstrated that colored glass (and analogously crystal) was the expressive medium through which the spirit of  the world could be seamlessly illuminated. In Taut’s own words, the Glashaus reminded him that “color is a phenomenon that is produced by light,” which encouraged him to use it as the artistic means for giving form to his buildings throughout his career (Taut, “Farbe am Hause”; translated in Düttmann 24). But, under the inf luence of  Scheerbart’s fictions and Behne’s theory, a more significant aspect of  the Glashaus that encouraged Taut’s utopian projects (Alpine Architektur, 1917; Die Stadtkrone, 1918; and Der Weltbaumeister, 1920) during the years of  World War I and immediately after it, was the power of colored glass. Its most profound ef fects were, according to Taut, that it could af fect and change the human psyche. He summarized what he experienced in and learned from his own building as follows: in the domed room [of  the Glashaus] where the light was scattered by ref lecting panes, rain or shine, the mood was never depressing. There was always a dif fused glow, in colors that began with a deep blue at the bottom and progressed upwards through moss-green and golden yellow to the peak, where they culminated in dazzling creamy white. Their vivifying ef fect on the nerves was generally felt, as was a more concentrating, calming ef fect in the lower cascade room, where the ceilings and walls led through all the hues of  the spectrum from red, gold and silver-painted surfaces to polychrome tiles to the ever changing kaleidoscope of the deep violet niche, all of  the colors collected and focused by the bright yellow glow of  the cascade, trickling like golden water (“Beobachtungen” 13; translated in Düttmann 24).

In conclusion, the end imagined for the Glashaus by Taut, Behne, and Scheerbart was a dreamlike experience that would remove one from the material concerns and utilitarian ends of mundane reality, which otherwise would obscure a deeper understanding of art and beauty. According to Scheerbart, the opacity of their imagined glass buildings – in other words,

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the perceptual ambiguity within them – could conquer the sensual bodies of inhabitants. Once the physical had been overcome, the emanation of the spirit from the body could begin. As beings liberated from all earthliness, the inhabitants could attain spiritual purity and act as astral beings. In this respect, especially for Scheerbart, besides its therapeutic power, colored glass promised to open the doors of perception for the spirit which when closed inhibited access to the metaphysical world. However, whether detachment from daily life promised freedom for one to redefine him- or herself, or assured a complete self-exemption which could free one from all gravity and memories of  the past and present, remains an open question. According to the German Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch (1885– 1977), this was the chief weakness of Taut and Scheerbart’s glass utopia. In Taut, Behne, and Scheerbart’s optimistic view, architecture in the shape of a beautiful form purified of all materialist conditions and practical reality could stimulate an exalted aesthetic experience, equivalent to the contemplative acts they associated with religious experience. In this view, the architect was ideally the free-creator who could give form to the house of  God. Bloch was not convinced by this presumption. He observed that in the wake of neo-romantic expressionist discourse, Taut, like many of  his friends and colleagues, naïvely believed that architecture could be a universe unto itself and alone assure Utopia. For Bloch, the alleged autonomy of architecture seemed to promote a kind of dissociative self-justification which blinded many architects to the full complexity of  their art, and its near total capture within the existing system. In this respect, the search for pure form and the use of glass, in Bloch’s view, purified space of content and context, and thus also of meaning. His conviction was that so long as architecture was bound within the “empty space” assured by the logic of  the capitalist system, it would have all but nothing to communicate (Bloch, Utopian Function 189). Bloch sharply diagnosed architecture as a discipline in crisis desperately looking for self-justification; debates on Sachlichkeit at the time could be seen as a symptom of  this crisis. The Vitruvian triad of  firmitas, utilitas, and venustas (firmness, commodity, and delight) that served for centuries as the primary law of architecture had been fragmenting since at least the eighteenth century (Pérez-Gómez; Rykwert). The notion of  built form

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developed out of  Vitruvius had for some time faced a double challenge to its authority from engineering sciences on the one hand and aesthetics on the other. Construction and art came to be seen as two distinct and autonomous areas of knowledge, with the special synthesizing capacity of  the architect increasingly squeezed out between them. Accordingly, in his pessimistic evaluation of early modern architecture, Bloch imagined that there was no choice but to read the principles of pure Sachlichkeit, with its search for pure functional form, and sachliche Kunst, with its search for pure artistic expression, in the same folder of purity that he associated with the unimaginative “art of engineering (Ingenieurkunst)” (Bloch, Utopian Function 190). Consequently, Bloch regarded Taut and Scheerbart’s critique of  the present as “fruitless.” However, in defense of Scheerbart and Taut’s utopian vision, it is worth noting that their aim was to create a Traumkunst (art of dream) in glass architecture but not a Raumkunst (art of space). The ambiguous substance of glass appealed to them, especially by virtue of its fictive attributes. The potential of glass to act in the subjunctive mode of  “as if ” and to suspend material reality invited both men to explore a dif ferent way of engaging with the environment. Intrigued by the paradoxical character of glass – a most incorporeal material (solid liquid, in fact) that urges sensual limits – Scheerbart and Taut attempted to replace traditional stone with it to pursue alternate connections between people and the world. Arguably, theirs was an admirable aim, considering that in the relationship between human beings and the world in which they live, buildings ought to signify more than a simple technical phenomenon (to which they have now been mostly reduced). As a substance on the threshold between materiality and immateriality, glass seemed to signify for Taut (as well as Scheerbart and Behne) a repository of some profound expressive attributes more than simply being a convenient construction material. In Taut’s own words, it was a complement to the surplus meaning of architecture. The act of making was not determined merely by finding a solution to what is pragmatically “necessary.” What is not “surplus” was compelled to perish in time (as existing technology is superseded or original uses change). Taut stressed the impotence of defining architecture merely as a material fixation of practical demands (“Glaserzeugung” 11).

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Taut resorted to the term “surplus” to articulate the metaphoric, representational task of architecture. However, this did not mean that glass was an external factor that lacked any cognitive significance in the perception of  the building or that it was simply an ornamental figure that aimed to make the ordinary more attractive. Rather, it was a variation in signification, a deviation from the literary or materialist meaning of the building. By virtue of its mysterious and enigmatic nature, which was open to ongoing interpretation, glass could serve architects as a matrix to furnish architecture with an excess of signification. Brief ly, Taut anticipated that, like a “garment of  hidden inscriptions,” colored glass could reestablish the narrative capacity of architecture (“Glaserzeugung” 9). Because of its sensuousness, colored glass, which could modulate space and time on sensory, emotional, and aesthetic levels of experience, could open a door to the opaque, symbolic depth of  the world; it could reactivate a vision of  the world similar to the one seen by the eyes of homo religiosus. Furthermore, despite the fact that Taut naïvely wished for the self-suf ficiency of art work, the Glashaus was not a pure product of  his free creative-self. Although unacknowledged by Taut himself, his building drew upon cultural memory and tradition. Specifically, he attempted to reactivate “tower” and “cave,” two archetypes that Bloch saw as “figures of hope,” where existing reality can be surpassed, questioned, and remade (Moylan 159). In light of this, Scheerbart and Taut’s project can be understood as an attempt to “excavate” the “fairy-like quality of architecture” by converting a building material into a rhetorical tool (Bloch, Principle 699–745). Consequently, their utopia remains worthy of reconsideration even in the present, perhaps especially now, when, as David Harvey maintains, architects have yet to embrace their basic responsibility for envisioning and constructing a dif ferent – superior – environment capable of associating “the micro-scale of the body” with the “macro-scale” of a global world view (Harvey 51).

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Works Cited Anderson, Stanford. “Sachlichkeit and Modernity, or Realist Architecture.” Otto Wagner: Ref lections on the Raiment of Modernity. Ed. Harry F. Mallgrave. Santa Monica: The Getty Center for the History of  Art and the Humanities, 1993. 322–60. Banham, Reyner. “The Glass Paradise.” Architectural Review 125 (1959): 87–9. Behne, Adolf. “Bruno Taut.” Der Sturm 4, no. 198/199 (1914): 182–3. ——. “Gedanken über Kunst und Zweck, dem Glashause Gewidmet.” Kunstgewerbeblatt 27.1 (October 1915): 1–4. Behne, Adolf, and Cornelia Briel. Schriften zur Kunst. Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 1998. Bletter, Rosemarie Haag. “Bruno Taut and Paul Scheerbart’s Vision–Utopian Aspects of  German Expressionist Architecture.” Dissertation, Columbia University, 1973. ——. “The Interpretation of  the Glass Dream – Expressionist Architecture and the History of  the Crystal Metaphor.” Journal of  the Society of  Architectural Historians 40.1 (1981): 20–43. ——. “Paul Scheerbart’s Architectural Fantasies.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 34. 2 (1975): 83–97. Bloch, Ernst. The Principle of  Hope. 3 Vols. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1995. ——. The Utopian Function of  Art and Literature. Trans. Jack Zipes and Franklin Mecklenburg. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1988. Coleman, Nathaniel. Utopias and Architecture. Abingdon: Routledge, 2005. Crew, Henry, and Olin H. Basquin. Pocket Hand-Book of Useful Information and Tables Relating to the Use of  Electro-Glazed Luxfer Prisms. Chicago, 1898. Donahue, Neil H. “Introduction: Art History or ‘Sublime Hysteria’.” Invisible Cathedrals: The Expressionist Art History of Wilhelm Worringer. Ed. Neil H. Donahue. University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995. 1–12. Düttmann, Martina, et al. Color in Townscape: For Architects, Designers, and Contractors, for City-Dwellers, and Other Observant People. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1981. Fischer, Theodor. “Was ich bauen möchte.” Kunstwart 20.1 (October 1906): 5–9. Gage, John. Color in Art, World of  Art. New York: Thames and Hudson, 2006. Harvey, David. Spaces of  Hope. Berkeley: University of  California Press, 2000. Herzogenrath, Wulf (ed.). Frühe Kölner Kunstaustellungen. Köln: Wienand, 1981.

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Ikelaar, Leo. Paul Scheerbart und Bruno Taut: Zur Geschichte einer Bekanntschaft: Scheerbarts Briefe der Jahre 1913–1914 an Gottfried Heinersdorf f, Bruno Taut und Herwarth Walden. Paderborn: Igel Verlag Wissenschaft, 1996. Mannheim, Karl. Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge. London: Routledge, 1991. Moylan, Tom. “The Locus of  Hope: Utopia versus Ideology.” Science Fiction Studies 9 (1982): 159–66. Neumann, Dietrich. “The Century’s Triumph in Lighting: The Luxfer Prism Companies and Their Contribution to Early Modern Architecture.” Journal of  the Society of  Architectural Historians 54.1 (1995): 24–53. Partsch, Cornelius. “Paul Scheerbart and the Art of  Science Fiction.” Science Fiction Studies 29 (2002): 202–20. Pérez-Gómez, Alberto. Architecture and the Crisis of  Modern Science. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1983. Rausch, Mechthild. Von Danzig ins Weltall. Paul Scheerbarts Anfangsjahre 1863–1895. Munich: edition text + kritik, 1997. Rausch, Mechthild (ed.). 70 Trillionen Weltgrüße: Eine Biographie in Briefem 1889–1915. Berlin: Argon, 1991. Ricoeur, Paul. “Architecture et Narrativité.” Arquitectonics 4 (2002): 9–29. ——. Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1976. ——. Time and Narrative. 3 Vols. Chicago: University of  Chicago Press, 1984. ——. Lectures on Ideology and Utopia. Ed. George H. Taylor. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. Rykwert, Joseph. The First Moderns: The Architects of  the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1980. Scheerbart, Paul. “Das Glashaus: ein Vorbericht.” Die Glas-Industrie 24.44 (1913): 3. ——. “Glashäuser, Bruno Tauts Glaspalast auf der Werkbund-Ausstellung in Cöln.” Technische Monatshefte 4 (1914): 105–7. ——. “Das Glas-Theater.” Die Gegenwart 39 (1910): 913–14. ——. “Die Entwicklung des Luftmilitarismus und die Auflösung der Europäischen Land-Heere, Festungen und Seeflotten.” Berlin, Oesterheld, 1909. ——. “Die Phantastik in der Malerei.” Freie Bühne 2 (1891): 289. ——. Glasarchitektur. Berlin: Verlag der Sturm, 1914. ——. Lesabéndio: Ein Asteroïden Roman. Kehl: SWAN, 1994. ——. “Licht und Luft.” Ver Sacrum 1.7 (1898): 13–15. Schutz, Alfred. Collected Papers. 3 vols. The Hague: M. Nijhof f, 1962. Taut, Bruno. “Beobachtungen über Farbenwirkungen aus meiner Praxis.” Die Bauwelt 10. 38 (1919): 12–13.

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——. “Das Bauen mit Glas.” Qualität 2.3–4 (1921): 35–9. ——. Die Stadtkrone. Jena: E. Diedrichs, 1919. ——. “Eine Notwendigkeit.” Der Sturm 4.196–7 (1914): 174–5. ——. “Farbenwirkungen aus meiner Praxis.” Das hohe Ufer 1.11 (1919): 263–6. ——. “Glaserzeugung und Glasbau.” Qualität; Wirtschaftliche Bildung und Qualitätsproduktion 1.1–2 (April/May 1920): 9–14.

——. Glashaus: Werkbundausstellung Cöln 1914. Cologne, 1914. Reprinted in Herzogenrath, Frühe Kölner Kunstausstellungen 287–93. Whyte, Iain Boyd. Bruno Taut and the Architecture of  Activism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Worringer, Wilhelm. Form in Gothic. New York: Schocken Books, 1957.

PART TWO

Reconsiderations

Malcolm Miles

An Orderly Life: Ildefons Cerdà and the Northern Extension of  Barcelona

The Liberal Utopianism of  Eixample In this chapter I will consider the theories of  the progressive Catalonian urbanist Ildefons Cerdà (1815–76), taking his 1859 plan for the northern extension of  Barcelona as a point of departure. Devised in the context of a campaign to extend the city beyond its medieval walls, Cerdà’s plan can be read as both a document of utopian imagination, and as a practical proposal, much of which was realized. Although realization did not entirely correspond to Cerdà’s proposals – due to the impact of speculative building in subsequent decades – much of the proposed infrastructure was delivered. Cerdà’s specification of regular proportions of  façades, blocks, and street dimensions remains a distinctive aspect of  the district known as Eixample, or “extension.” Though Eixample is now a middle-class area, Cerdà had intended it to be an egalitarian development of fering all citizens decent housing, and access to both green spaces and the convenience of modern public transport. It was also planned as a mixed-use zone where dwelling, leisure, and workplaces (including factories) would be in proximity to one another. As such, the 1859 plan may be read as prefiguring some of today’s urban villages, such as can be found in many corners of  the world. But despite realization not being in exact accordance with Cerdà’s plans for it, Eixample nevertheless retains many of its intended innovative and progressive aspects; in retrospect, it can also be read as a document of  liberal reformism. As such, it is typical of nineteenth-century European ef forts to contain the threat of mass revolt. Moreover, Cerdà’s writing confirms his

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place within this tradition. Issues thus emerge as to the relation between an orderly environment and public order; and between moral improvement and modernization. Underpinning both environmental and moral improvement is the imperative to prevent insurrection, and although Cerdà proposed an equally high quality of environmental benefit for all citizens, he nonetheless retained social distinctions in his provision of large houses for the bourgeoisie and small apartments for artisans. The creation of an environment conducive to human wellbeing, then, is also a provision for social stability based on the re-engineering of human conduct via the rebuilding of  the city; at the very least, making this correlation, in the way Cerdà and many urban reformers have, presumes that the one assures the other. This utopian thread begins within nineteenthcentury liberal reformism and continues, through various adaptations, in twentieth-century modernist architecture and planning. Perhaps, in this context, the f law in the work of architects and urbanists associated or identified with the International Congress of Modern Architects (CIAM), in which Le Corbusier was a key figure, is precisely its conviction that a new society could be built by design. The demolition of postwar tower blocks such as Ronan Point in East London, in 1984, sealed the fate of architectural and urban modernism in the popular imagination. If  today there are ef forts to reclaim its humane or political legacy, a reconsideration of modernism’s arguably naïve reliance on social re-engineering may be illuminating (see Hatherley). There are, too, correspondences between Cerdà’s liberalism and the modernizing tendency of  both the Welsh-born social reformer Robert Owen (1771–1858) and the French utopian socialist Charles Fourier (1792– 1883), though in dif ferent ways. Owen adopted a managerial approach geared to the increased productivity (by self-coercion) of workers, thereby maintaining the status of managerial expertise; but Fourier saw work as potentially libidinal, like play. Fourier’s complex and systematic analysis of  the passions in human nature led him to posit that, through mutual attraction, individuals of matched passions would desire the association of fered by work. Fourier’s ideas were applied only sporadically and at a small scale – not in the Versailles-like, and non-urban, settlement of the Phalanstère, a palace for around 60,000 people of matched passional qualities – while

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Owen is known for the application of  his theories in New Lanark, Scotland (now a heritage tourist attraction). Yet in his later ef forts to found settlements, Owen failed. Members of  the community at Harmony Hall, for example, founded in 1839 and dissolved in 1845, complained of poor living conditions, subsistence rations, and Owen’s contemptuous attitude (Coates 96). Perhaps, as I have argued elsewhere, Fourier’s writing can also be read in an older utopian framework, not as plan, but as critique in the tradition dating back to Thomas More and Tomasso Campanella, where what is presented to the reader is not description of the far-away but negation of present reality (Urban Utopias 37–56). This possibility – of utopian text as provocation rather than plan – is of more than historical interest, and relevant to a reconsideration of Cerdà’s work (including his extensive theoretical writing). In one way, Fourier can be aligned to the avant-garde in French cultural criticism from the 1820s to the 1860s, prior to the defeat of  the Paris Commune in 1871; common to both is a tendency to boldness, and with it a reliance on the role of  the educated or cultured visionary to lead society, in ef fect, to a golden dawn (Miles, Urban Avant-Gardes 7–22). The line between what was utopian fantasy, as provocation of a utopian imaginary in the reader’s mind, and what was intended to be realized materially is not fixed. Or, at least in retrospect, it can be debated. To read an axis of tension between imagination and plan (as dif ferent kinds of intention) allows for continuing reconsideration of Cerdà’s Eixample in particular and the utopian socialist project in general. In this way, Cerdà’s 1859 plan is both a blueprint, and, together with his writing, a theory for further elaboration. Cerdà’s plan, then, with his accompanying texts, can be considered alongside other future-looking social critique from the period as a political platform as well as a specification for urbanization. Ultimately, his reliance on design is compatible with Ludwig Feuerbach’s theory of materialism, in which human actions are determined by the environment, or the conditions, in which they occur. Hegel’s idea of  history was equally abstracted from human intervention (Antonio 6). For Marx, both conceptions were inadequate as theories for change, suggesting too abstract an idea of humanity. Marx’s solution was dialectical materialism, which fuses the two so that humans have a capacity to inf lect change in the conditions by which they

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are conditioned. The apparent tension between determination of  human experience by external forces and the parallel possibility of independent agency opens a basic dif ficulty in reconsideration of urban theory, including Cerdà’s, especially when the question asked is who determines the shape and extent of change, the planner and designer, or the dweller who modifies space through occupation. In the case of Eixample, some modification was made to the plan by the speculative developers who built the zone, and by later residents or property owners (such as infilling garden courtyards). Yet whatever vicissitudes the northern extension of  Barcelona has undergone, might it still be possible to read Cerdà’s theories as a case of a utopian-imaginary articulated in terms of urban development? Before looking at the plan for Eixample and its context in Barcelona, it is worth mentioning that Cerdà was aware of the utopian writing of Étienne Cabet (1788–1856) (Sanchez de Juan 7). Cabet’s Voyage en Icarie (first published in 1839) describes an “imagined” community. Cabet’s attempt to establish an Icarian community based on order and uniformity after a visit to New Lanark, but with greater emphasis on community (and incipient communism), links him to the applied utopianism of nineteenth-century industrial society and modernism. Yet his ef fort failed, like most, and I suggest the continuing value of a text such as Cabet’s, like Fourier’s, is as imaginative literature provoking the reader’s utopian consciousness, rather than as a blueprint for action. Cabet’s text is, too, riddled with art. John Carey writes, “In Cabet’s novel, Icarian life is described by a young French painter, Eugène, who has left France after the July Revolution” (232). Description by a painter rather than by a planner or even a voyager suggests a veil of interpretation, problematizing whatever claims the text might have to “scientific” description. Cabet’s formulaic description of a society based on an order of similarities might be an appropriate comparative text for some of Cerdà’s theoretical writing. When Cabet specifies the food eaten in Icaria, and writes of meals taken there as surpassing those of  the best Paris restaurants, he is giving an image to a desire rather than producing a menu for his local café (Carey 233). I realize it is fanciful to say, but I wonder if elements of Cerdà’s writing – however specific – could be read similarly. This is a rhetorical question. So I will begin with an outline of  the context for Cerdà’s 1859

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plan, indicate some of its elements, and discuss urbanization and liberal reformism generally, considering also Cerdà’s interest in technology, and the idea of ordering (social as well as physical), to argue that Cerdà’s plan of fers much to inform today’s urbanism but is f lawed by its implicit acceptance of an imperative to preserve a relatively conservative notion of public order.

Context: Barcelona and Cerdà Today, Barcelona is “hailed as the most successful global model for postindustrial urban regeneration based on its urban design, and celebrated as a textbook example of  how to turn a city into a global player” (Degen, “Barcelona’s Games” 131). It has a wealth of modernist (art nouveau) architecture, including the buildings of  Antonio Gaudí, and museums for the work of Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, and Catalan medieval art. Of note, too, are the hundred or so new or refurbished public spaces threaded through many of the city’s residential neighborhoods, created when the city hosted the Olympic Games in 1992. Equally noticeable is the renewal of a section of  the city’s hitherto run-down waterfront, which is now used by people of all social classes. In 2004 Barcelona hosted a World Forum of Culture and identified the old working-class district of Poble Nou as a quarter for the knowledge-based industries of communication design and digital technologies. In the 1990s, the city led schemes for renewal, financing redevelopment, and selling on completed sites to the private sector, allowing returns on public investment to be reinvested in further projects. Although the private sector has come to the fore since 2004, in further waterfront renewal and a new commercial quarter at Diagonal Mar, the city has continued to upgrade infrastructure such as public transport, street lighting, and public services. Today, Barcelona competes globally for inward investment, attracts large numbers of cultural and business tourists, and draws a line under the economic decline of  the fascist period, punishment for the city’s Republicanism.

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The city was economically repressed, too, following its fall to the Bourbon monarchy in the siege of 1714. The space beyond its medieval walls – 1,250 meters, the range of a cannon – was declared a military zone in which no building was permitted, to confine industry within the old city. In the 1850s, there was a rise in land costs as steam-powered machines for manufacturing enabled an expansion of production but required additional space. The result was cramped, unsafe working conditions, while overcrowded housing encouraged the spread of infectious diseases such as cholera. Significantly, the prize for a response to the first call for papers on the benefits of demolishing the city walls (in 1840) was awarded not to an engineer but to the hygienist Pere Felip Monlau. There were repeated strikes, too, the largest being in 1855. And prior to his drafting of  the 1859 plan, Cerdà was commissioned to produce a report on the old city’s housing conditions. Elsewhere, other cities were also modernizing, not least by the adoption of steam technology to drive machines. According to Isabelle Margarit, the sight of a steam train in Nîmes “made [Cerdà] aware of a new age – the civilization of industry, transport and communications, with the city as its central stage of activity” (28). Cerdà’s visit to Nîmes was part of  his training as a civil engineer, dealing with highways, canals, and harbors, within the military structure through which engineers were qualified. Having previously studied architecture, mathematics, and the natural sciences at a school run by the Board of  Trade, and a period as a lieutenant in the National Militia in Madrid (a liberal, democratic institution), Cerdà qualified as an engineer in 1841. But he resigned his commission in 1849 on inheriting a large rural estate – El Serda, in Centelles – after the death of his brother in 1848, following that of  his father in 1844. This rural background, however, was not unmodern: his father and grandfather were “members of  those enterprising generations that had hitched their interests to trade with the Americas” (Margarit, 28). His forebears’ industriousness produced the inherited wealth which enabled Cerdà to pursue his interest in urban form and theory, and to adopt an independent stance. The same wealth and status underpinned his involvement in politics, and election to the Spanish parliament in 1851 to represent the Second District in Barcelona.

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An opportunity to apply his thought on modernization came in 1854, when the Madrid government permitted initial demolition of  Barcelona’s walls. Unlimited urban expansion was then allowed (by edict of the Ministry of War) in 1858. Cerdà had become a city councilor, in which capacity he had produced the report on housing conditions mentioned above. The answer to the problems of overcrowding and unsanitary conditions was, to Cerdà, quite obvious: to expand the city, not merely to build more of it as it was, but to design a new, rationally planned city, in which disease would not spread and living conditions would be improved. Yet just as Cerdà’s engineering training and his links to Madrid put him in a key position to undertake such a project, his political connections beyond Catalonia aroused distrust among Catalan nationalists in Barcelona. Cerdà’s reputation today remains tarnished by his link to the Bourbon regime, perceived as precursor of the fascists.

The Plan and Cerdà’s Subsequent Theories After commissioning a survey of the proposed site – a f lat plain of around 11,000 hectares – from architects Josep Mas Vila, Josep Fontseré Domènech, and Francesc Daniel Molina, Barcelona’s city council organized a competition for plans for its northern extension in 1859, one year after receiving permission for expansion beyond the city walls. An Expansion Commission was established, a large loan was sought for building new roads, and Cerdà was appointed by the Civil Governor of  the province (a Madrid appointee) to produce a master plan for the city’s extension. The city’s competition of 1859 was in opposition to this Madrid initiative, organized in order to produce alternatives to it and marginalize Cerdà’s plan. The Madrid authorities retaliated by ordering that Cerda’s plan be displayed in public alongside the competition entries. In the event, the competition winner was architect Antoni Rovira i Trias, who proposed a radial plan of grid sections fanning out from the old city. Other entries also used various grid and boulevard combinations, punctuated by large city parks. In 1860, and against local sentiment, Madrid approved Cerdà’s plan.

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Initially he supervised its implementation. Nevertheless, as Eva Gimeno writes, debate “continued to rage through the first decade of implementation” (23). Eventually, after repeated interference and controversy, Cerdà left the city for Valencia. Even though Cerdà was frustrated by opposition and eventually driven to leave, what was built according to his 1859 plan remains remarkable, particularly for its infrastructure and rational proportions. Cerdà’s plan provides for a street grid in which half the space of streets is for pedestrians. All enjoy access to nearby green spaces, and each block has an internal garden. In the plan, there is street seating for porters carrying goods, street lighting, a rapid transit system, and a mix of residential, commercial, and industrial uses of land. Cerdà had the advantage of a blank ground, and could conceive his plan in the abstract as an ideal urbanization, a Cartesian space of intention. But to walk around Eixample today reveals Cerdà’s feeling for the sociable, too. In the 1990s, some of the garden courtyards which had been filled in over the decades were cleared of accretions, returning to Cerdà’s vision. In tourist brochures, Eixample is compared to Paris with its tree-lined streets and fashionable shops. But it was meant for artisans as well as the bourgeoisie, and dif fers significantly from GeorgeEugène Haussmann’s (1809–91) modernization of  Paris, which was more explicitly for military purposes (after popular revolts in 1789, 1830, and 1848). Haussmann cut boulevards through the existing city fabric, eliminating the old working-class quarters, to prevent the building of  barricades. Cerdà’s grid and mixing of classes was a less draconian response, assuming the self-improving qualities of citizens, which he imagined the improved conditions would facilitate. Perhaps this helps explain why Eixample is not compared to the extensions of Paris in peripheral zones such as Aubervilliers, Bobigny, Montreuil, and Vitry (Barber 89–127). For Cerdà, the instability Haussmann sought to crush is dissolved instead by planning improvements, which he believed would improve social attitudes. While Cerdà goes into a high level of detail in the design of housing – specifying hand-rails on both sides of stairways, for example, in a concern for personal safety– he is concerned for the safety of society’s institutions, too (Soria y Puig 27). Citing Buenos Aires as a city free from conf lict, he writes, “The barricade battles which are so frequent and so devastating […] in the labyrinthine streets of our cities, are completely

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unknown in those countries” (quoted in Soria y Puig 135). Of course, there may have been other reasons for that. Cerdà, in ef fect, specifies the dimensions and design of streets and buildings in a prospectus for a complete new city to replace the old city with its dark, twisting alleys given to crime and superstition, disease and strikes. The total area of the planned extension is ten times that of the old city, consisting of a regular grid in which all lots are of the same size. One boulevard quarters the city and another diagonally intersects it. Cerdà compares radial, ring, and combined systems, as in the existing plan of  Vitoria (Soria y Puig 121, figure 9). Other plans submitted in 1859 tended toward similar combinations. Rovira i Trias, for example, proposed three grids divided by boulevards radiating from the old city (Soria y Puig 122, figure 10). Cerdà knew of precedents in Boston and Philadelphia, but adopts the grid for ethical reasons. He writes that the square grid has special properties beyond those of  the rectangular grid: “the rectangular system tends and comes closest to satisfying those feelings of equity and justice, that noble badge of our present era; while the square grid is justice itself and equality of rights” (quoted, in Soria y Puig 127). The dimensions of  the Eixample blocks are 113 meters square, with chamfered corners, divided by streets of a uniform 20 meters (10 of which is the central carriageway). The maximum building height is 16 meters to ensure the penetration of sunlight. The equal width of streets except the boulevards which intersect the grid, Gran Via and Diagonal, af firms a concept of urbanization as an ordering based on equality, while the dimensions themselves af firm modernity (in being metric; Spain adopted the system in 1855). Gran Via bisects the arrangement of 1,200 blocks, cut perpendicularly by Passeig Sant Joan. This echoes the intersection of  Carrer Ciutat and Carrer del Bisbe in the old city (the surviving remnant of the Roman plan). In an 1863 revision of  the plan, uniformly square blocks are replaced by variations in two, three, four, and five modules combined. The footways are subdivided into two 2.5-meter widths on each side of the carriageway, one space for people transporting goods and one for unencumbered pedestrians thus able to linger at their ease. Trees are planted at 8-meter intervals, and lights sited every 28 meters. In a move seemingly as much civic as related to ideals of productivity, Salvador Tarragó notes, “Each intersection was to have an electric clock” sited above a central kiosk (9).

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Recognizing the need for spaces of mobility and spaces of  familial retreat outside the blocks, streets are categorized either as passages of movement or as sites of sociability. Cerdà writes, “The direction of a street has two purposes of equal importance […] it represents the direction of traf fic movement […] [and] to attend to and satisfy the needs of  habitability” (quoted in Soria y Puig 140). On one hand, the city requires the unimpeded circulation of people and goods to produce prosperity, but on the other hand, for the good of social cohesion, people need to be able to use the spaces in front of  their houses or apartments as extensions of domestic space, and to do so safely and pleasurably. Without mobility, a city condemns its inhabitants to “wasting away … [and] nothingness” while without social interaction they are isolated (Cerdà quoted in Soria y Puig 141). The tension produced by attempting to accommodate conf licting needs, or functions, is resolved by aligning-traf fic movement across the grid to horizontal (east-west) and habitability to vertical (north-south) directions, so that through traf fic does not interrupt the social life of  the street. A more recent version of  Cerdà’s solution to such dual needs of  the street can be found in the Dutch home-zone developments in which pedestrians have preference over vehicles. The street is a unified entity. That it is designed, and not the default outcome of building, denotes its importance as a location of f lows (people, goods, carriages, drainage) and of social mixing. The two processes are integrated in Cerdà’s subsequent theory, where he characterizes the street as distinct from the arbitrary “ways” of rural settlements: “the way for transit and the houses for dwelling must, therefore, come together in order to form a street” (quoted in Soria y Puig 111). Accordingly, Cerdà writes, in his General Theory of  Urbanization (Teoría General Urbanización): If  the street is the space that remains free between two rows of  houses, it is natural and logical that we should say something of those constructions which give it shape and define its look graphically. We know full well that living, rational beings have their dwelling within these houses, that they receive vitally important services from the street, of such a nature and of such moment that urban life would be impossible without them. And we know also that these relations are not to be passed over in silence; on the contrary, they require the most conscientious and detailed study because they are […] the quintessence of urbanization (quoted in Soria y Puig 111).

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Somewhat anticipating the work of  William Holly Whyte in New York in the 1970s, Cerdà foresees a range of mobile vendors seeking trade from passers by. They include food sellers (he lists thirteen types of food), sellers of drinks (six types) and fuel (four types). In addition, he lists thirty-four trades in fixed street locations (on the street, not in shops), from clothes menders and fan makers to newsagents, f lorists, ink suppliers, and organ grinders. There are hire cabs and movers’ carts, street auctioneers, and sellers of costume jewelry (Necesidades de la circulation 125–6). Cerdà’s liking for systematic detail seems not too unlike Fourier’s. Cerdà saw the principles on which his 1859 plan is based as applicable to any city and informed by grid cities in Latin America such as Buenos Aires, which, as noted above, he saw as free from conf lict. But the grid is not merely a geometric nicety; it carries a variety of meanings derived from specific contexts. The grid of colonial cities in New Spain is derived from that of pre-conquest cities such as Tenochtitlan, in which a large square – plaza mayor – is a center from which streets lead orthogonally (Low 101–26). The grid of New York, set out in 1811 when only the southern tip of  Manhattan was built on, is a means to divide land for sale in equally priced lots (Gandy 81). The grid of  Washington DC is a combination of an orthogonal grid and diagonal through-ways, aimed at enabling movement as a practical necessity and denoting the social mobility of a bourgeois democracy (Sennett 265–70). These early forms of urbanization were viewed by some of those who undertook and commissioned them as echoing nature. In 1781, Francesco Milizia (1725–98), Italian art and architectural historian, theorist, and biographer, published his most important work, Principi di architettura civile (Principles of Civil Architecture), in which he wrote that a city is like a forest in which streets should radiate star-like, or in herringbone pattern (Gandy 11). A notion of naturalism persists in English town-and-country planning, drawing from Scottish urbanist and eutopian Patrick Geddes’s (1854–1932) idea of an urban morphology based on the universal principles of natural growth. The Garden City Movement promoted by Ebenezer Howard (1850–1928) in the 1900s fuses town (employment and conf luence) and countryside (fresh air and dispersal) in a utopian return to a mythicized harmony (see Hall and Ward). Though Cerdà has no link to Howard, he

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writes of a synthesis of opposites: “Ruralize the urban, urbanize the rural […] Fill the Earth”; and argues that the benefits of green space and fresh air are both moral and physical (quoted in Soria y Puig 27). Arturo Soria y Puig notes that “ruralization of the urban and urbanization of the rural” is not only spatial when “Ruralizing the urban […] consists […] of making the peace and isolation of the countryside compatible with the movement and sociability proper to the city” (27). But for Cerdà, the grid is not a natural form but a new, qualitative articulation of  bourgeois democracy, of an emerging commercial society. Urbanization, then, is the provision of a humane and orderly environment. This might suggest that Cerdà anticipates the clean sweep proposed by Le Corbusier in City of  Tomorrow and Its Planning. However, this would be an oversimplification of  their dif ferences. While Cerdà’s theory of urbanization privileges modern technologies (primarily steam), Le Corbusier sees his urban vision as articulating the needs of a developed industrial society in which mobility is airplane f light. In place of nature, which is putatively the model for Cerdà’s project, Le Corbusier looks to the ideal of unified order as though it were determined by “the big Other, for whom his fantasy was staged” (Salecl 107–8). For Le Corbusier, order achieved is thus a return of myth in the midst of a technological society, which redirects attention to the varieties of rationality: the ordering and the enabling, the conceived and the lived. For Cerdà, the orderly produces an orderly life, conducive to prosperity, but it can do so only because technology enables the production of the city, and especially its sense of mobility, its dynamism (rather than technology being an end in itself ).

Technologies Cerdà’s revised plan of 1863 included a proposal for a network of  tram lines operating circular routes and a narrow-gauge railway using a recently patented French system which enabled trains to turn in small spaces. Hence their tracks could run in the grid, with turning points at its nodes;

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chamfered blocks at these points produced diagonal squares around three times the width of  the street. Cerdà saw the system at work in Nîmes in 1844, and participated in a parliamentary debate on railways in 1851. But while most railways served inter-city routes, their stations like gateways (because railways could not be taken through densely built urban fabric), he writes of urban railways sited in the street as being as normal a means of conveyance as the horse and cart (Magrinyà 13). He proposed a new central station at the port, with a series of private goods routes linked to a terminal (later the site of one of  Barcelona’s two main train stations, Estació França). Three rail lines were to run through Eixample, in passages below street level where the basements of commercial buildings could be adapted with loading and unloading bays. Interchanges with tram and carriage transport were to be provided at street level. After two decades, a compromised plan for an urban rail line was realized. Francesc Magrinyà writes that Cerdà’s proposal for rapid, universal, urban transport “only came into its own with the arrival of  the motorcar” (14). But the idea of a rapid transit system was later adopted by cities such as New York, London, Budapest, Paris, and Vienna (all with underground metro systems). Cerdà was simply ahead of  his time. Steam power was already used in Barcelona’s manufacturing industries, but for Cerdà its potential was in enabling viality, which might translate as livability. More than the provision of a pleasant streetscape, it indicates a city’s place in a trajectory of civilization. Cerdà writes of  the transition to steam power: [It] constitutes an enormously far-reaching step which, on its own, embraces all the earlier eras, and goes much further still […] The present generation ought, then, to do something which none of its predecessors did, something which they could not even in their wildest dream believe necessary: to create a new urban world for a new life and equally new urban operations. What comparison can there be between the radical revolution which the new locomotion and the application of electricity bring on, and the innovation which the conquest and application of equestrian locomotion may have introduced […] in those primitive times (quoted in Soria y Puig 313).

While he anticipated objections to the integration of steam railways in a city’s streets, Cerdà saw the benefits of mobility as outweighing any disadvantage. He also saw an inevitability in the adoption of urbanized railways,

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in that when public feeling reaches a certain degree of intensity, assumed to be a product of rationality, then “this desire will soon be addressed, and it will not belong before it is satisfied” (quoted in Soria y Puig 323). He becomes quite lyrical: the whistle of  the locomotive as it passes rapidly at the foot of our urbs, where it ceaselessly deposits numerous trains full of passengers and goods, which wheeled locomotion subsequently distributes and spreads throughout the interior […] [and] the incalculable movement which develops in the urb and the countryside as a result of this, warn us with a boisterous and forceful eloquence that the ancient manner of  being is disappearing as the new situation is being created, and its scope and significance are dif ficult to measure and predict (quoted in Soria y Puig 324).

This passage from Cerdà’s General Theory of  Urbanization could be compared to some passages by Le Corbusier in The City of  Tomorrow, or the proposal in Aircraft, to “sweep away the refuse with which life is soiled, clogged, encumbered. Let us undertake the great tasks of the new machine civilization” (caption to plate 110). In both cases a new, or even utopian, society is predicated on new technologies of movement, to be realized in a renewal which treats existing actuality as a blank slate. For Cerdà, the open plain outside Barcelona was such a blank slate, and it really was more or less bare, given the Bourbon prohibition on building. For Le Corbusier, in contrast, the center of  Paris – which he proposed to demolish – was already a densely inhabited metropolis. The comparison reveals a dif ference, too, beyond the commitment to technological progress: in the tradition of  Haussmann, Le Corbusier’s vision is violent, demonstrated by his proposed sweeping away of  the extant urban fabric; whereas Cerdà relies on what he takes as an inevitable arc of progress, which assures a gradual liberation of  human reason from habit and superstition. Although both saw their projects as inevitable, Le Corbusier’s plan would be realized through an act of will, whereas Cerdà believed his would be teleological fulfillment. Both are enlightenment positions, both instrumentalist, but Cerdà is a liberal while Le Corbusier’s plan for Paris was first published (in extract) in the French fascist newspaper Nouveau siècle (1 May 1927), a fact which remains open to interpretation but may reveal less about his politics than his misguided, even naïve, opportunism.

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Comparison between Cerdà and Le Corbusier’s respective myths of inevitability draws my attention, however, to the dif ficulty of instrumentalism. Crucially, does Cerdà’s plan rely on the authority of the governing authorities, or on an authority based in knowledge (which would be more organic than imposed)? His idea that the citizen moves, almost as if naturally, towards reason, suggests the latter, except that reason is to be liberated precisely by the new rational environment of  the grid plan. And it is the engineer (or we might now say the planner) who devises the plan, in a vanguard role. However, even if the engineer or planner might be trusted to act for the good of the people, technical expertise too easily drifts from knowledge to power. Thus, inasmuch as utopian schemes for new types of  human settlement are prescriptive and almost always rely on an overseeing authority for their implementation, even (or especially) in the guise of modernization, they feed a sentiment which casts all such projects as either communist or fascist. I think Cerdà’s genuine and comprehensive concern for human wellbeing puts him outside this authoritarianism, but there are issues. One such issue is highlighted by way of a consideration of the specter of the Chicago rational planning model of the inter-war and postwar eras, in which the technical expertise of master-planners was seen as removing planning, and resolution of  the conf licts inevitably produced in urban expansion, from political control (just as politics removed the control of a range of issues from private or family jurisdiction). Biological metaphors were often used to naturalize processes in fact produced through complex human interactions. Biology, that is, was a means to distance the city from historical processes. Cerdà’s reliance on a trajectory of progress may have served a similar function, not based in plant life but in an abstraction.

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Political Order I mentioned above that Cerdà approached his 1859 plan after writing a report on housing conditions in the old city. He was sympathetic to workers’ needs: the provision of  bad housing was equivalent to the sale of  bad food, the latter being subject to legal penalties which by implication should apply to the former. He feared the danger of insurrection when conditions reached a pitch of unacceptability, when there is little left to lose. He wrote, “In modern cities there is an imperative need which we can never forego: the need for internal defense and preservation of public order” (quoted in Soria y Puig 133). Not surprisingly, Cerdà references Haussmann’s remodeling of Paris: if the streets of the old city af forded strikers alleys and sudden corners by which to avoid a military force, “the administration has a direct […] interest” in the streets being straight and “completely clear […] since their action, both to monitor and prevent, and to resist any disorder, is thus less encumbered” (quoted in Soria y Puig 133). One of  Cerdà’s criticisms of rival plans such as Rovira’s is that they did not of fer uniform straight streets but the tortuous angles of a combination of radial and polygonal systems. Nonetheless, Cerdà always hoped to forestall revolt by design, not to fight it in the streets. Throughout Europe at the time there was a real fear of insurrection. In Victorian London, for example, it was not uncommon for people to throw stones at the Queen’s carriage in the 1860s and 1870s; the East End was a notorious site of crime and various iniquities. There were even individual tours for middle-class citizens to see the opium dens with a police escort. In London, as in Barcelona and other cities, improvement was seen as the solution to social problems apparently resulting from urban decay. The founding of  the Tate Gallery at Millbank, on the site of a former prison on a marsh, in a district of new housing blocks for artisans, was imagined as a means to improve the minds of the lower classes by educating them in middle-class taste. Although there were many piecemeal reform projects attempted during the latter half of the nineteenth century in London and elsewhere, Cerdà goes much further by planning an entire new city. Yet his ef forts echo those of urban improvers in London, who built sewers as a means to counter cholera.

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Improvement is inextricably linked to social order in the liberal imagination, particularly since the Enlightenment. Cerdà wrote of  “The barricade battles which are so frequent and so devastating […],” but answered by “the strategic advantages which the square grid layout allows […] even though it is not circumscribed by a walled precinct” (quoted in Soria y Puig 135). In other texts, he wrote of  harmonizing what is with what must be, and of  harmonizing competing or contesting interests within the city. To the “men of revolution” he responded that he is as revolutionary as they are; and to the “men of  tradition […] as conservative […] as you” (quoted in Soria y Puig 428). He concludes, obliquely referencing aspects of  his theory of urbanism: And that is why this common desideratum can neither be achieved by the dark and jarring path of revolution or with the un-roadworthy vehicle of traditionalism. Instead […] by lighting the way brilliantly, it is possible to reach a happy ending without any damage to either vehicle or way (quoted in Soria y Puig 428).

Perhaps this is a utopia; but it is also – a perennial dif ficulty – a city without conf lict, where an absence of carriage crashes stands for an absence of contestation (for space, for rights, etc).

Reductive Utopianism? Cerdà’s 1859 plan, its 1863 revision, and his subsequent theories seek to harmonize the basic needs for habitation and circulation, regarded by French urban theorist Françoise Choay as “the two basic concepts that remain today the operative poles of urbanism” (237). Sociation figures in Cerdà’s plans and theory as a third basic need, somewhat between habitation and movement, anticipating the emphasis on new social bonds in urban societies discussed by sociologists such as Émile Durkheim and Georg Simmel. All those street traders, for example, and the porters resting on the seats provided, use the city not only for the movement required by work but also for relief from toil in conversations with other dwellers. Similarly, the extension of domestic space in the street outside the apartment block is a

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specifically urban possibility. Again, the emphasis on urban transport systems enables mobility which in turn enables social mixing. This does not erase class dif ferences – as said above, artisans get small but decent apartments while middle-class families get large villas – but it contributes to conditions in which members of dif ferent social groups form perceptions of each other’s milieu. Yet this, too, is a means to prevent the eruption of revolt by defusing class conf lict; civic harmony is conceived of here as both the problem and result of civic design. For Choay, urban solutions conceived in terms of  living space and movement alone lead to a reductive urbanism, but also initiate a concept of  the city as mobile: “Cerdà’s city is in motion, with f luctuating boundaries that cannot be fixed, and an endlessly mobile population” (Choay 237). Cerdà was a technological modernizer, too, like Owen – who installed a model railway to clear dishes from the dining room at Harmony Hall, though he was only brief ly there – and modernization is in many instances a utopian project. The period from the early nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century saw a transition, in part through technologies of movement and mass-production, from utopianism as oblique critique, or negation, to utopianism as plan, manifested in the intent and ability to actually build new cities. But solutions by design in the brave new world tend to be imposed on dwellers seen as unable to realize it themselves. A relation of  “power-over” thus persists and is not replaced by that of “power-to.” Nevertheless, I would still argue that Cerdà’s authoritarian civic ordering does not mean that all aspects of  his works are valueless. His urban vision has elements in keeping with current and developing models of a sustainable city: the mixed uses of space which mean people live, work, and socialize in the same spatial matrix; the provision of good public services, and a built environment conducive to wellbeing; or the provision of green spaces as urban lungs, as examples, remain precedents for the re-thinking of what constitutes a livable city today. Perhaps the critical value of Cerdà’s theories remains that they lead to a reconsideration of what constitutes civic order, amid the tension (which may be beyond resolution) between ordering and an emergent, initially only imagined, order in freedom. Order is a complex concept. In modernity the idea of order is understood as being wrought out of nature. In much orthodox modernist city

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planning, natural conditions, or those of a site, are taken as a blank space on which to inscribe a new space. With the planned city, design is separated from building. Planning is the instrument of an order foreseen, accomplished by building. Order becomes instrumentalism. It is the dark side of the world’s disenchantment. It frees human endeavor from rule by mysterious and unpredictable fate, and ushers in the liberal-humanist subject who exercises will and agency on the world, in processes reproducing the patterns of a previous mythicization (Adorno and Horkheimer 3–5). Yet it is not rationality which destroys. For Italian chemist, author, and Holocaust survivor, Primo Levi (1919–87), reason is the last means of resistance against fascism (Levi 396–7). It is dif ficult to disagree with Levi, but I regard hope as a mobilizing force. Drawing from Henri Lefebvre, I would argue that just as power tends to leak, so design tends to be undone by the everyday acts of dwellers in their uses of space. In this context, Cerdà’s urban theories stand, despite their political history and instrumentalism, as a model of sociable urbanization, a process of design for wellbeing, confirmed in the provision of a framework for unanticipated urban practices into the present. The plan and the subsequent theories are deeply f lawed, as discussed above; more troubling still, the plan was a blueprint, an abstraction. But could it also be read retrospectively as vehicle of imagination, its unwavering rationality provoking a vision of a humane city? In an attempt to untangle this, it is worth citing Choay on Cabet’s Voyage en Icarie: “There is no need to recall in detail how the model, the metropolis of  Icaria by whose replication Cabet hoped to transform and redeem society, combines features of  Napoleonic Paris with a radical standardization of neighborhoods (dif ferentiated only by their color), dwellings, and even furniture” (227). There is no need, because the detail is indicative rather than prescriptive. The same can be said of Fourier’s writing. As Cabet says of the common dinner eaten by up to two thousand people “in superb halls elegantly decorated,” it “surpasses by its magnificence anything you may be able to imagine” (quoted in Carey 233). The point is to extend imagination to more desirable possibilities, in images which are a first step to the realization of a better world in whatever form it eventually takes. Ernst Bloch similarly regards imagined better worlds, like Cockaigne, and the images of plenty

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and play, which have a subversive role in popular literature, as the beginning of a utopian consciousness which is shaped by recurrent engagement. But could there be, at the social rather than individual level, a grass-roots dreaming which would erupt and interrupt the apparent closure of even the most progressive designs? Finally, then, Choay’s observation that introduction of a comparative model enters urbanism from medical science is revealing. As in science generally, the city comes to be regarded as a problem to be solved. Like a patient who needs to be cured, the city is (for Le Corbusier at his most extreme) a machine to be repaired, or, for Cerdà, re-drawn; for both, only radical surgery can do the trick. Moreover, if  the urbanist identifies with the physiologist or the physician, the city is pathologized, in need of  healing through professional, distanced expertise. Chaoy finds a repeated use of medical terminology in Cerdà’s 1867 theory of urbanization, and uncritical adoption of  the dualism of normal and pathological states. For Cerdà, however, the disease is ignorance of the universal principles which he reveals. Hence, he reads land speculation and industrial exploitation of workers as dysfunctionalities. It is these failures which require radical reform. In this regard, Choay observes, “urban space is the material support for all that is at stake in the social realm” (245). The city is “a methodological problem,” hence more in the mold of  Leon Battista Alberti’s abstract thesis On the Art of Building, than of Owen’s mills or Haussmann’s boulevards (Choay 248). As a methodological problem, the city requires a solution. This can be achieved in an enlightened way, but it will nonetheless remain an imposition. Cerdà was remarkably humane; his plan is a monument of progressive planning, but it is f lawed by his liberal reformism. Its underlying dif ficulty resides in his reliance on a concept of solution, together with a fear of conf lict which requires the elimination of contested claims. Yet a genuinely progressive (rational and free) society would be consensual, and consensus is a process, not a design. Sociologist Ruth Levitas argues similarly that the imaginary reconstitution of society is a utopian “method,” not a solution. This critique may inform a re-visioned urbanism, a not-yet envisaged (and never to be completed) rational city.

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Works Cited Adorno, Theodor and Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment. London: Verso, 1997. Antonio, Robert J. (ed.). Marx and Modernity: Key Readings and Commentary. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003. Barber, Stephen. Extreme Europe. London: Reaktion, 2001. Bloch, Ernst. The Principle of  Hope. 3 Vols. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1986. Carey, John (ed.). The Faber Book of  Utopias. London: Faber and Faber, 1999. Cerdà, Idelfons. “La Calle.” Revista de Obros Públicas. 9.4, 5 and 6 (Feb-Mar 1863). ——. Despojo. Reclamación contra el despojo que por la ley de ensanches se ha hecho de mi plan económico (razones en que ha de fundarse) [hand-written notebook]. First published with Cerdà 1859, Madrid: Instituto Nacional de la Administración Pública, and Ajuntament de Barcelona, 1991. ——. Juicio critico de la exposición de planos y proyectos para la reforma y ensanche de Basrcelona, mandafa por Real Orden de 17 Septiembre último e inaugurada por el Excmo. Ayuntamiento en 29 de Octubre de 1859 [anon. pamphlet attributed to Cerdà]. Barcelona: Sanchez [printer]. Reprinted, Barcelona: ESTAPE, 1971 [see Soria y Puig, 1999, 439–40 on verification of authorship]. ——. Necesidades de la circulation y de los vecinos de las calles con respecto a la via pública y manera de satisfacerlas [leaf let with no imprint, 1863]. Republished in Teoria de la viabilidad urbana y reforma de la de Madrid y otros trabajos conexos. Madrid: Instituto Nacional de la Adminitración Pública and Ayuntamento de Madrid, 1991. ——. Teoría Construcción Ciudades, ms April 1859. First published, Madrid, Instituto Nacional de la Administración Pública, and Ajuntament de Barcelona, 1991. ——. Teoría General Urbanización, 2 vol. Madrid: Imprenta Española, 1867 [facsimile edition, Madrid: Instituto de Estudios Fiscales, 1968]. ——. Teoría Viabilidad Urbana. Madrid, unpublished memorandum, 1861. first published, Madrid, Instituto Nacional de la Administración Pública, and Ayutamiento de Madrid, 1991. Choay, Françoise. The Rule and The Model: On the Theory of Architecture and Urbanism. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1997. Coates, Chris. Utopia Britannica: British Utopian Experiments 1325–1945. London: Diggers and Dreamers Publications, 2001.

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Degen, Monica Montserrat. Sensing Cities: Regenerating Public Life in Barcelona and Manchester. London: Routledge, 2008. ——. “Barcelona’s Games: The Olympics, Urban Design, and Global Tourism.” Tourism Mobilities: Places to Play, Places in Play. Eds Mimi Sheller and John Urry. London: Routledge, 2004. 131–42. Engels, Friedrich. The Condition of  the Working Class in England in 1844. London: Allen and Unwin, 1892. Gandy, Matthew. Concrete and Clay: Reworking Nature in New York City. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2002. Geddes, Patrick. Cities in Evolution: An Introduction to the Town Planning Movement and the Studies of  Cities. London: Williams and Norgate, 1915. Gimeno, Eva. “The Birth of the Barcelona Extension (Eixample).” Cerdà: The Barcelona Extension (Eixample), Exhibition Catalogue. Barcelona: Institut d’Estudis Territorials, 2001. 20–3. Grif fin, Roger (ed.) Fascism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Hall, Peter and Colin Ward. Sociable Cities: The Legacy of  Ebenezer Howard. Chichester: Wiley, 1998. Hatherley, Owen, Militant Modernism, Ropley: Zero Books, 2008. Le Corbusier, Aircraft, London: Trefoil Press, 1987. ——. The City of  Tomorrow and Its Planning. New York: Dover 1987. Lefebvre, Henri. Introduction to Modernity. Trans. John Moore. London: Verso, 1995. ——. The Production of  Space. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. ——. Writings on Cities. Eds and trans. Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996. Levitas, Ruth. “The Imaginary Reconstitution of Society: Utopia as Method.” Utopia Method Vision: The Use Value of Social Dreaming. Eds Tom Moylan and Raf faella Baccolini. Oxford and Bern: Peter Lang, 2007. 47–68. Levi, Primo. If  This Is a Man. London: Sphere, 1987. Low, Setha. On the Plaza: The Politics of Public Space and Culture. Austin: University of  Texas Press, 2000. Magrinyà, Francesc. “Cerdà’s Place among Urbanists.” Cerdà: The Barcelona Extension (Eixample). 17–19. ——. “Idelfons Cerdà’s Proposal for Railway Urbanization.” Cerdà: The Barcelona Extension (Eixample). 13–14. Margarit, Isabel. ‘Idelfons Cerdà, the Man.” Cerdà: The Barcelona Extension (Eixample). 28–30. Miles, Malcolm. Urban Avant-Gardes: Art, Architecture and Change. London: Routledge, 2004.

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——. Urban Utopias: The Built and Social Architectures of  Alternative Settlements.

London: Routledge, 2008. Salecl, Renata, “The state as a work of art: the trauma of  Ceausescu’s Disneyland.” Architecture for Revolution: Contemporary Perspectives on Central and Eastern Europe. Ed. Neil Leach. London: Routledge, 1999. 92–111. Sanchez de Juan, Joan-Anton. “Civitas et Urbs: The Idea of the City and the Historical Imagination of Urban Government in Spain.” PhD thesis, European University Institute, Florence (It), December 2001. Sennett, Richard. Flesh and Stone. London: Faber and Faber, 1995. Serratosa, Albert. “Cerdà’s Magic: Housing Begets a City.” Cerdà: The Barcelona Extension (Eixample). 10–12. Soria y Puig, Arturo (ed.). Cerdà: The Five Bases of  the General Theory of  Urbanization. Barcelona; Electa, 1999. Tarragó, Salvador. “Three Holistic Proposals for a Complete, New, Integrated City.” Cerdà: The Barcelona Extension (Eixample). 5–9. Whyte, William H. The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces. Washington DC; Conservation Foundation, 1980.

Ellen Sullivan

Drawing Blood: Patrick Geddes’s Sectional Thinking

Imaging Eutopia Remarkable in the iconography of utopian imagination are the sectional diagrams of  Patrick Geddes (1854 –1932). A Scotsman who straddled the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Geddes worked first as a botanist and finally as a town planner, shaping a Victorian era vision for the future city. Initiator of  the “regional survey,” he insisted that “survey and diagnosis must precede treatment” of urban ills, rather than the practice of widespread slum clearance of  the sort that characterized urban improvement schemes from the nineteenth century to Le Corbusier’s urban plans at their most extreme, and post-World War II urban renewal and slum clearance in practice (Geddes, Cities 286). Geddes’s beneficially cautious and holistic approach continues to inf luence enlightened planning ef forts to this day, or at the very least ought to.1 As an “applied sociology” drawn from his sectional approach to reality, his situationally specific utopian method for improving living conditions (as opposed to the isotropic tendencies of so much technocratic modern urbanism) was dependent on distinct graphic methods (of which more later) that continue to have a resonance upon which modern eyes would do well to focus. In the long history of attempts to image Utopia, its typical form appears to derive from its original island condition in Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, first published in 1516 (cf. Figure 8). Thus, even when not visualized as an island, representations of  Utopia tend toward a circular form, typically shown from above in plan view, emphasizing both closure and exclusion. 1

For an interesting exposition of  the long reach of  Geddes’s inf luence, see Welter, “Five Annotations” and Sutclife.

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In short, conventional visualizations of Utopia depict it as something of a radial (if not always radiant) city set of f from the wider landscape. Filarete’s plan of Sforzinda (1465), Colonna’s Cythera diagram (1499), the frontispiece to Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), and Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City diagrams (1898), all appear to us in circular form (Rowe 205–24) (cf. Figures 1, 9 and 10). Such apparently static qualities of Utopia perhaps derive from Thomas More’s putatively revealing description of utopian cities: “They’re all built on the same plan, and, so far as the sites will allow, they all look exactly alike” (More 70). Nevertheless, even though most commentators read the preceding as a likely unintentional indictment that reveals “all” utopian cities as inevitably static and inhumane, on closer reading, a counterargument could equally show that “so far as the sites will allow, they all look exactly alike,” actually makes “situation” also a preoccupation of  Utopia (Coleman 31–3). However, “exactly alike” is arguably a reasonable description of most attempts to represent the ideal city. Like a wind rose on a map, traditional images of  Utopia point to a town, apparently removed in time and space from the present. One of the more ironic aspects of Utopia’s dual nature would seem to suggest that these must be “No Places,” unbound by real topography and time, just as they are unbound by the constraints of the real cities known to their authors. However, although conventional readings of  Utopia, and perhaps traditional illustrations of it as well, tend to emphasize it as “No Place,” it is worth recollecting that More’s coinage is a pun that also reveals Utopia as “Good Place” (Coleman 27). Be that as it may, the abstractness of their representation tends to give these ideal cities an emblematic quality, revealing them as objects of contemplation ref lecting a perfect order that has apparently less to do with the messy reality of existing cities than with a desired condition of  harmony. A further counterargument reveals utopias as almost always critiques of some very real place seen as coming up short by their author, suggesting they might also be models for action (Coleman 61–2). Nevertheless, as conventionally understood, utopian images “will behave as a detached reference, as an informing power, as rather more of an heuristic device than any form of directly applicable political instrument” (Rowe 14). However, such uniformity may also serve as a pattern “of shared conception among the founders of cities and could act as a measure that situates inhabitants in all of  them – or in all the parts of one” (Coleman 33).

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In contrast to Rowe’s conventional diagnosis of  Utopia, in Geddes’s mind, the ideal city of Utopia was not an abstraction, but would evidence the enactment of a material articulation of ideals. In fact, for Geddes Utopia is clearly the promise of a “good place,” rather confirmed by his use of  “Eutopia” in all instances, rather than either the more ambiguous “Utopia” or “Outopia,” which would signify “no place”: “Eutopia, then, lies in the city around us; and it must be planned and realized, here or nowhere, by us as its citizens – each a citizen of  both the actual and the ideal city seen increasingly as one” (Geddes, Cities xviii). Fascinating in this statement is the suggestion that Utopia is already here, where we live, but waits for us to draw it out of existing conditions, making it impossible to conceive of  Utopia as either “no place” or a practical impossibility. Moreover, the first steps to accomplishing Geddes’s eutopia resides in a realization that all citizens already occupy two cities, the actual and the ideal, which harbor a potential to become one as a single unified city in the future, when the actual city comes to manifest the ideal as real. As a self-avowed “visual thinker,” Geddes’s concept of how to illustrate his eutopian city borrowed heavily from his background in botany and thus, not surprisingly, also revealed the importance of specificity or locality to his thinking, as a product of his habit of close scientific scrutiny (Geddes, Note 227). Like specimens prepared for microscope slides, his diagrams show the city in section, as if  to confirm that it is an organism which cannot in life be severed from its situation (cf. Figures 11 and 12).

Blind Sight Geddes began his university education at the University of Edinburgh, from which he famously withdrew after one week of study in 1874. Impressed by the writing of  Thomas Huxley, the biologist and defender of  Charles Darwin, Geddes relocated to London and studied under Huxley at the School of Mines (Mairet 1). A dynamic lecturer, Huxley was to inspire not only Geddes, but also H. G. Wells, who followed Geddes into Huxley’s

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laboratory a decade later. Grandfather to Aldous Huxley, author of  Brave New World, Thomas Huxley’s biological understanding of social man would be voiced in utopian and dystopian literature throughout the twentieth century. In London, Geddes trained as a biologist, studying plant and animal structure through the lens of a microscope. Encouraged by Huxley, Geddes began investigating the anatomy of marine organisms, and together they published a paper in the 1870s (Mairet 18). At this point it appeared that Geddes would follow the career path of a biologist; however, while in Mexico studying marine specimens in 1879, he suf fered a loss of vision. Blind and confined to a darkened room, his hope bound “between gloom and doom,” Geddes began to trace the bars of his shuttered windows with his fingers (Boardman 46; Welter 12). “What can a blind visual do with himself ? And then learning to see (as the blind say) with fingers – the solution came one day (when feeling the frames of the outwardly obscured and shuttered panes) – Graphics! Notations! (and raised in relief )” (Geddes, Note 227). The upright window, sectioned by the bars and seen only with his hands, became the model for the “thinking machines” that Geddes used for the rest of his life (cf. Figure 13). These were papers the size of today’s index cards, folded into squares, upon which he recorded information. Geddes’s early “thinking machines” developed into the method by which he shaped his ideas on the organization of man within the social world. Inf luenced by his laboratory training, his “thinking machines” were uniquely characterized by the employ of diagrams and section drawings, significant because such notational devices made it possible for him to arrange ideas in much the way one might arrange an exhibition.

Comte and the Valley Section Responding to Auguste Comte’s positive philosophy, and especially his call that “it only remains to complete the system of observational sciences by the science of social physics,” Geddes applied the rigor of observation and

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notation learned at the microscope to the political organism of  the city (Comte, Introduction 13). Like Comte, he was convinced of the unity of the sciences and strove to construct that unity graphically with his “thinking machines,” the folds of which brought often divergent ideas into juxtaposition with each other. Confirming his attempt to make unity out of diversity, he wrote, “Science is arrangement (usually graphic as well as verbal),” and “Civilization lies in orientation of specialisms” (Geddes, “Compass”; “Cosmos”). Throughout his career, his illustrated index, or Encyclopaedia Graphica, as he called it, grew to include built works as a way of collecting practical options into the folds of  his “thinking machines” (Geddes, “Index”). Geddes was also, and importantly, an active civic leader in Edinburgh, where much of  his energy was directed at recovering the original, medieval “Old Town” from the decay into which it had fallen. He restored a block of houses, in which he lived, and created the first university student housing in Scotland. He encouraged the planting of gardens in abandoned lots, and is perhaps best known for the “Outlook Tower” building, located on the Royal Mile in the Old Town of Edinburgh, adjacent to the castle (as was Geddes’s home). The tower had originally been owned by an optometrist who had installed a camera obscura at its top, which captured projected images of the city and continues to do so even today. After Geddes secured ownership of  the building, he transformed it into what he called an “index museum” which housed a permanent exhibition of maps and images of  Edinburgh and its surrounding region. Visitors to the tower began their tour on the ground f loor, which exhibited images of various places around the world, and from here moved successively up to the top f loor, through displays of increasingly specific regions, until they reached the room that displayed images of Edinburgh, through which they gained entry to the camera obscura, and onward from there to a balcony that provided expansive views across the actual city, allowing for a real time “Regional Survey” of Edinburgh and its environs. The “Outlook Tower” served as a vertical section cut through history and geography, and was the material realization of much of  Geddes’s work, and although the city exhibition is no longer there, as noted above, the tower continues to operate as a camera obscura. As evidenced in the Index, all of  Geddes’s illustrated projects demonstrate an understanding of  the

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city as a biological structure, the power of which is to suggest models for synthesizing broad-ranging ideas about its physical make up and the social life it contains. In 1909, Geddes published his important “Valley Section,” a diagrammatic, longitudinal section/elevation which associates geologic conditions with vegetative, occupational, and social organization (cf. Figure 14). Inf luenced by the work of Charles Flahault (1852–1935), a French botanist who studied and mapped the distribution of  tree species by region, Geddes’s diagram takes a similar approach to species of culture (Welter 61). Not only geographic in its aims, Geddes’s diagram also presents his notion of  the historical development of civilization from agricultural settlement to city. And, although the diagram traces its origin to Plato’s Republic, Geddes’s intent was to demonstrate the necessity of common cause amongst inhabitants, in tandem with the unity of topography and social endeavor, whereas Plato imagined his ideal as being established out of a social hierarchy among the occupants of his perfect state. The Valley Section appears throughout Geddes’s papers as a graphic presentation of  his synthetic thinking; for example, in his drawing titled “Geography of Education” he diagrams areas of study in section and elevation (cf. Figure 15). It is worth noting that in 1954, when Alison and Peter Smithson, members of Team X (a progressive group of post-World War II architects), sought a way beyond the reductive limitations of orthodox modern urbanism – enshrined in the doctrines of CIAM (Congrès International d’Architecture Moderne) – they based their ef forts on Geddes’s comprehensive Valley Section (Lathouri 16 –8, 173–4, n. 46, 47). Inf luenced also by scientists who straddled the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, such as Georges Cuvier (1769–1832) and Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859), Geddes was convinced of  the “inf luence of geographical conditions on social development”: “not even the highest expressions of  human individuality can be adequately studied apart from their physical conditions and antecedents of geographical environment” (Geddes, “Inf luence” 581). In order to depict his understanding of  the complex interrelationship between “human individuality” and “geographical environment,” Geddes not surprisingly borrowed representation techniques from the visual language of geology, newly emerging in

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the period (cf. Figure 16). It was a mode of representation made popular by empiricists during the nineteenth century who busied themselves with transformation of  the myths of natural history into the science of geology. In turn, they widely circulated their results in illustrated papers on the subject of  the earth’s history, which served to familiarize the reading public with drawings that showed cuts, especially sections into the earth’s crust. Consequently, the confounding anomalies of geologic formation were beginning to rest within a coherent and increasingly comprehensible story of dynamic processes, explained by sectional diagrams illustrating the record of geologic events: By the early 1830s the conventions of traverse sections through the earth had become a well-established part of the visual language of geology everywhere. They could be used without special explanation to illustrate a wide variety of structural phenomena such as folding, faulting and uncomformities; they were understood widely enough to be used increasingly in the form of wood engravings to illustrate popular books on geology; and they had become a powerful visual means of summarizing and synthesizing geological work on a very broad scale (Rudwick 171).

An example of one of  these very popular books is Huxley’s Physiography, published in 1877, two years after Geddes became his student. A work intended for a lay audience, it traced the geologic history of  the Thames River basin. In his introduction Huxley writes: I do not think that a description of  the earth, which commences, by telling a child that it is an oblate spheroid, moving round the sun in an elliptical orbit; and ends, without giving him the slightest hint towards understanding the ordnance map of  his own county; or any suggestion as to the meaning of  the phenomena of fered by the brook which runs through his village, or the gravel pit whence the roads are mended; is calculated either to interest or to instruct (vii).

Although the aim of  the Huxley’s book was to communicate the science of geology to lay readers, the way in which he addresses his subjects, as evidenced in the quote above, clearly emphasizes the value of  location to individual understanding. Focusing on the material in this way sheds light on how Geddes would have arrived at a sectional depiction of reality as best suited to expressing the intersection between inhabitants and their

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environments, not only as they are but also how they might become. Moreover, the immense popularity of  Huxley’s book “defined for a generation the way in which the earth’s physical features were studied in Britain” and also how these features should be represented, confirmed by the abundance of sectional drawings contained within that demonstrate the interplay of natural systems (Stoddart 180) (cf. Figure 17).

Beyond Darwin Huxley’s integrated approach to geologic processes ref lected a post-Darwinian construction of  the earth that could account for evolutionary or responsive development across time, aptly illustrated by sectional drawings, which allow for the graphic representation of temporal conditions. Geddes’s “Valley Section” drawings are clearly inf luenced by these illustrations and thus indicate the dynamism necessary to argue for the interdependence of natural and cultural conditions, suggesting also the possibility of a humandirected perfecting of social and environmental conditions. With the publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859, Darwin provided an operational model of  the natural world commensurate with the work of  Galileo and Copernicus in astronomy and physics, and Leibnitz and Descartes in mathematics. “When [Darwin] said of species what Galileo had said of the earth, e pur se muove (‘and yet it moves’), he emancipated, once and for all, genetic and experimental ideas as an organon of asking questions and looking for explanations” (Dewey 35). Darwin’s epoch-making contribution to the history of science was an understanding of  the natural world as a dynamic process that embraced change and the close interdependence of subject and environment. What his work suggested for early town planners such as Geddes was that it was possible to express utopian ideals without relying on the closure of radial plans to do so, for the natural world could ref lect the divine cosmos as temporally dynamic – as shown in Darwin’s “Tree of  Life” diagram – rather than

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static, as in planimetric fixity (cf. Figures 18 and 19). Accordingly, Geddes could abandon the ubiquitous radial plan, permitting him to consider Utopia in much the way he considered biology: “a city is more than a place in space, it is a drama in time” (Geddes, “Civics” 4). While the plan view of  “Utopia” appears to place it out of time, the sectional view of  Geddes’s “Eutopia” situates it squarely within time, or along an historical timeline, just as sectional illustrations of geologic formations could place the earth within a temporal horizon. Geddes continued to make use of  Darwin’s and Huxley’s work as he moved into the area of evolutionary ethics and sociology, especially in the development of  his diagrams of  the city that emphasized the unity of people and place. For example, he claimed that “science, literature, and architecture are all so many concrete embodiments of the art of pure thinking which underlies them and must be interpreted and rationalized by virtue of some underlying scheme of unity. Thus the claim for the utility of graphic methods becomes increasingly justified” (Geddes, “Atlas”). For Geddes, graphic presentment was the universal language of  the sciences, social as well as physical (Mairet 122). In a series of diagrams labeled “Social Notations,” dated 1902, Geddes outlined the social organization of  the ideal city (cf. Figures 20 and 21). Borrowing from the upright sections of  botanical illustrations of the period, he drew a plant in section and identified the “parts of a f lower” with the cultural necessities of civic life. In the same year he described his “thinking machines” as analogous to library shelves, highlighting how they contributed to the organization of  both knowledge and inquiry: Taking now an actual living thing, a germinating seed, a plant in f lower and fruit, we may carry it in thought along each of the divisions of our book-case, and up and down through each of its various shelves, until we are accustomed to give these the requisite concreteness, and conversely until each living thing can be analysed in each of its aspects, or generalized with its species and congenus in its place in nature […] we see what is known about our theme, and the blank shelves, like a blank map indicate what is not known: they ask us questions, suggest new inquiries, and direct them; new comparisons, new points of view, new combinations of these open before us […]. Our library, or card-case, is thus passing more and more completely from a mere static store-house of information to active usefulness as a logical apparatus: it

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Apart from its obvious pre-conceptualization of something akin to databases and random access memory, Geddes’s approach to the physical organization of information derives from Huxley’s work in South Kensington. In the twenty years prior to Geddes’s arrival in London, Huxley was employed as a lecturer in Natural History at the Jermyn Street Museum of the London School of  Mines. There his responsibilities had grown to include paleontologist for the Geological Survey, and the organization and display of the fossils in the museum’s collection. Amongst his curatorial achievements, “Huxley was able to carry out his plan for displaying the specimens and positioning them in the correct stratigraphical order” (Forgan 441). As the demand for display space competed with laboratory and lecture space at the Jermyn Street building, a new compound was developed in South Kensington which separated the functions of  laboratory, lecture theater, and museum. Huxley was instrumental in allocating space in the new location. He was also involved in the development of the City and Guilds College which became the Normal School for teacher training. At both institutions, Huxley established the adjacency of  lecture theater, microscopy laboratories, and specimen display, which inf luenced Geddes’s own working methods, including the organization of  his “Outlook Tower.”

Regional Surveys For Huxley the laboratory was far more central to biology teaching than for any of his predecessors. He often proclaimed that only a carefully managed program of experimental work would give teachers the essential authority of  having had “direct” contact with the inner workings of  “Nature”:

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[E]stablishing the laboratory, rather than the ‘field’ or the museum, as the definitive site for learning life science in the early 1870s was by no means a straightforward task. Huxley depended heavily on the microscope as the instrument to realize this transition, making its use a central tool of  the teacher-training program (Forgan 449).

In turn, Geddes was to extend the idea of the adjacency of laboratory and field into his proposals for “regional surveys” and exhibitions of cities, to say nothing of  the intense focus he lavished on phenomena, such as the microscope suggested. As confirmation of  this, in the preface to his 1915 Cities in Evolution, he extols the virtues of  the “city survey” as an instrument for understanding the city within its regional and historical context: “We cannot too fully survey and interpret the city for which we are to plan – survey it at its highest in past, in present, and above all, since planning is the problem, foresee its opening future” (xxvi–ii). In the opening chapter of Cities in Evolution, Geddes exhorts readers to find a map of  England, “in the nearest public library. If it not be there, let the librarian have no peace till he gets it,” and explains what is to be seen on the population-map (32). Here he introduces the term “conurbation” to express “this new form of population-grouping, which is already, as it were subconsciously, developing new forms of social grouping and of definite government and administration” (34). Geddes describes through maps, photographs, and drawings the development of urban regions, relating that development to the natural resources of each area: “speaking of coalfields, we may conveniently here call attention to the close coincidence of  this great centre of population with its magnificent South Wales coalfield […] and thence note the parallelism of each great conurbation to its coalfield” (37). Urging readers to initiate surveys for every town, he believed this “field work” was incomplete unless complemented by a “laboratory” in the form of an “Index Museum.” As suggested above, his “Outlook Tower” in Edinburgh was just such a laboratory: The Outlook Tower, as its name implies, is a vantage point from which the visitor can have a wide variety of outlooks. On tours conducted by Geddes, these began with the Camera Obscura on top of  the dome, an apparatus which ref lected the outdoors panorama in a series of images like coloured moving pictures upon a white surface inside the darkened dome […] then from the observation balcony outside,

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Ellen Sullivan and in quick and brain-teasing succession, Geddes would show how meteorologist, geologist, geographer, zoologist, botanist, and so on, look at the region visible from the Tower. To illustrate each of  the scientific outlooks he had set-up typical instruments or had collected specimens of the subject-matter studies. The result was a kind of index-museum representing everything that the natural sciences knew about this region (Boardman 5).

In 1902, Geddes described his rationale for “the Index Museum”: “I find it dif ficult to imagine any class of ideas which does not appear to my mind to lend itself more vividly to graphic than to verbal presentment” (“Index”). Combining lecture theater, laboratory, and specimen display, Geddes turned Huxley’s model of pedagogy into an opportunity to understand the city as a social organism. As he developed the practice of  “regional survey” and “conservative surgery,” he never strayed far from the principles of investigation inculcated in him by Huxley. For example, in 1910 Geddes participated in the London Town Planning Exhibition: From the “Survey of  Edinburgh,” for many years in progress at the Outlook Tower, a selection had been made and developmentally arranged; so that here, more than elsewhere before, the essential conditions and phases of a city’s historic past were shown as determining its qualities and defects in the present. Past and present were also shown as presenting the problems of the city’s opening future, and as conditioning their treatment also. This exhibit was therefore felt to present a needed suggestion, and even nucleus for a further exhibition of smaller but more typical and systematic character (Cities, 256–7).

Of particular interest here is the continuum Geddes establishes between past, present, and future, especially with regard to how such awareness makes it possible to highlight a city’s problems while also opening it up to its own future. Although Utopia is typically represented as “no place” (emphasizing “Outopia”), and as out of  touch with reality and the actual work required to make genuine improvements (especially in architecture and urbanism), Geddes’s emphasis was on Utopia as a realizable “good place” (“Eutopia”), achievable only by working across an intersecting axis linking the real (of  the past and the present) to an ideal set in a foreseeable future. Further development of  his utopian praxis was shown in an exhibition mounted the following year, again in London. On this occasion

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the exhibit was held in Crosby Hall, a fifteenth-century home which had been preserved through Geddes’s own ef forts and those of idealist architect William Lethaby (1857–1931); together they organized its removal to a location on what had once been Sir Thomas More’s orchard. Appropriately, this exhibition went beyond the earlier one by displaying more than “examples of good contemporary work”: It involved an ordered design; that of presenting a type-selection of  housing and town-planning schemes of suggestive character towards city development; and further of working towards the comparative presentment of the study of the evolution of cities – historic, actual, and possible. Of  this great process, the architecture of  the city is but the changing expression, and its plan but the record, say rather the palimpsest (Geddes, Cities 256–7).

As in the previous quotation, this passage reveals the core of Geddes’s utopian praxis as a continuum, though here through “comparative […] study of  the evolution of cities – historic, actual, and possible.” By making utopian work the product of a “great process” rather than chiliastic rupture, Geddes introduces a degree of temporal sophistication to the problem of achieving ideals, the potential of which has yet to be fully explored by architects and urbanists. As part of  this nuanced project of potential, Geddes believed that every city should have such an exhibition, which would be part of an ongoing survey of each town and its region: “For each and every city we need a systematic survey, of its development and origins, its history and its present. This survey is required not merely for material buildings, but also for the city’s life and its institutions, for of  these the builded city is but the external shell” (Cities 255). Not surprisingly, Geddes viewed the physical structure of  the city as but the framework of  life, which is any city’s real substance. Such sensitivity suggests advancements to utopian and architecture/urban practices alike. The extended title of  Geddes’s book from which most of  the preceding quotes have been drawn – Cities in Evolution: An Introduction to the City Planning Movement and to the Study of  Civics – reveals the full complexity of  his project. Most importantly, the planning of a city is inseparable from the civic life it shelters and supports. Moreover, the book emphasizes evolution – achievement of conditions superior to present ones – as the real aim of city planning.

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Thought of in these ways, our contemporary preoccupation with image or form on the one hand, and with economic realism on the other, not only neglects the thickness of any city’s evolving story but may also contribute to a degenerative process.

Diagnosis before Treatment To account for the full complexity of civic life and cities, the surveys Geddes envisioned would need to gather information from an exhaustive list of  topics: situation, topography, natural advantages, ecology, climate, water supply, soils, animal life, river or sea fisheries, means of communication, industry, population, town conditions, historic origins, recent history, existing town plans, housing and sanitation, and future possibilities: As with geography, so with history: we design or renew the city’s pageant, scene by scene. No minuteness of local archaeologist and antiquarian can be spared, no contact with the outer world of which the general historian tells; yet the main task is too commonly missed between these – the problem of history proper – the essential story of  the city, the presentment of its characteristic life at each period (Cities 361).

Contrary to the close-up approach advocated by Geddes in the preceding, throughout the twentieth century and into the present, the plan, or aerial view, has dominated visions of  the city and representations of its renewal through future development, often according to supposedly ideal city plans. Bird’s-eye views of  the world as it is, and representations of  how it might become, are distinctly modern, suggesting overarching and totalizing godlike vision, such as airplanes make possible, but such vision also parallels our increasing detachment from experience on the ground in its full complexity. In contradistinction, Geddes’s multilayered, temporally sophisticated sectional method for studying cities could continue to guard our practices – utopian and spatial – against just such acts of  hubris.

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Inevitably, Geddes approached the study of a city in the same way that he approached the study of an organism. His urban utopic diagrams are like illustrations of a carefully-prepared microscopic slide. His drawing of the “Outlook Tower” remains true to the microscopic section while incorporating the temporal qualities of dynamic processes and the familiar transverse section of  the geologist (cf. Figure 24). As a man of action, Geddes was determined to put his theories of city planning into practice: “this constant sharpening of the knife becomes tedious unless it is supposed to cut something. Now let us see if we can’t draw blood” (“Spheres”). As a result, he wielded the pen as a knife, cutting sections as one would prepare slides for microscopic examination, and his diagrams inevitably draw “blood,” revealing connections both temporal and topographical between the city and society, perhaps also illuminating how both are limbs of  the same social body. Viewing the city in section rather than in plan, Geddes reveals Utopia as a potential “Good Place” rather than as an abstract “No Place,” and thus situates its potential in the dynamic realm of “Past, Present, and Possible.” If  the bird’s-eye view of  traditional illustrations of  Utopia appear to suggest some radial organization that has tended to assure their inevitable unreality, Geddes shows us that dreaming the ideal city “as possible” (not merely as fantastic) is best done through sectional representations, which reveal civic potential as “a drama in time.”

Works Cited Boardman, Philip. “Patrick Geddes and His Many Worlds.” The Outlook Tower: Essays on Urbanization in Memory of Patrick Geddes. Ed. J. V. Ferreira. Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1976. 1–13. ——. The Worlds of Patrick Geddes: Biologist, Town Planner, Re-educator, Peace Warrior. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978. Coleman, Nathaniel. Utopias and Architecture. Abingdon: Routledge: 2005. Comte, Auguste. Introduction to Positive Philosophy. Ed. and trans. Frederick Ferre. Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 1988.

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——. Auguste Comte and Positivism: The Essential Writings. Ed. Gertrude Lenzer.

London: Transaction Publishers. 1998. Dewey, John. “The Inf luence of Darwin on Philosophy.” The Philosophy of John Dewey. Chicago: University of  Chicago Press, 1981. Forgan, Sophie and Graeme Gooday. “Constructing South Kensington: The Buildings and Politics of T. H. Huxley’s Working Environments.” The British Journal for the History of  Science. 29.4 (1996): 439–40. Geddes, Patrick. Cities in Evolution: An Introduction to the Town Planning Movement and to the Study of  Civics. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1966. ——. “Civics: As Applied Sociology”. Read before the Sociological Society at a Meeting in the School of  Economics and Political Science (University of  London), July 18, 1904. ——. “Classification of the Sciences.” Manuscript. University of Strathclyde Archives. File T-GED 14/1/18–22. Dated 8/11/02. ——. “Cosmos.” Thinking Machine. University of Strathclyde Archives. File T-GED 3/1/1,2. Undated. ——. “Compass Method.” Thinking Machine. University of  Strathclyde Archives. File T-GED 18/1/224. Dated 21/10/04. ——. File T-GED 14/1/24–6. Dated 3/2/03. The full quote is: “Lotze of  the PostKantian epistemologists said that this constant sharpening of the knife becomes tedious unless it is supposed to cut something. Now let us see if we can’t draw blood.” ——. “The Index Museum: Chapters from an Unpublished Manuscript.” Assemblage. 10 (1989): 47–64. ——. “The Inf luence of  Geographical Conditions on Social Development.” The Geographical Journal. 12.6 (1898): 580–7. ——. “Logical Spheres to Neo-Politics.” Thinking Machine. University of  Strathclyde Archives. ——. “A Note on Graphic Methods, Ancient and Modern.” Sociological Review 15 (1923): 227–35. ——. “Our Atlas of  Atlases.” Manuscript. University of  Strathclyde Archives. File T-GED 14/1/4,5. Dated 23 August 1992. ——. Unpublished Manuscript. University of  Strathclyde Archives. File T-GED 14/14. Huxley, Thomas H. Physiography: An Introduction to the Study of Nature. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1901. Lathouri, Marina. “‘The Necessity of  the Plan’: Visions of  Individuality and Collective Intimacies.” Intimate Metropolis. Eds Vittoria Di Palma, Diana Periton and Marina Lathouri. London: Routledge, 2009. 153–74.

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Mairet, Philip. Pioneer of  Sociology: The Life and Letters of  Patrick Geddes. London: Percy, Lund, Humphries and Co. Ltd., 1957. More, Thomas. Utopia. London: Penguin Books, 1965. Novak, Frank G. Lewis Mumford and Patrick Geddes: The Correspondence. London: Routledge, 1995. Rowe, Colin. The Mathematics of  the Ideal Villa and Other Essays. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1976. Rowe, Colin and Fred Koetter. Collage City. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1984. Rudwick, Martin J. “The Emergence of a Visual Language for Geological Science, 1760–1840.” History of  Science 14 (1976): 149–95. Stoddart, D. R. “That Victorian Science: Huxley’s Physiography and Its Impact on Geography.” Transaction of  the Institute of  British Geographers 66.17 (1975): 17–40. ——. “Kropotkin, Reclus and ‘Relevant’ Geography.” Area 7 (1975): 188–90. Sutclife, Anthony R. “Review of  Volker M. Welter and James Lawson, eds. The City after Patrick Geddes.” H-Urban, H-Net Reviews. ( June 2001). 26 March 2010. . Welter, Volker M. Biopolis: Patrick Geddes and the City of  Life. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2002. ——. “Five Annotations, Post-war CIAM, Team X, and the Inf luence of  Patrick Geddes.” CIAM Team 10, the English Context. (5 November 2001). Team Ten Online. 26 March 2010. .

Nathaniel Coleman

Utopia on Trial?

Utopia and Architecture The idealism of modern architecture promised a better world, socially, physically, and politically. It was intended to become the physical counter­ point to wide-ranging reforms. In order to achieve these it would partner with science and technology to achieve a “brave new world.” At least this is how standard histories of modern architecture, most of which call it utopian, represent the period. As most inhabitants of  the modern city readily acknowledge, whatever the aims of modern architecture might have been, its legacy is mostly an alienating landscape. To suggest that the results of modern architecture in the city leave much to be desired is at the very least an understatement. In light of this, it is not too much to wonder how a movement with a supposedly utopian agenda for social transformation, framed by the renewal of cities, could have so frequently resulted in its opposite: a dystopian wasteland that more often than not thoughtlessly betrays our “right to the city” (Lefebvre). As it turns out, conventional analyses of modern architecture revealing it as utopian are something of a cover for an idea(l) that utopian prospects must inevitably result in dystopia. In short, the nomination of modern architecture as utopian, and thus a failure, is really just another way of saying it was dystopian (which it could often be, but not because it failed at Utopia). Put another way, in common architectural parlance, Utopia can only ever signify dystopia ( Jacobs; Rowe and Koetter). Inf luenced either directly or indirectly by Popper’s negative appraisal of  Utopia, especially what he called “utopian engineering,” it is reasonable enough that early criticism of  the project of modern architecture

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– especially as it developed after World War II – regarded it as establishing “absolutist utopias,” constructed in adherence to blueprints rather than as interpretations of models, making it a species of  totalizing “utopian engineering” (Popper 58–75). The often extravagant claims modern architects made to truth, infallibility, science, and a direct one-to-one relationship between architecture and social behavior were extreme, mostly untested, likely unverifiable and thus ultimately all but destined to failure. However, it is precisely the overheated claims of modern architects, especially many associated with CIAM (Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne), 1928–56, that reveal the overall project to be closer to totalizing or absolutist schemes for scientific management and schematic social reforms that either appears as though imposed from above by abstract and anonymous forces, or would need to rely on the extremes of control to bring about imagined results, much like the societies dystopias depict, and warn against (N. Coleman, Utopias; “Dystopia”).1 Yet, the fixation on Utopia as failure conveniently hides its other potential as the motive force of architecture’s social dimension in any remaking of the world in a better way. When allowed to f lourish, Utopia can catalyze the radical reinvention of architecture, infusing it with the conviction that society can be improved through reconceptualizations of  the world “as it is” via imaginings of its transformation into something else or other, into an alternative. In point of fact, however, architects’ attempts to accomplish radical transformation have tended toward the technical or aesthetic rather than the social. Or, as David Harvey observed, architectural utopias primarily involve spatial form only, and exclude process (160–96, 230–2). And even when architects’ putatively utopian projects have seemed to evidence social awareness, it has generally been in a decidedly schematic and literal manner (except in the rarest of exceptional instances; Aldo van Eyck for example) (N. Coleman, Utopias, esp. 196–233, 245–56). In architectural terms, the “schematic” relates most obviously to plans and blueprints, which are central to managing the design and construction of buildings and cities,

1

For a brief overview of  CIAM, see “Architects Profiles. 3. CIAM,” From Here to Modernity.

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whereas the “literal” relates to the explicitness of architectural programs (including representations, briefs, and specifications), presented as though they were material certainties before the fact. Yet, because architecture is constructed in a fairly organized and direct way, it is not unreasonable that it verges toward the literal and the schematic, which, however, emphasizes technical functionality over emotional function. The dystopian atmosphere of many modern cities arguably results largely from an apparent confusion about utopian projection in the first place. Although well known for being a failed Utopia, it is actually quite dif ficult to see how modern architecture is in any way actually utopian (except in the rarest of instances), rather than simply being an exaggerated projection or realization of already existent trends that are, in any event, usually the purview of dystopias, not utopias. Utopias, in the sense being developed here, envision some overall social transformation (perhaps even the reconstruction of some imagined golden age), revealing potential conditions not yet conceivable (or immediately achievable) in the present. Simply augmenting, intensifying, or exaggerating possibilities already resident in the present does not suggest enough of a transformation for a plan, as such, to be considered a Utopia (Sargent, “Definition” 143).2 Likewise, making claims for the framework of a new condition, suggesting, for example, that its realization alone would be enough to bring about the imagined transformed conditions, is also not enough to declare a Utopia realized. Perhaps the great failure of modern architecture in its ef forts to give Utopia f lesh does ultimately reside in architects’ naïve, deterministic, and instrumentalist belief  that an architectural framework alone – absent of nearly any sensitivity to the social history of its intended inhabitants – would be enough “to ef fect a basic transformation in the human condition” (Manuel 70). And although it is possible to identify links of inf luence between nineteenth-century utopian socialists – William Morris, for example – and the aims of a very limited number of twentieth-century modern

2

For a more in-depth discussion of the general problem of definition within Utopian studies and in relation to architecture and the city, see the Introduction to this present volume.

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architects – Le Corbusier (1887–1965), for example – claims for the utopianism of modern architecture are attached to it primarily by critics and historians disappointed in one way or another with its outcomes. In short, nominating modern architecture as utopian is nearly always either pejorative or a lamentation (N. Coleman, “Dystopia”). Thus, whether positively or negatively, modern architecture is recollected as utopian mainly by individuals who were (or are) either disappointed by its failures or who desired (or desire) to overcome modernism and leave it behind. This is why nomination of modern architecture as utopian has resulted chiefly from post hoc analyses of its shortcomings (or failure).3 Arguably, then, the conventional proposition that modern architecture was utopian significantly exaggerates the original objectives of even its most determined practitioners. More helpful would be to consider what calling something utopian connotes in a given instance. In most cases, doing so unfolds according to the following equation: “Utopia” is equivalent to “impossible,” or, as Levitas put it, for detractors, “Utopia = Totalitarianism = Communism = Marxism + Socialism and Communism = Totalitarianism = Fascism” (“For Utopia” 30). By blandly accepting modern architecture as having been utopian in its aims – meaning “doomed to failure before the start,” if not far worse – it becomes less painful to accept that, in the main, twentieth-century building has been generally incapable of providing suitable environments for individual and social life.4 In a passage supporting 3

4

Although equating Utopia with failure is more or less the norm within architecture literature and beyond, locating confirmation that doing so is a post hoc analysis can be dif ficult. However, in a talk broadcast online, architectural historian, and Le Corbusier specialist, Tim Benton, did acknowledge that “utopia is a post modernist term […] it wasn’t used by modernists in the high period of modernism in architecture […] so, in using this term […] we’re applying a current concept rather than one that was active at the time” (Benton, “Le Corbusier”). This reading finds support in the following: “Of all the criticisms that modern architecture has had to endure since the 1960s, the one of utopianism has apparently had the most impact. It seems that, by now, almost everybody is convinced that modern architecture’s utopian ambition was its most harmful attribute. Its utopian aspirations are usually seen as completely bound up with paternalistic, not to say totalitarian attitudes, and are for that reason discredited and put aside” (Heynen 382).

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my assertion that construing modern architecture as utopian is dubious, including how identification of it as such intends to highlight it as failure, Joseph Rykwert argues: It is perhaps the fate of fudged and ill-considered utopias to end in squalor quickly. But the speed with which Gropius’ slab skyscraper in the park, which seemed such a splendid idea to a Western European and even American haute-bourgeoisie only [fifty or sixty] years ago, decayed into the horrific square miles of Lefrak towers has left planners rather breathless: the shabby utopia had become the exemplar for the biggest boom in world history (“Learning” 105).

In the passage above, Rykwert alludes to a number of issues that are relevant to the present discussion. Obviously enough, a “fudged and ill-considered utopia” will be unrealizable at best or transform into something much worse when established. However, it is Rykwert’s identification of  these with Walter Gropius (1883–1969) that is most significant. Although he also discusses Le Corbusier in the same article, it is really Gropius’s model of  the “slab skyscraper in the park” that became the standard issue throughout the world (in some instances also acquiring the now infamous, and equally ill-considered, “streets in the sky” (“Alison+Peter”). Overall, Gropius’s species of modern architecture has been far more inf luential in actual practice than Le Corbusier’s (or anyone else’s for that matter, at least through the 1970s, and in many ways even still, though with postmodern make-up). A key reason for this is Gropius’s embrace of standardization, machine production, and the ef ficiencies of  the factory, including prefabrication and teamwork. In short, his model was far more apparently economical and ef ficient to build than Le Corbusier’s. It was also much more of a diagram, lacking in the nuances of  Le Corbusier’s ever-transforming model, which made Gropius’s model much easier to understand, replicate, and implement. In fact, although Le Corbusier is most frequently blamed for the failures of tower block housing, as Rykwert suggests, Gropius’s “solution” has been far more inf luential. One of the key characteristics of his approach was to extol minimum existence standards as the maximal criterion. Rykwert’s characterization of  Gropius’s “slab skyscraper in the park” as having “decayed into the horrific square miles of  Lefrak towers,” suggests a realized dystopian vision rather than a utopian one. That it was

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also ultimately the product of an economic vision, rather than a utopian one, is supported by Rykwert’s observation that “the shabby utopia had become the exemplar for the biggest boom in world history.” Ultimately, the ef ficiencies modern architecture staked out for itself, in the name of  technological progress, made it much more the handmaiden of real estate speculation and emergent global capitalism than of  Utopia. As Renato Poggioli observes, “architectural functionalism” (another name, along with “international style,” for twentieth century modern architecture), was destined to become “the cliché of  the building industry” (83). Nevertheless, throughout the first three quarters of  the twentieth century, the problem of how to house a growing and mobile population of an increasingly mass society exercised the minds of architects, planners, and policy makers in Europe, the United Kingdom, and the United States. However, even though public housing provision will always entail some social vision, that alone would not be enough to declare every instance a Utopia, even if infused by some degree of  latent utopianism. Thus, although the utopianism of modern architecture is often taken as a foregone conclusion, actual utopianism, as a discernable part of an unfolding tradition of Utopia (in the form of literary utopias, city plans, reforms, or even individual buildings) remains, in most instances, an open question. With this in mind, it is worth considering the reservations advanced by Manfredo Tafuri (1935–94), one of  the very few architectural historians, or theorists, to question the actual utopianness of modern architecture: [T]he utopian trend in nineteenth-century politics was to have only very indirect relationships with the ideas of the “modern movement.” Indeed, those relationships, which have been recognized for the most part by present-day historians, between the utopias of Fourier, Owen, and Cabet and the theoretical models of Unwin, Geddes, Howard, or Stein, on the one hand, and those of the Garnier-Le Corbusier current, on the other, are but suppositions in need of careful verification. It is likely that these relationships will come to be considered as functional and as forming part of  the same phenomena one wishes to analyze by means of  them (44).

Tafuri’s attempt to uncouple utopian socialism and the modern movement in architecture promises a more balanced consideration of the real sources, inspirations, and motivations of modern architecture. Divested of some of 

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the freight it has been made to carry for at least the past fifty years, architects could expend less energy distancing themselves from the received myth of  Utopia in relation to the modern movement to concentrate on the value of idealism and social imagining in the invention of architecture and the city. Energy previously expended on utopia-anxiety could then be redirected to expanding the very limited band of reality that too often dominates the attentions of architects: technically ef ficient provision of services on the one hand, and novel images for consumption on the other. Largely missing from this horizon is a deeper comprehension of architecture’s social dimension, especially the ways it can play a subtle role in the lives of individuals and institutions. In turning from Utopia as most do now, even as dystopia is constructed nearly everywhere, too many architects will continue to comfort themselves by thinking they are doing something profound even though most of what is achieved amounts to little more than the conservation of  “impotent and inef fectual myths […] illusions that permit the survival of anachronistic ‘hopes in design’” (Tafuri 182).

Utopia on Trial It is against the backdrop of modern architecture and Utopia sketched out in the preceding that I will now turn to the consideration of a peculiar little book, Utopia on Trial: Vision and Reality in Planned Housing, published in 1985 by Alice Coleman, a professor of geography at University College London. The main aim of  her book was to put Utopia on the stand (on mostly trumped up charges). According to her, the failures of modern mass housing are attributable to the inherently retrograde precepts of  Utopia. While Coleman’s case has run into trouble with criticism that argues she accused the wrong defendant by naming architecture the culprit rather than identifying poverty, limited opportunities and poor maintenance as the real perpetrators, the virtue of  these criticisms notwithstanding, it is her conceptualization of  Utopia that interests me here. To redress the

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longstanding frame-up of Utopia as the straw man of modern architecture and planning failures, in what follows, I analyze Alice Coleman’s conception of Utopia with a suspicion that it was not really Utopia that she put on trial. The value of such an exercise resides in the potential for recuperating Utopia, so often cast as the fall guy for deterministic ideas on the relation between architecture and behavior, which are far more Fordists or Taylorist – that is dystopian – than utopian. Moreover, as is argued here, it is not so much Utopia that is to blame for the strange, unsettling, and frequently unsatisfying setting of the modern city but rather Utopia’s relative absence from modernist visions of planned housing. But for Coleman, Utopia was the only possible suspect: Because of  the DOE’s [Department of  Environment’s] reluctance to take design problems seriously [produced by design guidelines for social housing that actually] […] initiated and multiplied detrimental features […] this book has been written as an analogy with a trial. What is put on trial is the ideal environment, Utopia, which design control was intended to create (3).

This statement is worth considering not only for the degree to which it presumes that we all agree on what the nature of Utopia is, but also for its conviction that central authorities responsible for public housing really did intend to establish an ideal social condition – rather than satisfying a necessary social provision – and in doing so genuinely attempted to achieve Utopia. The passage is also very helpful in teasing out what Coleman intends by Utopia. Firstly, for her, Utopia is “the ideal environment” which, in her presentation of it, is totalizing. In this instance, capitalization of  “Utopia” presents it as though it were the proper name of a single entity, place, or univocal concept, akin, perhaps, to More’s invented island of Utopia. However, More’s title referred as much to an imaginary place as to an ideal condition, both of which could go by the same name. Coleman attempts something similar but without the benefit of defining her negative Utopia with any precision. Her use of  Utopia is revealing for other reasons as well: presented as it is in her book, her presumption must have been that no description or definition was required, because we are obviously all already in agreement as to what Utopia means in every instance. Moreover, presented as singular, “Utopia” here is used as shorthand for

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the certain failure of social dreaming that it presumably always guarantees. In Coleman’s presentation of it, the concept of  Utopia is at fault, not just some specific – perhaps genuinely failed – attempts to realize it. Coleman’s objective, then, is not just to call attention to the utopian shortcomings of social housing but is rather to do away with Utopia full stop. Before moving forward, I should note that as the main aim of  this chapter is to identify what Coleman actually means by Utopia in her book, readers with an interest in the exact nature of its findings, the research methodology supporting them, and the proposals apparently drawn from her conclusions, are encouraged to consult her book, cognizant of  the numerous reservations aired here and elsewhere.

Building Utopia? Can a single building be the embodiment of Utopia? Maybe, but only if it is also the physical manifestation of, and frame for, a community of agreement. So, for example, whereas, an operational Fourier Phalanstère would be a building-based utopia, the vast majority of public housing projects, wherever they might be found, would not be. The key dif ference between usual public housing schemes and a Phalanstère has more to do with the social organization of  the communal living it houses than with the specific architectural form it takes; although whatever its form, it must be shaped around the social forms it is meant to house. Thus, a conventional public housing scheme might take a form similar to a Phalanstère, but that alone would not make it utopian. Equally, a run-of-the-mill public housing scheme could, at least theoretically, shelter a utopian form of communal living, if its inhabitants came together to organize themselves in this way. Public housing in the United Kingdom has come to be seen as a home of  last resort for those without other options, but even when it actually is the better option, residents are brought together because of material

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circumstances (need) above all else, rather than by way of desire or agreement, even if apparent choice plays a part. No matter how superficially utopian an architectural housing scheme might seem, arguably, the community it houses will only resemble a Utopia in any convincing way if its members have come together to make it one. Utopias function only in the presence of a large degree of social agreement of a sort beyond simply seeking better living conditions (as a pressing need). Less likely still would be the willingness of inhabitants brought together out of need for adequate shelter to sign on to a utopian scheme if, for all intents and purposes, they have been forced or coerced into such an arrangement, whether because other options are of intolerably poor quality or because of  the absence of real choice. Any tacit agreement suggested by living in a particular estate or block of  f lats would be spurious because such living arrangements are often arrived at by default: all of the individuals living in a particular estate may have come together because it was a superior housing option, but even this degree of shared interest is not enough to declare a Utopia (even if the motivations of the architect who designed it, or the council that commissioned it, were utopian in some loose way). It follows, then, that the order imposed on residents by a particular housing arrangement – even if of a superior standard – would be dif ficult to characterize as in any way constituting a Utopia, especially if no agreement has been arrived at except through proximity and the shared necessity of shelter. So, as suggested above, although it might be possible that an architect’s vision for a design was utopian (as perhaps was the planner’s and developer’s involved with it as well), the resulting housing block or estate could never become an operational utopia, unless tenanted by individuals also designed by the architect or adequately disciplined to his or her social expectations for the project, either by way of agreement or through coercion. It is thus two aspects of modern public housing that concern me here: could the social structure of living arrangements that individuals, families, and communities living in public housing find themselves in be in any way defined as Utopia? Secondly, could the designs for this housing be accurately defined as utopian if little or no thought had been given to how inhabitation of it might actually approximate a utopian condition? Not surprisingly,

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I begin with the view that the answer to both questions, must, in almost every instance, be no. If this is correct, then it would follow that in Utopia on Trial Alice Coleman falsely accuses Utopia for the failures of modern public housing in Britain. In point of  fact, she would have done better to have put some other concept in the dock; determinism, behaviorism, and ignorance, for example, or perhaps even naïve idealism might have been better concepts to indict. If so-called utopian public housing schemes were not really utopian – from conception to inhabitation and management – what were they, dystopian perhaps, or examples of  bad social science taken f lesh? Some exaggerated form of scientific management made operational without the benefit of any critical appraisal (or restraint)? Whatever they were, some provisional attempt at identifying how a housing scheme might actually embody a utopian impulse, from invention to inhabitation and long-term organization, remains elusive, unless it is the intended setting for some kind of intentional community. So far as I see it, the reservations introduced here are valuable for the historiography of modern architecture inasmuch as they constitute a plea for a bit more precision being brought to bear on declarations of a building as utopian simply because it seems to share characteristics with other buildings of similar genera that have previously been nominated, mostly incorrectly, as utopian. Largely, such buildings (or schemes) are at best simply images of  Utopia (or of a utopia), so schematic that for them to become operational in the way their architect may have envisioned (if indeed s/he has even really considered the social life the project would house and shelter) would require draconian measures for making inhabitants conform to the vision of a single individual or authority (governmental or private). At best, such a high degree of obedience to a particular organizational system would be little dif ferent from the cultural dominant of mass society as it is; at worst it would be dystopian. Lyman Tower Sargent would, it seems, go even further, dismissing the claims of  Utopia for the vast majority of projects for housing because most do not comprise “a fairly detailed description of a social system that is nonexistent but is located in time and space” (“Definition” 143). According to Sargent, “[a]t least one of the foci of the work must be such a [detailed] description

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[of a social system]” (“Definition” 143). Moreover, “[v]ery few reform tracts present more than a limited view of society. And of course virtually all city plans and the like would be excluded”; that is, unless the “social dreaming” (Sargent’s general definition for “utopianism”) they manifest includes description of  “a non-existent society described in considerable detail” (“Definition” 143; “Defense” 11; “Three Faces” 9). It is worth clarifying at this juncture that the way in which I am using Utopia here coincides most closely with Sargent’s definition of a “Eutopia or positive utopia” in that my emphasis is on that which is discernable as “considerably better” than the existing society which it is meant to exceed. On the other hand, in each instance of Alice Coleman’s use of “Utopia,” it seems to me that what she really intends is a “Dystopia or negative utopia,” which Sargent defines as “a non-existent society described in considerable detail and normally located in time and space that the author intended a contemporaneous reader to view a considerably worse than the society in which the reader lived” (“Three Faces” 9). More importantly, Sargent’s challenge is that the conventional expectation in every instance that Utopia always proposes a “perfect” condition is really just “a political weapon” on the part of  “opponents of utopianism […] to justify their opposition” (“Three Faces” 9). It is in just this way that Alice Coleman uses Utopia; moreover, her disappointment seems also to turn on the idea that the housing estates and blocks she criticizes are failures not least because they did not achieve perfection. In this sense, she arguably conceives of  “Utopia” and “perfection” as interchangeable in the same way that “Utopia” and “totalitarianism” are typically represented. However, as Sargent observes, “perfection” is not in fact the aim of  Utopia: “One thing that constantly irritates me in writing about utopias is the use of  the words ‘perfect’ and ‘perfection.’ In English the words mean finished, completed, without future change” (“Defense” 13). It seems to me that opposing Utopia and utopianism on the grounds that the first must inevitably fail and that second must inevitably lead to failure – because the imagined aim of both must surely be a perfect condition – actually reveals something of  the debunker’s own disenchantment with the stubborn imperfectability of  the world (and of city plans and buildings). I think this arguably also goes some way in explaining why

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the refuge of opposition to Utopia and utopianism is so frequently scientific rationality, neoliberalism, and free market capitalism. The opponent of  Utopia, so it seems, actually wants perfection more than the utopian does, and since this will not come, the only option is to go “hard boiled”: to conform to the stubborn inequality of  the world as it is and to paint this acquiescence as a virtue. On the other hand, the social dreamer is just that, a dreamer, imbued with a visionary or idealist habit of mind planted in the here and now but ever looking outward, elsewhere, in the direction of  the first steps to a superior condition. In point of  fact, such a habit of mind will have little patience for the static condition that opponents of  Utopia and utopianism believe it to represent. Oscar Wilde captured this quite well in writing that Utopia is “the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and seeing a better country, sets sail” (“Soul” 1089). Although Wilde by no means encompasses the totality of thought on Utopia, his observation of both its pervasiveness and attendant restlessness supports the view advanced above: Utopia precludes its own perfection because when achievement seems near, dissatisfaction inevitably sets in and the search for the ideal imaginary that social dreaming gives rise to is on again. I am not certain where and when or by whom modern architecture of the twentieth century was first characterized as utopian.5 Nevertheless, 5

Although Patrick Geddes (1854–1932), Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) and Constantinos A. Doxiadis (1913–1975), each took up a discussion of Utopia, in one form or another, they did not describe modern architecture as utopian. For each of  them, Utopia was something yet to be achieved. For Geddes it would be “Eutopia” (Cities); for Fuller something of a technological Utopia (Oblivion); and for Dioxadis “Entopia,” which he described as being “halfway between utopian dreams and plan […] the place which satisfies the dreamer and is accepted by the scientist […] where artist and […] builder meet” (50–1). However, the negative designation of twentiethcentury high (or orthodox) modern city planning and architecture as Utopia appears to originate with Paul and Percival Goodman (Communitas), Jane Jacobs (Death) and Colin Rowe (Collage), originally published, 1947, 1961, and 1978, respectively. Each in his or her way attacked orthodox modern planning (and somewhat less so architecture) as utopian and destructive. Jacobs clearly identifies Le Corbusier and

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it has long since become a commonplace to define the often naïve idealism of a limited number of architects as utopian because of  their dreams for a more rational city, organized like a machine according to the tenets of scientific management and deterministic social science (N. Coleman, “Building”). There may indeed have been a widespread social impulse at the origins of modern architecture late in the nineteenth century and early in the twentieth, but this barely survived World War I, and was decisively removed by the necessary expedients of reconstruction in the aftermath of  World War II (N. Coleman, Utopias 88–112; University of  Western England, History). To be sure, nomination of modern architecture as Utopia really takes of f during the late 1950s, at the moment when it reached its apex; just when its limitations and failings became undeniable. Equally, even though architects began to retreat from a social preoccupation as early as the post-World War I period (perhaps the turn from social preoccupations to aesthetic ones compensated for the horrors of  the war), at least some architects active during the interwar period maintained their social concern. Nevertheless, of all twentieth-century architects, Le Corbusier has been cast as the straw man of utopian modern architecture, not least because of  his creative genius and incessant sloganeering, tied to extravagant claims for the capacity of architecture to alter behavior, reform society, and redeem cities. It is thus no wonder that in no small sense, the real target of  Utopia on Trial is Le Corbusier (although Ebenezer Howard (1850–1928) is a

Ebenezer Howard as proponents of  this orthodoxy. Paul and Percival Goodman’s approach is far more nuanced. Rowe’s attack on Utopia emerged out of  his postWorld War II disillusionment with the false promises of modern architecture and city planning. Most readers will be aware of the popularity and inf luence of Jacobs’s book, but the Goodmans’ was in print until 1990, and has inf luenced community planning. In its anarchist stance, the Goodmans’ book was both utopian and a critique of  the orthodox modernist Utopia it challenged. Rowe’s book, written with Fred Koetter, was perhaps one of  the most inf luential texts for the development of stylistic postmodernism in architecture in most of its guises. Rowe’s inf luence on generations of architects goes back to the early1950s, when he began teaching, and extended into the 1990s.

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co-defendant).6 Le Corbusier has long been blamed for the failures of modern city plans and public housing alike, even though very few of  his schemes were ever actually realized, and he built nothing in Britain. Or, as one writer put it, “According to this line of  thinking, the architects of  the [Broadwater Farm] estate were responsible for the policeman’s death [who was killed there during riots in 1985], and Le Corbusier was in turn responsible for the architects’ design” (Benton, “Scatology” 2). The intensity of this blame appears to have reached an apex by the mid-1980s when the Arts Council of  Great Britain ran into dif ficulty securing funding to mount an exhibition, Le Corbusier: Architect of  the Century, celebrating the centenary of  his birth.7 Although recent exhibitions suggest that his fortunes have since improved, attacks on Le Corbusier can still go over the top. In a recent article, he was described as being “to architecture what Pol

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Although Alice Coleman is happy to lay the blame of housing failure in England on Le Corbusier, she readily acknowledges that “Le Corbusier’s vision drew together the various strands of the Modern Movement in architecture and elevated it into the International Movement. […] Le Corbusier was certainly not in the business of testing and modifying his designs. Our own testing did not derive from a consideration of  Le Corbusier’s work but most of the design features that have failed our tests prove, in retrospect, to stem from his Utopian vision. He was fundamentally right in one respect – that design can af fect the character of a community. […] Le Corbusier’s pre-eminence has placed restrictions on architects’ creativity” (104–5). The number of commonplaces rehearsed in the preceding quote is too many to adequately discuss here. But suf fice it to say that the uniqueness of Le Corbusier’s vision (and creation), as well as the notable transformations of  his approach throughout his life, puts the lie to most of  them, as well as to the myth of an International Style of  Modern Architecture, and to the reductionist understanding of architecture and design that runs throughout Utopia on Trial. At its best – and worst –modern architecture was ever about individual talents and personalities. If followers believed, in much the way Coleman does, that some true “system” of design had been invented; the mediocrity of  the preponderance of  their output puts the lie to this myth as well. Benton writes, “The relationship between the architecture of  housing and social behavior is intriguing. When the exhibition Le Corbusier, Architect of  the Century was being in planned in the mid-1980s, the organizers found it dif ficult to line up the usual sponsors of architecture exhibitions (the builders, cement manufacturers, and well-meaning patrons). The fundraisers described this as ‘the Broadwater Farm factor’” (“Scatology” 2).

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Pot was to social reform. […] Hardly any town or city in Britain […] has not had its composition wrecked by architects and planners inspired by his ideas” (Dalrymple). Of course, not only did Le Corbusier never build anything in the U.K., his total lifetime output was approximately ninetytwo constructed works, most were collaborative projects, some temporary and others subsequently demolished (Alive 190).

Accusations Before Utopia can be deemed a failure, accused and convicted of causing misery, some sense of what it is meant to be would be helpful. But this is not really forthcoming in Alice Coleman’s book. Although a few commonplaces regarding the relationship between Utopia and architecture are rehearsed, especially relative to modern architecture and social housing, the book adds little if anything to an understanding of architecture and Utopia, which is precisely why it is worthy of consideration. While “Utopia” is prominent in the title, the book continues a tradition of using the term in a presumptuous way, giving little thought to the potential multi-dimensionality of Utopia as a term, concept, and ideal. The book’s crass repetition of ongoing dif ficulties for making sense of Utopia in relation to the built environment – as it is or might become – is what piqued my interest. Criticism of  Utopia on Trial turns mostly on its methodological f laws. However, so far as I have been able to discover, only one appraisal of the work deals with the problem of  Utopia, even though the book’s title might reasonably lead readers to expect a careful dissection of Utopia to be at the core of its conceptualization (Lipman and Harris, “Dystopian”). That most commentators leave the problem of  Utopia aside in their considerations of  the book suggests that they are happy to collude with Coleman in accepting “Utopia” as already given, universally understood, and thus warranting no further discussion. In fact, in the considerations I’ve read, Utopia is mentioned only when the title of the book is quoted (save for Lipman and Harris). Ultimately, Alice Coleman presents Utopia as a “straw man,” and all commentators seem happy to accept this, regardless of the other methodological problems the

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book might evidence. In any event, Coleman nevertheless did identify a range of genuine potential shortcomings in public housing, which she spuriously believed were caused by Utopia: There are many other kinds of stress and trauma, including crime, fear, anxiety, marital breakdown, and physical and mental disorders that would largely be avoidable in more socially stabilizing environments. Designs which have this disadvantaging ef fect are an iniquitous imposition upon people who cannot cope with them, especially as there is every reason to believe most of  them would cope perfectly well in more traditional houses (3).

Whatever its merits, the basis for the claims Coleman makes here are obscure, especially with regard to the supposedly deleterious ef fects of  f lats counteracted by the harmlessness, even tonic, ef fects of  traditional houses (Lipman and Harris 35–6). Presupposed in this is that somehow, at least in Britain, people can only cope with living in semi-detached or detached houses, ideally private. Whatever truth there may be to this, it suggests, as much as anything else, primarily a lack of sociability on the part of tenants and perhaps even some kind of need for isolation. More so, by the time Coleman wrote Utopia on Trial, and since, people who could af ford to live in privately owned traditional houses would not likely be the same people who by some choice or necessity live in public housing, whether in high- or low-rise housing blocks or in collections of publicly funded attached or even semi-detached houses (Towers 65–85). People who can live in traditional houses “can” because they have the resources that make doing so possible.8 Could the replacing of existing mid-twentiethcentury housing estates with neo-traditional terraced (or row) housing, 8

For a compelling rebuttal to Alice Coleman’s strangely determinist emphasis on design alone as the cause of  housing estate failure, see Paul Spicker. For example: “[a]lthough Coleman explicitly denies the point, the root cause of  the problems of depressed council estates is poverty or the lack of material resources. […] Many issues which appear on the face of it to be problems of design […] have to be understood in the context of a lack of resources. […] Coleman fails to consider the possibility of a relationship between poverty and design. Design has to be considered within its social context and the adequacy of a building’s design may be directly dependent on the resources available to its occupants. In areas occupied by wealthier people, many of  the problems suf fered in depressed estates could be simply overcome […].

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or even semi-detached housing – as is currently the fashion – really assure a dif ferent outcome for people struggling within an unequal society characterized by evermore diminished prospects?

No Society? To put Utopia on Trial into context, it is worth noting that the mid-1980s was a period of conservative retrenchment in the lead up to the fall of  the Berlin Wall in 1989, which heralded the emergence of free market capitalism as the dominant system of organization across the globe. In 1985 stylistic postmodernism in architecture was at its apex. Margaret Thatcher’s run as prime minister of the United Kingdom (1979–90) was at its mid-point, as was Ronald Reagan’s U.S. presidency (1981–9). By 1985, whatever radical or progressive social thinking (or dreaming) that might have once motivated modern architects had either been expunged or was the province of holdout fringe dwellers, such as Dutch architect Aldo van Eyck (1918–99), who long resisted the status quo (N. Coleman, Utopias, 196–233, 243–56).9 To further contextualize Utopia on Trial, it is worth noting that Alice Coleman’s indictment of social housing in Britain has been described elsewhere as being comparable with Thatcher’s proclamation that “There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there

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Many of the problems in council estates would not occur if the occupants were not poor […]” (284, 285, 286, 287). For an in-depth discussion on the relationship between stylistic Postmodernism (and stylistic Desconstructivism) in architecture and a general move to the Right from the late 1970s onward, see Mary McLeod, “Architecture and Politics”: “Both the historicist and poststructuralist tendencies correctly pointed to the failures of  the modern movement’s instrumental rationality, its narrow teleology, but these two positions have erred in another direction: in their abjuration of all realms of  the social and in their assumption that form remains either a critical or af firmative tool independent of social and economic processes. […] The formal and social costs are too high when the focus is so exclusively on form” (55).

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are families” (quoted in Benton, “Scatology” 2, 4).10 Not surprisingly, the Conservatives under Thatcher began the sell-of f of council f lats in England, just as Alice Coleman’s research “proved” that semi-detached housing would solve all of  the social problems “created” by public housing, especially in its high-rise form. So, in a very real sense, Utopia on Trial is a Thatcherite attack on the very idea of the public in housing.11 Accordingly, then anything seeming to suggest the possibility of a commonweal was ripe for rejection. Some vague notion of  Utopia as retrograde culprit would have played well with the remnants of  the left and the right equally: the failures of  the welfare state, of socialism and of communism, so the story goes, could surely be lain at the doorstep of social dreaming, of  the kind only Utopia makes possible.12 10

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The complete passage within which the famous quote was found is even more telling: “I think we’ve been through a period where too many people have been given to understand that if they have a problem, it’s the government’s job to cope with it. ‘I have a problem, I’ll get a grant.’ ‘I’m homeless, the government must house me.’ They’re casting their problem on society. And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first. It’s our duty to look after ourselves and then, also to look after our neighbour. People have got the entitlements too much in mind, without the obligations. There’s no such thing as entitlement, unless someone has first met an obligation” (Thatcher). “At the heart of  the issues raised by Alice Coleman’s research are the social, psychological, and economic ties that bind the individual to family and social groups. Margaret Thatcher once famously said, ‘There is no such thing as society.’ In this view, communities consist of individuals and families responsible for their own welfare and security, and restrained only by a framework of  law and morality. Coleman’s view of society is certainly a bleak one, populated by perverts, criminals, vandals, and meddling architects who must be kept at bay behind ‘defensible space.’ This is of course a widely shared view, which may or may not have been aggravated by the architecture of social housing. It fails to consider the optimism and aspirations towards social interaction that mark the most successful housing environments” (Benton, “Scatology”). See the following definition of  Utopia for a Marxist perspective of it as impossibility: “Utopia [ou-topos = not-place] Originally the name of Thomas More’s fictional island, the atheistic and communist republic described in his 1515 novel, Utopia. Ever since, the word has denoted any vision of an (sic) perfect society which plays the role

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As it turns out, Coleman’s book has proved quite inf luential, but this may simply be because it was cresting a wave of neoliberal, Thatcherite dogma presented as the only alternative.13 Moreover, the research findings clearly support the ensuing trend of privatizing public housing estates in England, and the U.K. government consequently largely withdrawing from the provision of social housing. In short, post-World War II mass housing estates, whether accurately or inaccurately, will have been implicitly identified with Leftist – even socialist – politics, whereas traditional single-family private houses, primarily detached or semi-detached are, apparently, associated with Right of center conservative values. If  the evidentiary facts could prove that putatively utopian (read: supposedly Leftist/socialist) housing layouts and designs were failures because of some essential f law, glaring proof would have been established as to just how degenerate the ideology underpinning them must be. What, though, if the basic premises of  Coleman’s conclusions are in themselves fatally f lawed? What if Utopia is not in reality always and everywhere actually a trope for (Leftist) authoritarianism? What if even if it could be proved that it was, the ideology underpinning mass social housing of the sort Coleman rejects was anything but utopian? Or even if it was, it would need to be qualified as being, in most instances, of a pathologically, perhaps even degenerate, utopian sort. Equally troubling is the possibility that much modern mass housing of the mid-twentieth century was at some level inevitably – if not intentionally – dystopian. Because of her association with Thatcher and the ideals of neoliberalism, Coleman would inevitably have sought to transform problems of social justice into ones of design. Solving the former requires utopian vision to accomplish the job, whereas the latter (as presented by Coleman) is simply

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of an ideal for a social movement advocating changes to existing social conditions. The connotation of Utopia, as in ‘Utopian socialism,’ is that the ideal state of society represented has no real basis in actuality and may be an impossible and unattainable idealisation. The opposite of Utopia in this sense is a condition which already has a real, even if embryonic basis” (Marxist Internet Archive). Not surprisingly, Alice Coleman’s ideas did indeed receive “high-profile support” from” then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (Colquhoun 45).

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a problem of technique. More troubling still, Coleman of necessity would have wanted to demonstrate that all of the myriad problems she identified with failed public housing estates could not in any way be symptomatic of poverty, and the lack of choice it assures, even of a lack of upkeep. Confident in having decoupled social deprivation from housing failure in problem estates, a specific design – associated in the popular imagination with Le Corbusier and socialism – could be made the malady. And the free market and single-family housing could be revealed as the sure cure. Interestingly, though ultimately not surprisingly, Coleman begins her case against Utopia by appealing to a dismissal of it (understood in this immediate context as the social dimension of architecture) advanced by perhaps the most cynical and opportunistic of twentieth-century American architects, Phillip Johnson (1906–2005) (Applebaum; Varnelis; Stevens). Coleman describes Johnson as “noted” and quotes him as saying: “We really believed in a quasi-religious sense, in the perfectibility of human nature, in the role of architecture as a weapon of social reform […] the coming utopia when everyone would live in cheap prefabricated f lat-roofed multiple dwellings – heaven on earth” (quoted in Coleman 3).14 Coleman acknowledges this as a retrospective description of early twentieth-century architecture as utopian, supporting my earlier claim that architects rarely, if ever, described it as such at the time when it was being imagined and built (A. Coleman 3; N. Coleman, Utopias, “Dystopia”). However, the strangest aspect of this passage is Johnson’s use of  the word “we,” as though he were implicating himself in some “quasi-religious” belief in architecture’s role “as a weapon of social reform” in the making of “Utopia” take f lesh. Of course, Johnson never believed any such thing. He was a highly inf luential American architect, whose work is generally unremarkable. Above all else a taste maker, he was co-inventor of  the term “International Style” in 1932 to describe the then still challenging, mostly European, modern architecture of  the twentieth-century. “International Style” was the title of an exhibit at the

14

The source of  Johnson’s comment is revealed in the listed references for Coleman’s book, it comes from an unpublished lecture by Johnson, “What Makes Me Tick” (1975), published in Writings, 260–5.

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Museum of Modern Art in New York City, co-organized by Johnson, who was the museum’s director of architecture at the time. The “International Style” exhibit and accompanying book of  the same name were intended to introduce this then new architecture to a U.S. audience. One of Johnson’s primary self-acknowledged intentions was to present the new architecture, which in many instances really did have a clearly worked out social and political agenda, as simply an historical style devoid of either that had arrived on the scene as an aesthetic of  the day. The style was now safe for ready consumption by the wealthy, a view borne out by its achievement of of ficial status by the late 1940s (N. Coleman, Utopias 88–112).15 Thus, right from the start, his main aim was to drain the new architecture of whatever social(ist) taint it might have had. So, even if  Johnson may have dabbled for a time in “f lat roofed” buildings it would have been because they were fashionable or stylish, not because they promised to provide af fordable housing for those who needed it (N. Coleman, Utopias, 68–71, 95–6). Even granting that he might have believed that everyone “would live in cheap prefabricated f lat-roofed dwellings,” this “everyone” certainly did not include him. That the obscurely referenced Johnson quotation ends with “heaven on earth” should have been clue enough for Coleman that the statement was primarily ironic and that he did not see himself in the description of  the modern movement in twentieth-century architecture he ridicules.16 If anything, he is taking a shot at the earnest, albeit often naïve, architects who might have actually once believed such things.17

15

16 17

Some notable examples of this include: Equitable Building (1944–8), Pietro Belluschi; Glass House (1945–9), Phillip Johnson; 860–80 Lakeshore Drive Apartments (1948– 51), Ludwig Mies van der Rohe; Lever House (1952) Gordon Bunshaft, for Skidmore Owings & Merrill; Seagram Building (1958), Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, with Philip Johnson; 26 St James Place (1959–60), Denys Lasdun and Partners; Economist Building (1959–64) Alison and Peter Smithson. Interestingly, the way in which Alice Coleman quoted Johnson, led at least one reader to believe that he had actually “recalled” the passage to Coleman; see Hanley 84. In the same speech, Johnson continued: “The day of ideology is thankfully over. Let us celebrate […]. There are no rules, only facts. There is no order, only preference.

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Coleman’s appeal to Johnson in aid of making her point is revealing. As suggested above, Johnson was best known for his cynicism, irony, and utter lack of conviction (amongst other proclivities, including a penchant for Nazism never quite renounced) (Applebaum; Stevens; Varnelis). At first glance, then, it is quite peculiar for Alice Coleman to have begun such an earnest book as Utopia on Trial with a quote from a man who would have been the first to admit that he never believed in anything, “in a quasi-religious sense,” or in any other, not least “the perfectibility of  human nature” or “the role of architecture in social reform,” and certainly not in any “coming Utopia.” Moreover, Johnson’s approach to architecture was strictly formalist; he had no time for and little interest in the ethical or social function of architecture. Arguably, North American architecture, if not twentieth-century architecture more generally, was certainly no better for his negative inf luence on it. By the time he died in 2005, he had become something of a hero for generations of architects who hoped to escape what they perceived as the restrictions a social (or ethical) dimension, identified with early twentieth-century modernism, would necessarily place upon architecture and the free reign of  the architect’s individual desire (N. Coleman, Utopias 68–71).18 Although seemingly a digression, it is also worth ref lecting on Johnson’s role in the emergence of stylistic postmodernism in the United States during the late 1970s/early 1980s, which coincided with ef forts to put twentieth-century modernist architecture to rest, conveniently coinciding with the rise of  Reagan and Thatcher, on either side of  the Atlantic (see McLeod). It is within this context that Johnson’s comments and Alice Coleman’s research ought to be understood. At the very least, by allowing Johnson to help justify her case, she arguably takes opinion for fact in her conviction that the nefarious link between Utopia and the failures of modern architecture she presupposes is true and verifiable. My claim,

18

There are no imperatives, only choice […]. I am of the opinion that we have no faiths. I have none. ‘Free at last,’ I say to myself ” (260, 261). Pre- and post-World War I and II modernism up to the late 1960s is now distant enough to have been, in at least some instances, recuperated by the heritage industry and museum curators (Hatherley, 5–6, 15–17).

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however, is that putting Utopia on trial for the failures of modern social housing was simply a cover for wanting to purge planning and architecture of whatever by then enfeebled social reformist idealism lingered on into the mid-1980s, the real failures of post-1945 housing notwithstanding. Twenty-five years hence, Rykwert’s observation that “corporate capital” is impotent “to generate a socially cohesive environment” could be taken as a rejoinder to Coleman’s free-market ethos, which now seems so absolute as to suggest that there really is “no alternative,” just as Thatcher proclaimed, no matter the consequences (Seduction 227). Equally, Coleman’s indictment of social housing, and the Utopia she believed it represented, as well as her preference for the “genius” of the free market is, as suggested earlier, cognate with Thatcher’s famous “no such thing as society” proclamation. On the surface, the ethos suggested by this statement might seem quite reasonable, at least until one ref lects on the multiple deprivations that are part and parcel of unequal societies in which a significant part of  the population is entrapped in conditions from which willpower alone cannot release them. People ensnared in this way will likely never be able to own a private house and may even have great dif ficulty renting one from the private housing market. Structural intergenerational under- and unemployment underscores unequal conditions, which do not lend themselves to amelioration by design alone or the goodwill of neighbors. The fantasy of some “Big Society,” as imagined by the current coalition government in Britain, is surely not enough to adequately redress the consequences of persisting material inequality, and is likely but a cover for “No Society.” Although Coleman associates the failure of post-World War II highrise public housing in Britain with Utopia, it seems that her project is really to recast mid-twentieth-century housing as in some way fundamentally punitive, in the sense that unless residents correct their outlook on life, enough so that they would want to escape council housing, they will be doomed to a life of crime (and punishment): It is a tragic thought that Utopia designers, with their idealistic intentions, have tipped the balance suf ficiently to make criminals out of potentially law abiding citizens, and victims out of potentially secure and happy people. […] All these discoveries add up to the fact that it is the Utopian design that has been imposed upon post-war

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Britain that appears to be the chief  factor in many aspects of social decline in new or redeveloped areas. […] Utopia has proved disastrous […]. “Houses – not f lats” is the optimum housing policy (22, 180, 181, 123).

Interestingly, architectural historian Dell Upton has argued that for public housing to be acceptable to mainstream America, it would of necessity have to be inferior to private housing options, making it “appropriate” to the social status of the poor in need of it (239).19 Given Coleman’s Thatcherite proclivities, it is no wonder she viewed private housing as unassailably good and social housing as irredeemably bad. More emphatically, social housing corrupts whereas private housing nurtures.

Concrete Utopias? If there is some value in thinking that Utopia may be concrete or abstract, as Bloch did, or that it can be either constitutive or pathological as Ricoeur observed, or that when ideology transforms into a myth it becomes a degenerate Utopia, as Louis Marin claimed, then it may well be that Alice Coleman’s supposedly completely rational preference for “traditional houses” is actually but a cover for desiring an abstract, pathological, and degenerate Utopia of some neoliberal privatized paradise, which is a reading suggested by Bill Hillier:

19

Upton notes that there is a correlation between the sub-standard housing on of fer to the poor, at least in the U.S.A., and a general societal ambivalence toward those in need: “In housing, the result has been to reinforce the economic principle that only those who can pay should have pleasant physical surroundings: anything more robs the industrious. Since the nineteenth century, public-welfare of ficials have assumed that housing for the poor, whether in almshouses or public housing, should involve no excess expenditures or gratuitous physical amenities and that it should be disciplinary, instilling identity through enforcing desirable behaviour. The poor should have only what they could win and hold in the market place” (239).

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Nathaniel Coleman In short, a “Colemanised” estate could be very much like the very worst estates we have now. Certainly it will generate everywhere the fear that arises when some people have to pass through a series of spaces that are devoid of people for most of  the time. “Colemanism” is, it turns out, nothing less than the disease for which it claims to be the cure. The only way to rehumanise estates is to gradually reintegrate them into the public realm. […] “Colemanism” will isolate people from the public realm even more radically and will do so in the name of the same failed theory which gave rise to the problem in the first place (41).

Hillier’s negative association of Coleman’s program for improvement with the production of empty spaces and the fear of isolation that comes with it sheds light on her project’s origin in a self-acknowledged social Darwinism (A. Coleman 6). However it is his af firmative statement about what really ought to be done to improve problem housing estates that is most valuable in the present context of a discussion about Utopia in the positive, rather than the negative. Hillier’s proposition that gradual reintegration of  housing estates into the public realm is the key to rehumanizing them is extremely compelling and also carries with it a refreshing whif f of Utopia (that in no way derives from Coleman’s proposals). Even a cursory glance at, or f leeting thought about, the vast majority of public housing provision will surely reveal that most of it is characterized by a peculiar exclusion from the city it is in, and thus also from the ongoing patterns of life unfolding there (either through height or physical separation from the street, or both). Hence, physical isolation, alienation inscribed into the built environment, will inevitably send a strong bodily message to inhabitants and passersby alike; this is a strange place, “other” in its negative relationship to the realm beyond its perimeter, or far below. Whatever the original rationale may have been for dissociating so much mass housing from the existing patterns of  the city, isolation, and disaggregation from the public realm is surely legible as a strong social communication: the “sickness” that inhabitants of such estates have over time come to represent is best quarantined apart from the “healthy” city, even

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though this separation may have contributed to the perception.20 Although Coleman claims to be proposing ways of ameliorating these problems in existing housing projects and to have established a range of strategies for preventing them in ones newly built, Hillier argues that in each instance “the ghetto ef fect of  the estate as a whole will be made even more potent, since her philosophy for relating estates to surrounding areas is […] only one of sealing up as many ways in and out as possible” (41). Nevertheless, once she is satisfied that Utopia has been proven guilty of the failures of multiple-dwelling-unit housing estates, Coleman claims that “[p]revention would seem to lie in the decision to build no more f lats and concentrate on houses instead” (4). As it turns out, her findings ostensibly show that “the inter-war house” performs best, outpacing either “pre-1914 or post-1945 houses” (4). While many of us may aspire to a single-family private home, this is by no means universal; in many corners of  the world, the norm is to either rent or own an apartment, rather than to purchase a house. Thus, the bias against f lats and for houses in Britain might be cultural, it might even be a Thatcherite social construction, or maybe a fabricated need to support both the construction and banking industries. If people in Britain, for example, are now somehow less well adapted to living close together, then that may be revealing as well. Community requires interaction, even with strangers. And stranger-anxiety encourages isolation under the guise of desirable privacy. Coleman’s aim, it would thus appear, was primarily an ideological one, grounded in a specific range of  beliefs rather than in the science she touts, which her strongest critics have called into question (Lipman and Howard; Hillier).21 In support of this view, Coleman identifies post-1945 20 Hillier supports this reading, arguing that no matter how “varied their geometry, most modern estate housing divides people up into ‘group territories,’ whether this is a court, an access deck, a staircase or a cul-de-sac. These territories are typically segregated from each other – you must pass through many interstitial spaces to go from one to another – and segregated from the main interfaces of everyday public life, which usually occur outside the estate, if anywhere at all” (41). 21 For a good overview of Utopia on Trial, see Towers, especially 114–17. He writes, “Some years on from the publication of Utopia on Trial the heat of the original controversy

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housing blocks as constituting “the great Utopian blunder” (4). Of course postwar Britain was notable for its commitment to building a social welfare state, through the institution of the National Health Service, nationalization of industries, and ef forts to rebuild many bombed cities, including by providing housing. In light of the mid-1980s publication of Coleman’s book, during Thatcher’s Premiership (to say nothing of  the support her work received from the Conservative government), it is worth ref lecting on Utopia on Trial as an ideological text with much more in its sights than just failed housing estates. Rather, by identifying Utopia as the culprit, it is arguably the whole constellation of values represented by council housing and state provision in general that are on trial in the book (A. Coleman 6, 81, 92, 162). Indeed, it is intriguing that Coleman identifies “Utopia” as the culprit in housing block and estate failures when it is human “experience” and desire abstracted into an aesthetic and quasi-sociological principle that are more likely to blame. As Herbert Gans observes: the outcomes of architectural and site planning, and of most policies which seek to change the “physical” environment, have little impact on the behaviour patterns and values of people. Planning [and architecture] which aims to improve living conditions must address itself  to the significant causal elements of  these conditions, which are usually economic, social and political. […] The physical environment is relevant to behaviour in so far as this environment af fects the social system and culture of  the people involved or as it is taken up into their social system (xi, 5).

In fact, one is left with the impression that Coleman’s research was blind to this possibility because her project was ultimately an expedient above all else, with its obsession for scores, facts, and apparently scientific methods.

has faded and the issues fallen into perspective. It is now clear how risky it is to try to apply science to housing. Scientific methods require precise definitions and comparisons with well defined controls and tests which can be repeatedly replicated. Such criteria are extremely dif ficult to apply to the complexities of multi-storey housing. […] The failure to convincingly apply scientific evaluation, however, does not mean that design is of no significance” (116). For more on the weaknesses of  Coleman’s scientific method, see Hillier 39.

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An intriguing example of  this is the statement that “[p]rivate blocks, for example, have an average disadvantagement score that is over twice as good as council blocks, so ownership is not independent of design” (5). The presumption of  this statement is that privately developed housing blocks with privately owned f lats (or apartments) must be better designed than those that have been provided by the state and publicly funded.22 Arguably, the bias towards private provision and the free market is at least as much the motivation for the way this conclusion is presented as the supposed “facts” of  the research. Even if private blocks are now less disadvantaged than council blocks, it is possible that the causes of this have little basis in Coleman’s data. Thus, the social justice aspect of public housing failure is not even considered. For example, if privately provided and owned blocks of  f lats perform better than those provided by councils (that are publicly owned and rented) it would suggest that ownership is independent of design, exactly the opposite of  Coleman’s contention that it is not.

Utopia Anxiety Whether or not private housing blocks really are better designed than public ones is debatable; however, privately owned f lats will benefit from a much higher level of inward investment toward maintenance, security, and services, to say nothing of  the residents being free of  the stigma currently associated with being a tenant in a council estate (of course this equation 22

In point of  fact, the origin of public provision of  housing in Britain was a direct response to the private sector’s inability to provide decent housing, and also as a corrective to the abuses of private landlords (BBC/Open University, From Here; Leeds Tenants Federation, Hidden; University of Western England, History, sections 1–7; Towers 11–64). However, as housing choices diminished in line with larger and larger scale developments, social housing in Britain started to become stigmatized “from as early as 1961” (Towers 67). For more detail on the stigmatization of public housing, see Towers 65–85.

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does not account for the continuing often dire state of private rental of ferings). If, culturally, private home ownership harmonizes with privatization and the mores of capitalism, then to rent, especially in a society that inevitably puts such a high value on house ownership, would be tantamount to failure, or at least to a clearly identifiable diminished quantum of economic, social, and cultural capital. Coleman appears to support this reading: The twentieth century in Britain has been split in two by a great revolution in housing. The first half dominated by the old system of natural selection, which left people free to secure the best accommodation they could. The second half  has embraced the Utopian ideal of  housing planned by a paternalistic authority, which of fered hopes of improved standards but also ran the risk of  trapping people in dwellings not of their choosing. Unfortunately, Utopia is not automatically synonymous with progress, and much of our planned housing is proving to be retrograde – the scene of many kinds of social malaise (6).

The most peculiar aspect of  this passage is the supposition that Utopia intends itself  to be “synonymous with progress” and that revealing that it is not always so somehow unveils it as tending toward the “retrograde.” What makes this observation strange is its apparent ignorance of Utopian literature from at least More to Morris, in which some future (or elsewhere) is envisioned as superior, but usually not in terms of  “progress.” Although rarely, if ever, the point of utopias, progress does seem to be the dark star of dystopias. In fact, Utopia arguably charts a course filled with doubts about mainstream progress, from More’s countering of enclosure with commonweal by way of appeal to the genius of a prelapsarian island people, to Morris’s countering of nineteenth-century industrial progress with a radically alternative condition that while socially progressive was infused with real anxiety about post-Enlightenment conditions of social and cultural disaggregation. Beyond these inconsistencies with the literary traditions of Utopia, Coleman’s association of it with centralized planning, paternal authority, and diminished choice, neglects the degree to which most utopias (literary or real) presume a community of agreement or interest already established, such that consensus might be assumed, usually achieved as an adjunct of commonweal, assured by the satisfaction of  the need for emotional, biological, and sociological survival.

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If post-1945 social housing in Britain was “retrograde,” “paternalistic,” and ultimately unsatisfactory, it is because it could never arise out of  the commonweal literary utopias or intentional communities presume, not least because the individuals, families, and communities for whom it was provided were, for the most part, little more than abstractions for those who commissioned and designed it. In this way, most post-1945 public housing could only ever be pathologically or degenerately utopian at best. Supporting this reading, Coleman’s description of  the process by which Utopia is achieved in her scenario describes something closer to the mechanisms of a fascist dictatorship than the social association of a commonweal: First there are the pre-Utopian residents, many of whom have been ruthlessly evicted from their little terrace houses, and sometimes mentally scarred by this process as severely as by the loss of a spouse or the loss of a limb. Then there are the hopeful new f lat-dwellers, who suf fer all the stresses and tensions of seeing their block degenerate into a place they are ashamed of and fearful to live in, until they too are forced to make way for a second round of  Utopia (6).

One of  the most peculiar aspects of  Alice Coleman’s attempt to reveal “Utopia” as responsible for all of  the ills of public multiple-dwelling unit housing is the sense one gets that in her mind some ideal reality was actually fully achieved by postwar public housing in Britain. Otherwise, sentences such as, “First there are the pre-Utopian residents, many of whom have been ruthlessly evicted from their little terrace houses, and sometimes mentally scarred by this process as severely as by the loss of a spouse or the loss of a limb,” would hardly be believable. Whatever the truth of  this statement, with regards to the failures of  the high-rise public housing it refers to, it is the dichotomies she sets up that interest me here. For example, there is an opposition between the bigness of the new housing projects, which is a trope for the social policies and actions of central government, but more so of Utopia as inevitably overwhelming, inconsiderate, and violent, because it was planned by “a paternalistic authority.” The alternative to pre-utopian existence was domestic in scale, self-suf ficient in character, and even homely, represented by the “little terrace houses” Coleman identifies as having been erased to make way for the “Utopian block of  f lats” that would replace them. Because “Utopia is not automatically synonymous with progress”

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confirmed by much “planned housing […] proving to be retrograde,” any subsequent attempt to make good on the failures of past ef forts will only herald “a second round of Utopia,” also doomed because, “Housing authorities do not yet understand the failure of  Utopia well enough to be sure of avoiding mistakes in future [sic]” (6). It is important to make it very clear that I do not reject out of  hand Coleman’s observations regarding the failures of post-1945 social housing in Britain (though I am less convinced by her proposed free-market solutions); rather, what I most want to do here is to identify a category error – in the sense that Coleman describes the absence of social imagination as its presence – and a lack of linguistic precision – Utopia is assailed but not adequately defined – that illuminates the other notable shortcomings of  Utopia on Trial, or at least should alert readers to their likelihood. Returning for a moment to category error, what Coleman describes as Utopia has very little in common with either more fixed definitions of the concept, or even with more open ones. In short, Utopia is employed by Coleman to make a conservative attack on what she sees as a symbol of socialist peril. In terms of  linguistic imprecision, Utopia is used throughout Coleman’s book without any indication that something quite specific is being attacked: a centralized, authoritarian, paternalistic, and ultimately mostly ignorant provision of public housing by collections of bureaucrats and professionals more akin to the functionaries who populate Terry Gilliam’s 1985 dystopian film Brazil than the Utopians in More’s book (or in almost any other literary utopia or intentional community for that matter), and that this does not exhaust the possibilities of  Utopia. For Coleman, these incompetents could be redeemed only if  they renounced their supposed Utopia while embracing her idealized “science” of privatization. Indeed, so far as Coleman is concerned, the most damning thing to be said of  Ebenezer Howard’s and Le Corbusier’s suggestive thought experiments, Garden City and Radiant City, respectively, is that “neither of the two mainsprings of our modern Utopia […] had any scientific background whatsoever” (6–7). Sharing a faith in scientific management with the incompetents she damns, Coleman’s trust in scientific rationality and quanta belies a seemingly complete lack of interest in, or sensitivity to, the imaginaries of art, which includes architecture. Artistic invention in architecture was most potent in all historical periods until scientific

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rationality began to subsume it. And even post-Enlightenment, the most compelling artists of the modern epoch have either intuited, or understood explicitly, that science cannot explain everything, not even the failures of mass housing built since the end of  World War II. It is sure that the two primary utopian currents in the built environment identified by Coleman – the Garden City of Ebenezer Howard and the Radiant City of Le Corbusier – of fered only partial and f lawed views on how to re-imagine cities in the twentieth century; nevertheless, it is extremely reductive to consider the problem solved simply by condemning their provocative schemes for supposedly having inspired the doomed housing projects examined in Utopia on Trial: Vision and Reality in Planned Housing, projects with which they had no direct involvement anyway.

Utopia the “Other” Coleman’s indictment notwithstanding, Utopia’s defamation by communism and capitalism alike makes it into a genuine alternative to the banalities prof fered by the master narratives of  both. Utopia is not some “middle way” (akin to neoliberalism) but, rather, stakes out a territory of  “otherness” that is at once optimistic and capable of overcoming the poverty of imagination that marks the current epoch in all sectors of public life, including architecture. If modern architecture failed in its promise of a better future through reform, by trading in utopian dreams it could not deliver on for a dystopian reality it could easily build everywhere, it is not because it was wrong-headed in construing itself as utopian in the first place (which it very rarely, if ever, did anyway), but, rather, its failure was inevitable because its vision was never bold enough to begin with. Dogged by insecurity, manifest as a need to be seen as technologically rational and nearly scientific, most modern architects – save perhaps for Le Corbusier after 1929 and a few others – were unable to infuse their work with the imaginative complexity that could have made it into an enduring “counterform” of renewed social life.

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Above all else, the view advanced in Utopia on Trial is that the public sector will inevitably prove incompetent in its ef forts to solve social problems, such as housing. Whatever the shortcomings of public housing policy might have been, at least it took on the provision of shelter as an obligation of  the state. The obvious alternative to both Utopia and the failures of government must be, in Coleman’s view, the technical rationality and economic imperatives of the private sector. Not surprisingly, cognate with this perspective is Coleman’s belief that science, as unassailable truth, of fers an ef fective antidote to the supposed “Utopian blunder” inf licted on people by the “Utopian ef forts of the last 40 years” (A. Coleman 4, 5). However, as suggested earlier, it is precisely Coleman’s claims of scientific veracity to justify her findings and the conclusions drawn from them that have come under the most ferocious attack by critics (Hillier; Spicer; Smith). It is as if she believed, at least as naïvely as Le Corbusier supposedly believed in Utopia, that science of fers the only reliable perspective on reality and possibility alike. The claim that modern architecture was utopian and that utopias always harbor absolutist ideologies has served a double purpose for quite some time now; on the one hand, it supports a view that the architecture coming after the modern (read: stylistically postmodern) must be superior to it because it has overcome the utopian fallacy, on the other, architecture must necessarily void itself of a social dimension (read: Utopia), to protect it (and us) from utopian excess, which must be a good thing in comparison to the wrong-headed fantasies of reform spun by the first generation of modern architects. As with so many apparent “truths,” the so-called postmodern (and supposedly autonomous) architecture of the past thirty-five or so years, has, in most of its guises, simply replaced modernist earnestness with acquiescent frivolity often verging on the thoughtless, an example of which is the ongoing mania for demolishing 1960s and 1970s housing only to replace it with silly and inferior (frequently privately financed) simulacrums of pre-war or earlier housing.

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Works Cited Applebaum, Anne. “‘Remembering’ Philip Johnson.” The Washington Post (2 February 2005): A23. 26 July 2010 . BBC/Open University. From Here to Modernity. 20 July 2010 < http://www.open2. net/modernity>. Benton, Tim. “Session 2: Le Corbusier.” Utopias and Avant-Gardes Study Day – Part 3. London: Tate Modern and Open University, 25.03.2006. Tate Channel. (19 July 2010) . ——. “Scatology, Eschatology, and the Modern Movement: Urban Planning and the Facts of  Life” Harvard Design Magazine, Housing and Community 8 (Summer 1999): 1–4. Coleman, Alice. Utopia on Trial: Vision and Reality in Planned Housing. London: Hillary Shipman, 1985. Coleman, Nathaniel. “Building Dystopia.” Rivista MORUS – Utopia e Renascimento (Brasile) 4 (2007): 181–92. ——. Utopias and Architecture. Abingdon: Routledge, 2005. Colquhoun, Ian. Design Out Crime: Creating Safe and Sustainable Communities. Oxford: Architectural Press, 2004. Dalrymple, Theodore. “The Architect as Totalitiarian: Le Corbusier’s Baleful Inf luence.” City Journal 19.4 (Autumn 2009). 26 July 2010 . Design Museum. “Alison + Peter Smithson Architects (1928–93 + 1923–2003).” Design Library. 26 July 2010 . Doxiadis, Constantinos A. Between Dystopia and Utopia. Hartford, Connecticut: Trinity College, 1966. Fuller, Buckminster. Utopia or Oblivion: The Prospects for Humanity. New York: Bantam Books, 1969. Gans, Herbert. People and Plans: Essays on Urban Problems and Solutions. Middlesex: Penguin, 1972. Geddes, Patrick. Cities in Evolution: an Introduction to the Town Planning Movement and to the Study of  Civics. London: Williams and Norgate, 1915. Goodman, Paul, and Percival Goodman. Communitas: Means of Livelihood and Ways of  Life. 1947. New York: Vintage Books, 1960.

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Hanley, Lynsey. An Intimate History of  Estates. London: Granta, 2007. Harvey, David. Spaces of  Hope. Berkeley: University of  California Press, 2000. Hatherley, Owen. Militant Modernism. Winchester, United Kingdom: Zero Books, 2008. Heynen, Hilde. “Engaging Modernism.” Back from Utopia: the Challenge of the Modern Movement. Eds Hubert-Jan Henket and Hilde Heynen. Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2002. 378–98. Hillier, Bill. “City of  Alice’s Dreams.” AJ (Architects’ Journal) 28.184 (9 July 1986): 39–41. Holston, James. The Modernist City: An Anthropological Critique of Brasília. Chicago: University of  Chicago Press, 1989. Jacobs, Jane. Death and Life of Great American Cities. 1961. New York: Vintage Books, 1989. Johnson, Philip C. “What Makes Me Tick.” Lecture, Columbia University, 24 September 1975. Eds Peter Eisenman and Robert Stern. Philip Johnson Writings. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979. 260–5. Leeds Tenants Federation. The Hidden History of Tenants. 26 July 2010 . Lefebvre, Henri. “The Right to the City”. 1968. Writings on Cities. Ed. and trans. Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas. London: Blackwell, 1996. 63–184. Levitas, Ruth. “For Utopia: The (Limits of  the) Utopian Function Late Capitalist Society.” Critical Review of  Social and Political Philosophy. 3.2 (2000): 25–43. Lipman, Alan, and Howard Harris. “Dystopian Aesthetics – A Refusal from ‘Nowhere.’” Design Studies 8.1 (1987): 33–40. Lyon, Dominique. Le Corbusier Alive, Trans. Kathryn Walton-Ward. Paris: Vilo International, 2000. Manuel, Frank E. “Towards a Psychological History of Utopias.” Utopias and Utopian Thought. Ed. F. E. Manuel. Boston: Houghton Mif f lin, 1966. 70. Marxist Internet Archive. “Glossary of Terms: Utopia.” Encyclopaedia of Marxism. 26 July 2010 . McLeod, Mary. “Architecture and Politics in the Reagan Era: From Postmodernism to Deconstructivism.” Assemblage 8 (February 1989): 22–59. Mumford, Eric. The CIAM Discourse on Urbanism, 1928–1960. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2000. Poggioli, Renato. The Theory of the Avant-Garde. Trans. Gerald Fitzgerald. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press, 1968. Popper, Karl Raimund. The Poverty of  Historicism. 1957. London: Routledge, 2002. Rowe, Colin, and Fred Koetter. Collage City. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1978.

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Rykwert, Joseph. “Learning from the Street.” Lotus 11 (1976). The Necessity of Artifice. New York: Rizzoli, 1982. 102–13. ——. The Seduction of  Place. New York: Vintage, 2002. Sargent, Lyman Tower. “In Defense of  Utopia.” Diogenes 53.11 (2006): 11–17. ——. “Three Faces of  Utopianism Revisited.” Utopian Studies 5.1 (1994): 1–37. ——. “Utopia – The Problem of  Definition.” Extrapolation 16 (1975): 137–48. Smith, Susan J. “Utopia on Trial: Vision and Reality in Planned Housing.” Review Article. Urban Studies 23:3 (1986): 244–6. Spicker, Paul. “Poverty and Depressed Estates: A Critique of Utopia on Trial.” Housing Studies 2.4 (1987): 283–92. Stevens, Mark. “Form Follows Fascism.” New York Times ( January 31, 2005): 13 July 2010 . Tafuri, Manfredo. Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development. 1973. Trans. Barbara Luigia La Penta. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1976. Thatcher, Margaret. “Aids, Education and the Year 2000!” Interview. Woman’s Own (31 October 1987): 8–10. Towers, Graham. Shelter Is Not Enough. Bristol: Polity Press, 2000. University of Western England. The History of Council Housing. 26 July 2010 . Upton, Dell. Architecture in the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Varnelis, Kazys. “‘We Cannot Know History’: Philip Johnson and Cynical Survival.” Journal of  Architectural Education. 49.2 (1995): 92–104. Wilde, Oscar. “The Soul of Man under Socialism” (1891). The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1989. 1079–104.

PART THREE

Prospects

David H. Haney

Spaces of  Resistance and Compromise: The Concrete Utopia Realized

What Makes a Utopia “Concrete”? In their 2004 book, Living in Utopia: New Zealand’s Intentional Communities, Lucy Sargisson and Lyman Tower Sargent argue that the term “concrete utopia” best categorizes the New Zealand alternative communities that formed the core focus of  their study (xiii–xiv).1 They intend this term to designate any type of community based on principles that could be regarded as “utopian,” the dif ferentiation here being between the fictive places of  literary utopias or the conceptual principle of utopianism, and actual communities where utopian dreams are pursued in real space and time. The term then encompasses many dif ferent kinds of alternative communities, too numerous to list, or perhaps even imagine. Without wanting to privilege one type of concrete utopia over another, here the reader is invited to imagine a relatively self-suf ficient community: more or less as a building or buildings housing community members, with a parcel of land 1

It is worth noting that Ernst Bloch, the German philosopher of hope, used the term “concrete utopia” to distinguish a certain kind of utopian mentality from what he identified as “abstract utopia.” According to Levitas, for Bloch, “concrete utopia […] is anticipatory rather than compensatory [because it] reaches forward to a real possible future” (67). On the other hand, according to Levitas, for Bloch, “abstract utopia” “is fantastic and compensatory. It is wishful thinking, but the wish is not accompanied by a will to change anything” (67). Also worth noting is that Sargisson and Sargent’s use of “concrete utopia” is very close to Bloch’s, except that they move beyond “anticipation” to an examination of “realization,” in much the way I also do in this chapter.

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for producing food and other necessities. The reason for investigating this particular type of concrete utopia is to examine how such small communities have attempted to transcend, or resist, predominant systems of production and exchange. What I am not suggesting is that such communities had to concern themselves with techniques of production (whether of  food, shoes, or other life needs) simply as a necessary outcome of supporting themselves; rather, their act of resistance itself was embodied in the act of production, realized through techniques that may or may not have been “alternative” to the mainstream or dominant system. At the same time, the urge to realize a vision of  the “good life” meant that the techniques of day-to-day living were elevated or transformed into an act of political resistance, in a lived, bounded space, the formation of which could also be viewed as an act of resistance. To take this discussion towards the architectural, I would also like to qualify the term “techno-utopia,” as carefully described by Nathaniel Coleman in his 2005 book, Utopias and Architecture (73–83, 85, 254). Coleman quite rightly points out that utopias need to “transcend” the dominant order in some way. Yet often in twentieth-century architecture, future-oriented fantasies masquerading as utopias were in fact nothing more than a fetishization of  technological trappings, more about appearances than any transcendent ethos. While Coleman’s observation is clearly demonstrated through the work of architects like the Archigram group, technology itself is not inherently antithetical to the utopian project. The concrete utopia as buildings for dwelling and land for production is architectural in the sense that it occurs in real space and material. While Coleman’s inquiry is focused on architecture as universal professional practice, I am more concerned with “architecture” as something which is done locally, often by non-professionals (which is not to say uninformed individuals or groups). Techniques of production, then, are bound up with space and architectural form, as well as with time. Within the limits of this chapter, I will begin by examining some possible methodologies for understanding the concrete utopia, and then look at a selection of such communities, beginning in the late nineteenth century, and leading up to the present.

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Karl Mannheim: The “Relative” Utopia and the “Real” The first question to ask is what constitutes the “utopian” in the concrete utopia? In his study of utopias and architecture, Coleman turned to the writing of  the German sociologist Karl Mannheim (1893–1947), particularly his book Ideology and Utopia, published in 1929 during the Weimar Republic (see Mannheim, Ideology vol.1, 173–236; see also Coleman, 10, 24, 27, 33–7, 39–40, 55–6, 58–9). Here I will consider Mannheim’s positions again brief ly, primarily in relation to the concrete utopia. For Mannheim, utopian thinking is a general principle, opposed to the ideological, which he believed served “those in power” by obscuring actual political and social reality, thus resisting change. Utopian thinking is, by contrast, oriented towards transcending the existing social order and is more likely to represent the position of  those ascending to power. The key aspect of  the utopian is that it is intended to “transcend” the existing order, neither merely to alter it, nor merely to present it in a dif ferent light. Mannheim describes a dialectical historical pattern of  the ascendant class achieving its utopian goals, at least in part, while the dominant class loses some or all of its power, and the system is transformed. What is clear from this, is that once one set of utopian ideals is realized, another must come along to challenge the system of  those in power, to keep the process in motion and alive. Utopian reality must remain always slightly out of reach if it is to retain its transcendent function. Mannheim primarily considered universal political concepts, rather than local acts of resistance, such as the concrete utopias described in this chapter. However, he also argued that abstract sociological concepts must be tested in the real, meaning the real political arena and social milieu in which change takes place. Here, we may return to the concrete utopia, for it is here that a defined system could most likely be put in place that would at least resist, if not wholly transcend, the prevailing order. This is perhaps akin to what Mannheim refers to as the “relative” utopia, as he believed that for utopian concepts to be politically ef fective, they must be realizable to some degree in the present situation. The relative utopia is thus not

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absolute, but politically expedient, and hence subject to some compromise. The concrete utopia seems to satisfy these objectives, for on the one hand the community in real space and time may set up what it considers to be the good life, while at the same time, negotiations and compromises must be made with the outside world, beyond its boundaries. Clearly, the concrete utopia cannot exist in complete isolation, and even if it could, this would in fact negate part of its transcendent function as a site of resistance and change. Therefore, at the level of political reality, the concrete utopia may, in principle, serve the same kinds of goals as the relative utopia described by Mannheim, although these work as sites of resistance, rather than as universal political concepts. Mannheim’s observations on the historical process of change also supports the observation made by Sargisson and Sargent, that although some scholars have dismissed individual concrete utopias as “failures” because short-lived; in fact, the concrete utopia should be considered as an historical phenomenon, notable for the fact that it ever existed at all. Following Mannheim’s rationality, individual concrete utopias are, by necessity, short-lived, for like the utopian political concept, they must be constantly renewed and rethought in relation to changes in dominant systems of power. As Mannheim and others have noted, utopian thinking cannot come “out of  the blue”; it is always rooted in some way in the existing situation. The concrete utopia as Utopia, is conceived in opposition to the prevailing system, so once that changes, the concrete utopia must change as well. It may be easily argued, though, that some concrete utopias fail because of particular problems such as internal conf lict. But following Mannheim’s observation that utopian thinking as a phenomenon is a dialectical historical process of change, this does not negate the overall pattern. In fact, it is relatively easy to establish that individual concrete utopias are children of  their time, and if  they are to continue to exist, they must change with the times, albeit in a transcendent way.

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Henri Lefebvre’s Concept of  “Spatial Practice”: Conceiving Techniques in Space At this point, it is worth returning to the question of  how the concrete utopia might be considered as being “architecture” or perhaps “architectural.” Again, I am not concerned here with the professional production of architecture as designed objects, but with architecture as a means of understanding the concrete utopia as a community production. The French sociologist and philosopher Henri Lefebvre (1901–91) discussed his concept of  “spatial practice” in his magisterial mid-twentieth-century work, The Production of  Space, largely as an elaboration of  Marxist thinking. As the term suggests, “spatial practice” is all encompassing, including all forms of social, economic, and political activity. In order to expand the discussion of  the architectural beyond the building as object, and yet still include it, Lefebvre asks his readers to think of an image of a relatively substantial yet not unusual house: Now, a critical analysis would doubtless destroy the appearance of the solidity of this house, stripping it, as it were, of its concrete slabs and its thin non-load-bearing walls, which are really glorified screens, and uncover a very dif ferent picture. In the light of  this imaginary analysis, our house would emerge as permeated from every direction by streams of energy which run in and out of it by every imaginable route: water, gas, electricity, telephone lines, radio and television signals, and so on. Its image of immobility would then be replaced by an image of a complex of mobilities, a nexus of in and out conduits. By depicting this convergence of waves and currents, this new image, much more accurately than any drawing or photograph, would at the same time disclose the fact that this piece of “immovable” property is actually a twofaceted machine analogous to an active body: at once a machine calling for massive energy supplies, and an information-based machine with low energy requirements. The occupants of the house perceive, receive and manipulate the energies which the house itself consumes on a massive scale (for the lift, kitchen, bathroom, etc.) (93).

Lefebvre continues by following the systems feeding the house outwards to include infrastructure systems on regional and national scales (and by extension, global). But he cautions against considering these systems in and of  themselves. Infrastructure is not just a matter of wires and pipes,

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etc., just as architecture is not just bricks and mortar. What is important to Lefebvre is that infrastructure ties remote spaces together; it links them over great distances, changes spaces themselves, and is in turn brought into being through economic and political forces. Space is what Lefebvre wants to emphasize as an integral part of  the entire process of production and consumption, not just as an empty container or stage for action. Lefebvre’s remark that walls are really just “glorified screens” is quite significant here, for while the spaces within the house (or indeed any building) are defined by walls, these are in fact permeated by various services, which again are about further spatial connections. Thus space here is not conceived in the way architects usually think of it, as discrete units contained and defined by architectural structure. Rather, space in terms of spatial practice is much more pervasive; architectural division of space into “rooms” only operates on a particular level, and is in fact bound up in many larger systems. Architecture as building may even be thought of as part of  this massive infrastructure tying spaces together, obvious examples being train stations and transportation systems, others being the electronic web linking banks and financial systems. Any local space which appears to be discrete and bounded, whether building or concrete utopia, is in fact shot through with dif ferent spatial systems, whether in the form of infrastructure or otherwise. Lefebvre suggests the model of  hydrodynamics, noting that various waves can pass through the same body of water at the same time, causing interferences, but not necessarily cancelling one another out (87). By expanding architecture in this way, to both include and be included in larger spatial practice, the problem of architecture and technology is redefined. While as Coleman has pointed out, the techno-utopian version of architecture really represents shallow imagery with little promise of actual change, Lefebvre makes us conscious of  the fact that technology is an unavoidable problem; the habitation and use of architecture today is inextricably embedded in any number of distribution and production systems. But how then could the concrete utopia act as a site of resistance to such totalizing systems? Here it may be worth returning to the relative utopia, for any actual space is by necessity connected to some external systems, no matter to what extent any community may try to resist or transcend these. The most obvious point

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where this becomes clear is the actual spatial boundaries of the community’s site. Not only is this boundary literally permeated in every instance, but other systems connected to spatial practice, such as legal and economic, although more abstract, will by necessity also engulf  the concrete utopia. Thus, the concrete utopia must be a “relative” utopia, necessarily involving some negotiation with the other spatial networks within which it is embedded. Of importance here is the fact that these are not solely political or social networks, but also technological and of course economic. Thus the practice of daily living in the concrete utopia, while seemingly benign on one level, in fact calls into question these pervasive systems intended to support basic functions. This means that the apparently “practical” cannot in the end be separated from the political, if we are in fact speaking of authentic utopian projects.

Bernard Stiegler and Technological Evolution From the above discussions, it should be clear that the technological aspect of the concrete utopia is more than just a matter of a means to an end, but rather is a key factor in its realization. The French philosopher Bernard Stiegler (born 1952) has devoted himself to the question of technology as a field of inquiry, posing the proposition that technological development is an evolutionary process, following its own inner logic. While the full scope of his analyses are too complex to consider here, the methodologies that he takes from anthropology, particularly from French archaeologist André Leroi-Gourhan (1911–86), seem applicable to the concrete utopia. For my purposes here, Leroi-Gourhan’s anthropological categories of  the internal and external milieus may be thought of as including both the con­crete utopia – internal milieu – (almost as an ethnic group) and the capi­talist worldview – external milieu – within the context of technology. On the other hand, the internal milieu may also be conceived of as a kind of organism:

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Here the problem of permeable boundaries returns, recalling the analysis of  the house by Lefebvre. Of particular importance to Stiegler is the relationship between interior and exterior milieu, how one inf luences the other. He notes that “invention” has the same ef fect as “borrowing” on the interior milieu, that is, where a technological innovation originates is of secondary importance, as compared to how it is taken up in the interior milieu, which in the context of this chapter would be within the concrete utopia. Borrowing also implies a freedom of selection made by the interior milieu, meaning here that a technology may serve capitalist ideology (for example) in the exterior milieu, and yet be transformed ethically by being employed to serve a utopian counter-program in the interior milieu. Thus it is also clear that for the concrete utopia, isolation from the exterior is not necessarily desirable; and, in fact, exterior technologies can enrich the utopian program, without it being contaminated by the political origin of  those adopted technologies. Understood in this way, the use of technologies within the concrete utopia is clearly distinguished from the superficial technological-utopia of architects, as identified by Coleman. Stiegler focuses on the concept of evolution, drawn from both biology and ethnology, as a means of understanding the inner logic of  technological development, and how this has af fected society. He argues that technology follows its own line of evolution even though the inner logic of capitalism drives technological invention ever forward, to serve profits through expansion and planned obsolescence. Returning to the problem of  the selection of  technologies by the internal milieu, it is clear that it is not driven by profit motives. Hence, the internal milieu may select technologies from anywhere along the evolutionary line of  technology. If an internal milieu, such as a concrete utopia, selects a technological practice deemed outmoded by the exterior milieu (capitalism), this should not be dismissed as nostalgic romanticism, so long as this decision serves the

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overall utopian program of  transcending the dominant system. One may also imagine subsequent lines of  technological development within the concrete utopia, which might af fect mainstream practice. Hence we learn from Stiegler that the relationship between the internal and external milieu is not just a matter of space, or even spatial boundaries, but also of  time. Consequently, as a recurrent phenomenon, the concrete utopia may be analyzed as a series of case studies over time, in order to examine changing relationships between technologies within and without, which I will consider shortly.

Karl Marx and Alienation: Distance, Consumption, and Daily Experience The concrete utopia is in principle set up to serve daily life as a way of realizing an alternative vision. How, then, could such practices be seen as political resistance, and how could these also be reconnected to augmented quality of life experiences? If what is being resisted by concrete utopia is the exterior milieu or dominant power class – generally defined as industrialcapitalism – then we would do well to begin by turning to the analyses of  Karl Marx. Whether one identifies with the principles of communism or not, Marx’s astute analyses of capitalism still provide a model for understanding the system and its ef fects on our daily lives. Marx proposed that although economic relationships in human societies existed long before capitalism, they were fundamentally af fected by a new set of conditions, which he considered profoundly disruptive. Using the example of  the weaver, he recounts how in earlier societies, cloth could be purchased from the weaver, with direct contact between both producer and consumer. Under the capitalist system, both production and consumption suddenly occurred on a mass scale; the product, the cloth, became a “commodity” that was produced only to be exchanged for profit (Marx 180–202). The cloth (and the weaver) thus had no value other than to serve the system of production and profit. The cloth was “alienated” from the weaver in this

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manner, and indeed the consumer was also alienated or distanced from the point of production. Marx’s purpose was primarily to discuss economic relationships, but underlying his discussion of alienation there lies a clear concern for quality of  life as well. Not only was a social connection lost between the weaver as producer and the consumer, but there was a further existential loss as well. In consideration of Marx’s insights, it is worth returning for a moment to Lefebvre’s analysis of  the house, which, according to him, is permeated by connections to external systems. Any of  the systems of supply, or removal, may be understood as commodities, that is, as services that are provided in order to make a profit. Infrastructure, such as water and sewer systems, connects the point of use, or removal, with remote spaces, often unknown to the user. All of  these systems are bound up in a complex set of relationships, all of which mediate the process between production and consumption. Remembering that the concrete utopia in question here is a kind of self-suf ficient settlement, the act of self-suf ficiency is revealed as not just a practical one. The desire to avoid alienation also plays a role here, evidenced by ef forts to reduce the distance between production and consumption of food in the same community. To return again to the problem of architecture, we may imagine that in the concrete utopia connections between interior spaces such as kitchens and bathrooms to exterior spaces for growing food and waste disposal act to counter the alienating ef fects of the totalizing systems of global capitalism coming from outside the community, including such basic services as: water, power, sewerage, and supermarkets. So far, the discussion has taken up development of  the theoretical underpinnings of concrete utopias, including their aims and justifications. I will now turn to a series of case studies of independent communities, which can arguably be construed as concrete utopias, each of which reveals explicitly that the relationship between the internal and external milieu is not just a matter of space, or even spatial boundaries, but also of  time.2

2

Although I have not dealt with it explicitly here, the analyses developed in this chapter are close in spirit to the ideas David Harvey elucidates in his book Spaces of 

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Introduction to Case Studies: What May Be Revealed by Historic Progression To some degree concrete utopias will always also be “relative” utopias, for compromises must inevitably be made with the outside world in order for any settlement to be established and function. Each of  the following communities represents a dif ferent degree of compromise, and as sites of resistance, each avoids dominant modes of production and consumption in dif ferent ways. What also becomes evident in a study following an historical timeline is the way attitudes towards mainstream technologies change, especially when these benefit the internal utopian program. In many instances, a progression may be noted, beginning with rejecting technology completely, followed by including it within the utopian project, then by realizing the spatial implications of applied technological practices in dif ferent ways, and finally, with the community being open to adopting technologies from dif ferent time periods. The social models underpinning each of these projects inevitably af fect both the selection of practices and their integration into community life. In what follows, I will examine each case study through a brief sketch of it. However, for a general theoretical framework, the reader is invited to return to the methodologies discussed in the first half of this chapter. Finally, the question of “architecture” is again thought of  here in terms of spatial practice, rather than through issues of  formal expression as such.

Hope, not least of which is his conviction that we need Marx now more than ever to understand the conditions of  the present, and that Utopia must be dialectical, a problem as much of  “spatial form” as of  “social process,” of  “time” as of  “space” and of  “closure” as of  “potentialities” (Harvey 3–94, 133–96).

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St George’s Farm and Clousden Hill: Following Technology from Rejection to Embrace By the mid-nineteenth century, the Arts and Crafts movement in England had firmly established its principles and practices in support of  handcraft over mass-production. This movement came about because it was thought that new mass-production techniques had displaced craftsmen and had removed human creativity and the hand from the production process. At the same time, other social critics were aware of the problems of alienation, and saw the concrete utopia as a way of freeing themselves from capitalism by producing their own foods and goods where possible. The two examples considered in this section were both established during the height of  the Arts and Crafts movement’s inf luence, but each one embodies its tendencies quite dif ferently. The first, St George’s Farm near Shef field, was founded by John Ruskin (1819–1900) in 1876, who named it after the crafts guild that he had already organized (Armytage 292–9). Ruskin associated technology with the Industrial Revolution, which he despised. The first phase of  the St George’s Farm settlement was intended as a colony to produce boots by hand, without the use even of sewing machines. Thus the colony came about as an attempt to transcend industrial manufacture, and to reintroduce a sense of community to the production process. This initial phase failed, so Ruskin shifted the emphasis to food production, as an obvious need of the community. Ruskin seemed to consider gardening techniques to be an acceptable form of  technology, as a means of sustaining the settlement, and of advancing general knowledge. However, while he ordered the construction of greenhouses, that is, glasshouses heated by the sun, he rejected hothouses, for these were heated by coal. Even that much association with industrial technology would have sullied his vision of a return to a society based on handcraft technique. In the late nineteenth century, such extreme anti-technological views were beginning to wane in favor of a more tempered approach; thus, because of its absolutist approach, St George’s Farm may be seen as the end of an early phase of  the reaction to industrialization. Ruskin’s vision was based more upon purity of technique than the ability to of fer a viable social and economic model, so in this sense it was related to the techno-utopia.

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Moving forward a few years in time to another alternative settlement in the North of England, a completely dif ferent attitude towards technology comes into play, this time inspired by the writings of the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921). Ever the visionary, Kropotkin wrote that vineries could grow up around the coal pits of Northumberland and Durham, where cheap, directly available coal for heating could be had (Newcastle Daily Chronicle, 21 March 1895; reprinted in Todd 14). Kropotkin espoused the idea of self-suf ficiency in his vision of the concrete utopia through small agricultural and workshop production. He recognized that any technique or technology could be used to support this type of utopian site of resistance. Kropotkin’s call for settlements in the Northeast of England inspired the immigrant tailor Frank Kapper to move to the industrial center of  Newcastle upon Tyne with the purpose of organizing a group to found a self-suf ficient colony in 1895. The colony he formed, Clousden Hill, is particularly significant, for not only did Kropotkin’s writings directly inspire Kapper, Kropotkin wrote in support of  the colony, and even visited after it was well established. Kapper, however, did not have a financial backer as Ruskin did in the beginning. He was an itinerate tailor, and therefore he and his co-settlers were only able to rent, rather than purchase, a small farm at Clousden Hill, near Newcastle. The Clousden Hill Colony occupied land that had been previously set up for agricultural purposes; it was not a planned community in the architectural sense. But from the beginning, the latest technologies of the day were embraced as a means of supporting the social program, even if  the spatial organization of the place was less well conceived. The Colony’s charter pronounced that all work, “whether agricultural, gardening, or industrial [would] be done on the most advanced principles of scientific research and instruction: the machines [sic] to be used wherever possible” (quoted in Todd 23). The whole plot of  land was to be “cultivated intensively, either as vegetable gardens or orchards,” and greenhouses were to be erected as soon as funds would permit (Todd 23). The Colony would also have as many small industries as possible, following Kropotkin’s call. This kind of intensive agriculture represented the application of the latest techniques, not to support profit in and of itself, but to provide economic support on a small scale for a utopian vision of living. The mass-production of greenhouses had obviously progressed to the degree that such structures

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were now relatively cheap and easy to erect, important for such a small, lowbudget operation. Industrial mass-produced devices were not eschewed in principle, so long as they served the self-suf ficiency agenda. The colony produced food not only for itself, but also for sale in local cooperative markets, rather than profit-driven ones. Thus the colony had to engage in market exchange, but within a sympathetic network, meaning that there was still a sense of resistance (Todd 23). Clearly from the beginning, those who understood horticultural practices were critical in making the whole place work, while others who did not were often a burden (Todd 40). (The place had a rather Bohemian atmosphere, with people constantly coming and going.) One example of the lack of technical expertise was a 30-foot smoke stack that one observer ironically noted was built without even so much as a plumb line, so that it consequently “failed to maintain its tower of Pisa-like position, and came to earth” (Todd 40). Clousden Hill Colony lasted for nearly ten years, failing primarily not for technical or production reasons, but because of  the disintegration of  the group. Kapper and his colleagues understood that technology itself was not necessarily an alienating factor, but they also discovered that hard labor, along with technical knowledge and commitment were necessary, real-life factors as opposed to abstract political concepts. During its existence, the community was successful and drew adherents in part because of publicity in the local and socialist presses, and also because it was able to draw upon existing cooperative markets. It was by no means isolated. Though it failed for internal reasons, we may also categorize it as a concrete utopia occurring at the beginning of a phase when contemporary technology was becoming acceptable, while simultaneously lacking in cohesion as a social and spatial organism.

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The Eden Colony and the Ziebigk Siedlung: The Body, Food Production Techniques, and Planning The next two settlements I will consider may be categorized as being part of the “modern” period, that is, when planning and technology were quite consciously seen as tools to serve a program of resistance through patterns of daily living. Although the first project, the Eden Colony, from roughly the same period as Clousden, was not “modernist” in the architectural sense, it was nevertheless based on repetitive planning units – single family houses and gardens (see Haney 100–1). Conceived by a group of middleclass vegetarians, Eden was founded close to a rail suburb of Berlin in 1892. The most important element of the program was the requirement that all families grow their own vegetarian food, as a reaction not just against alienation in the sense of economic exploitation, but also to a sense of general degradation of  the quality of  life, especially bodily health. In the colony, gardens were considered places of production, as well as places for exercise in the outdoors. Each family had a substantial garden plot, all organized on a rational grid, with communal facilities for food processing located in the center (cf. Figure 25). One of the most utopian aspects of the settlement’s organization was ownership of  land, for the entire community was cooperatively run; each family leased a plot from the colony, and speculation was prohibited. The Eden colonists were not only resisting the mass-production of food and industrial alienation, but also capitalist land speculation. Like the Clousden settlers, the Eden community processed its vegetables and fruit collectively, producing products such as fruit juice and preserves. The crucial rail connection to Berlin markets was also used by the colony to spread its ideals through vegetarian cookbooks and brochures. The grid on which the settlement was laid out was certainly not a new device, but the fact that it was driven by gardening requirements was relatively innovative. The middle-class background of  the settlers may have been the reason why they rejected true “communal” living, such as sharing a common kitchen as at Clousden; instead, each family lived in a fairly conventional single-family house (which would have been a relative

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luxury in Berlin at the time). Technological innovation came into play in the production of high-quality food products, not so much in the domestic arrangements. Eden represents a particular point when rationalization of  the techniques needed to support a self-suf ficient colony, including spatial planning, reached a fair degree of sophistication. The colony continues to exist today on a cooperative basis, but there is a sense that it functions more as a comfortable middle-class garden suburb, than as a transcendent, concrete utopia. While the colony may still maintain a lingering degree of utopian resistance, middle-class comfort has prevailed in the end, and so this is a case where success in terms of longevity does not necessarily mean that the utopian function has endured. The next concrete utopia in this pair, the Ziebigk Siedlung (Settlement) in Dessau, Germany, founded in 1926, represents a dif ferent stage of development, both internally and externally (see Haney 164–72). By this time, domestic infrastructure had been transformed; centralized systems of distribution, such as for water, energy, and waste, had become the norm. The “modern” house, as discussed by Lefebvre above, was by then more or less a standard goal. Ziebigk bears some similarities to the early Eden Colony, however. Although land was not in cooperative ownership, initially the housing development was financed by a cooperative building society, through which members could lease units. In this way the building society attempted to avoid real estate speculation, while lowering construction and operating costs. Residents were also to grow enough food to feed their families in their small gardens, although these were at a much smaller scale than at Eden (cf. Figure 26). There was also no communal facility for processing of  foods, for, unlike at Eden, residents were not expected to raise excess produce for sale. What distinguishes Ziebigk is the innovative use of domestic technology, connecting kitchen and garden through a continuous cycle of growth, consumption, and reuse of household waste. The project was designed by the team of landscape architect Leberecht Migge (1881–1935) and architect Leopold Fischer (1901–75), a favorite student of  Austrian architect and social critic Adolf Loos (1870–1933). The kitchens and bathrooms in these dwelling units were similar to the period norm, yet the designers resisted centralized distribution systems, particularly for household waste and

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sewage. A conceptual section diagram through house and garden explained to residents how gray water would be leached directly to the garden through underground pipes, while solid waste from the dry toilets was to be aged in a silo-like structure, afterwards to be used as garden fertilizer (cf. Figure 27). Migge spoke of following “ancient Chinese agricultural principles” in this latter respect, suggesting the value of selecting techniques and technologies at dif ferent points along the evolutionary timeline (quoted in Haney; my translation). This closed cycle could be interpreted in economic terms, yet it was also presented as preserving the “biological” (today “ecological”) cycle of elements. The initial residents were quite excited to be participating in what they considered a new, biologically oriented living pattern. While the infrastructure did not really facilitate any direct political transcendence, the use of  household waste in the garden did provide for at least a degree of economic independence. Here we see a fine line between the relative, concrete utopia as authentic site of resistance, and the techno-utopia as superficial fetishization. However, the connection between such infrastructure and the technological, functional emphasis in much modernist architecture should not be cause for immediate denunciation. At Ziebigk and Eden, the latter not being stylistically modernist, there is an emphasis on planning and techniques as rational processes to serve utopian resistance, admittedly to dif ferent degrees.

Findhorn and Sieben Linden: Post World War II Counter-Culture and the Ecovillage Movement In the three decades following World War II, consumption boomed as never before, especially in the United States, and technological progress was seen by the mainstream western establishment as an ever-forward movement, continually resulting in betterment of  the general quality of  life. At the same time, the range of movements often known collectively as “counter-cultural” took root internationally, in many instances making

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a direct challenge to the belief in technological progress as the key to happiness, especially when tied to neo-capitalist global exploitation. Utopian resistance to these dominant conditions was thus realized through a model for daily living based on alternative practices, following in the older tradition of  the concrete utopia. One of  the significant features of  this era is the ability to select technologies backwards and forwards along the time scale, such as is evidenced by the use of  both wood-burning stoves and photovoltaic cells often within the same community. Also observable in this period is an increasing international consciousness of organic farming methods, evolving into a more comprehensive ecological program. Ecology means many dif ferent things; in the concrete utopia it is most often used as further ethical justification for maintaining a closed cycle of resource use within the bounded community. The term “ecovillage” came into use in the late 1980s as a statement of such principles, developing out of counter-cultural activities primarily focused on ecology.3 However, this seemingly new development may be of  less consequence to the historical development of the concrete utopia than it may at first appear. Nevertheless, concurrent with other postwar expressions of resistance, a growing mistrust of design professions is also evident, most explicitly in the emergence of a build-it-yourself mentality believed to be an alternative to mainstream practice, including a rejection of mass-production techniques and associated modernist aesthetics. Findhorn in northern Scotland is the first of the two post-World War II communities I will consider in this section. Founded by three individuals in 1962, Peter Caddy (1917–94), his wife Eileen (1917–2006), and their friend Dorothy Mclean (born 1920), life at Findhorn was from the beginning motivated by the religious and spiritual beliefs of “new age” Christianity.4 The original trio settled on what was very poor sandy soil on a disused section of an air force base, on a windy peninsula. They lived in a mobile 3 4

On ecovillages (including the two examples discussed in this section), see Bang; Jackson and Svensson. See also the Global Ecovillage Network (GEN) website: . On Findhorn see their website: . The author has visited Findhorn on several occasions.

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home (or “caravan”), the cheapest form of dwelling available at the time, and although mass-produced, it suited their need for freedom (cf. Figure 28). Because they wanted to be as economically self-suf ficient as possible, they grew their own food, thus organic gardening principles intersected with the religious nature of the group. They soon became famous for turning the sandy soil into productive gardening land, their “miraculous” forty-pound cabbages being the product of spiritual meditation; as Eileen explained it, they asked the vegetables what they wanted. The reputation of  the group grew and attracted followers who settled on the site, mostly in mobile homes, following principles of self-suf ficiency and spiritual living. A major change took place in the community when it was decided to rebrand Findhorn as an “ecovillage” in about 1990, when the term was still new. At the time, a community member acquired an adjacent piece of land, christened the “Field of Dreams,” that was divided into plots for sale, with the stipulation that only ecologically designed, resource-ef ficient, houses could be built there. Plots were sold and developed over the decade, with many houses being quite substantial and costly. During the same period, new infrastructure was also introduced, including wind turbines for producing electricity, and a greenhouse containing tubs of aquatic plants for bio-digestion of sewage, the so-called “living machine” (cf. Figure 29). The move from spiritual self-suf ficient utopian community to ecovillage was not dif ficult to make, as Findhorn’s original principles necessarily involved careful use of resources. However, the settlement is now split into two communities of dif ferent character. Many in the newer Field of  Dreams community live in houses that although ef ficiently designed, are relatively conventional in character. More importantly, Field of Dreams residents are not required to participate in communal events, or in communal living, other than being in a kind of close-knit neighborhood. The other group has evolved from the original spiritual community and remains more committed to an alternative form of communal living that more clearly resists mainstream society. Even so, many of  the community members closer to the founding principles of  Findhorn still live in outdated, extremely energy-inef ficient mobile homes. Inevitably, then, the Field of  Dreams group follows a more conventional social living pattern realized through a clear technical program, while the alternative minded other group arguably

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follows a more utopian social program only partly supported by selected domestic practices. Consequently, consideration of  Findhorn as a significant international example also requires that its internal contradictions be taken into account. If Findhorn has grown somewhat haphazardly over a period of nearly five decades, Sieben Linden in northern Germany was initially founded as an ecovillage in 1991, and has unwaveringly followed an essential set of principles since.5 The original site development plan was organized following a fairly rigid arrangement of dwellings and communal facilities, with a relatively high density of inhabitation. However, as the community has actually grown, it is much more loosely defined spatially than as initially planned, yet functions remain clearly assigned to dif ferent zones and spaces. The overall infrastructure indeed consists less in devices or conduits, existing rather in terms of spaces that are more freely dispersed. However, for all of its apparent organizational clarity, the place appears to represent a dif ferent kind of  logic from mainstream engineering works, which tend towards rigid control and separation. At Sieben Linden, the provision of a large garden area plays a central part in daily community life, with subgroups tending their own areas following dif ferent types of organic gardening. An adjacent reed-bed serves as a gray water treatment area, while at the same time adding to the landscape character of the whole (cf. Figure 30). Dry toilets are used throughout the settlement, but human solid waste is not used in the gardens for fear of contamination through medications, etc.; human waste is instead deposited in the adjoining band of woods to decompose. This band of woods also serves as the source of  firewood for heating, used by many residents in wood-burning stoves. Finally, a pond acts as both biotope and source of water for extinguishing fires. All of these landscape areas can be seen to correspond to domestic needs and infrastructure alike, which can in turn be thought of as deriving from (and responding to) human bodily needs. The main resource that is not wholly provided for within the community is

5

On Sieben Linden see their website: . The author visited Sieben Linden summer 2008 during a Global Ecovillage Network meeting.

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electricity, for there is not enough land to construct generating windmills. A few photovoltaic cells have been installed over the firewood sheds, and these meet the needs of  the residents who use only minimal electricity, while others rely on the main power grid. The combination of  technologies taken from dif ferent points along the evolutionary timeline is quite evident at Sieben Linden: wood stoves, heavy timber frame construction, and photovoltaic cells. The overall technological logic of  the place relies upon this kind of combination, which functions nevertheless as an integrated whole. The settlement is divided into subgroups of dwellings, as both a social and technological division, for while some have relatively conventional kitchens and bathrooms, others use almost no electricity and share a communal bathhouse. Other dwelling units, such as groups of small wooden wagons, require no domestic facilities, a workable arrangement because the occupants use the communal kitchen and dining hall, as well as outdoor washing areas and privies. Therefore, a range of domestic arrangements means that residents have dif ferent kinds of daily experiences, yet all share an underlying desire to live outside of the dominant systems of social and economic production. One gardener’s desire to avoid mainstream practices clearly reveals the problem of  the permeable boundary to the concrete utopia (group conversation including author, summer 2008). She objects to the use of any power equipment in the garden, choosing to use the ancient technique of draft horses instead (cf. Figure 31). One primary reason for her doing so is to avoid using fossil fuels, yet significantly, she does not use animal dung for fertilizer. (Most of  the gardens at Sieben Linden are fertilized using plants that can be ploughed under as “green manure.”) However, because there is not enough land to grow hay to feed the horses, this gardener must buy from local farmers, who in fact use fossil-fuel powered equipment to plough, harvest, and transport. Despite ef forts of alternative communities to select only ecologically oriented technologies and practices, this is a revealing example of how they must inevitably accept some kind of negotiation with the outside world. Ultimately, no matter how much autonomy from the mainstream may be desired, compromises must always be made within the concrete utopia, letting the outside world inside through some form of controlled exchange. Inevitably, then, realizing the concrete utopia

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remains a problem of compromises, but this does not necessarily negate the whole utopian project; rather, it shows that the principle of  the relative utopia must be accepted. In terms of historical development, at Sieben Linden we are perhaps seeing a new kind of spatial synthesis of techniques for living within the utopian vision of a better life.

Joep van Lieshout and the Negative Concrete Utopian Fantasy The contemporary Dutch artist Joep van Lieshout exploits the theme of  the concrete utopia throughout his work, both in fantasy form through drawing and sculpture, and through the creation of a community around his work group, dubbed AVL (Atelier van Lieshout) Village.6 Van Lieshout includes all of  the supposedly good principles of ecological living in his concrete utopias, including recycling of wastes of all kinds, such as human feces, and even human bodies. Images of small self-suf ficient communities are both eerily sentimental and disturbing, even nauseating, at the same time. Van Lieshout plays with several issues, most obviously with what I have identified here as the desire to avoid alienation by reducing the distance between consumption and production, through recycling and otherwise. By removing this distance altogether, for example by collecting feces to use as fertilizer in the same space as communal dining, a sense of extreme discomfort may be created. In other projects he shows what appears to be a concrete utopia in terms of alternative practices like recycling, yet he removes the sense of personal freedom through the use of images of slavery and compartmentalized social structures, so that a disturbing, negative ideology is introduced. Returning to the problem of  the techno-utopia, van Lieshout’s work illuminates the danger of attaching seemingly innocuous technological practices to negative ideologies, such as 6

See the Atelier’s website: . See also Allen, et. al.

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will result in dystopian conditions. Perhaps he reminds us that alternative practices without positive utopian convictions have no ethical meaning at all, and that the supposedly “good” ecological ethic of recycling (amongst other apparently ecotopian activities) is easily diverted.

Conclusion: Between Utopian Transcendence and Managerial Planning If the concrete utopia is a historical phenomenon, following the dialectical process described by Mannheim, then how is the need for constant change and renewal accommodated? As a relative utopia, the concrete utopia is not necessarily oriented towards overall societal change, but such communities may nevertheless see themselves as models for change or sites of resistance. For example, the global ecovillage movement has come of age, with many of its promoters claiming that the concept has now entered the mainstream. What does this mean for internationally recognized communities such as Findhorn and Sieben Linden? Are they compromised by their own success? In an unrelated development, the U.K. government has recently launched a new program of  “eco-towns,” on a much larger scale than ecovillages, essentially providing more resource-ef ficient housing and ample green spaces. In the commercial sector, a large housing development in the Southeast of England has titled itself an “ecovillage,” merely because it has a central heating plant and energy ef ficient dwelling units.7 One of the problems for concrete utopias like Findhorn and Sieben Linden is how they present themselves as agents or models for change. Clearly, if  techniques, practices, and alternative technologies are simply “applied” by government bureaucrats and developers independently of a utopian ethical program oriented towards change then the result is simply a watered-down form

7

On ecotowns in the U.K. see: . The development referred to as an “ecovillage” seen by author in an advertisement in a local London newspaper.

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of  techno-utopia, without even the passion of a Buckminster Fuller. But proponents of the ecovillage, ef fectively the newest version of the concrete utopia, will agree that it cannot be a model for everyone. It would simply not be possible for large population sectors to live in small villages, even if people wanted to. What remains is the problem of  the relative utopia: it can never be an absolute. In all probability, concrete utopias will continue to be founded, with many being short-lived, but as an historical phenomenon it will undoubtedly continue to evolve and survive.

Works Cited Atelier van Lieshout. 7 July 2010 . Allen, Jennifer; Aaron Betsky, Rudi Laermans, Joep van Lieshout, and Wouter Vanstiphout. Atelier van Lieshout. Rotterdam: NAI, 2007. Armytage, Walter Harry Green. Heavens Below. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961. Bang, Jan Martin. Ecovillages. Edinburgh: Floris, 2005. Coleman, Nathaniel. Utopias and Architecture. Abingdon: Routledge, 2005. Communities and Local Government, U.K. 7 July 2010 . Findhorn Ecovillage. 7 July 2010 . Global Ecovillage Network (GEN). 7 July 2010 . Haney, David H. When Modern Was Green: Life and Work of  Landscape Architect Leberecht Migge. Abingdon: Routledge, 2010. Harvey, David. Spaces of  Hope. Berkeley: University of  California Press, 2000. Jackson, Hildur, and Karen Svensson. Ecovillage Living. Totnes, U.K.: Green Books, 2002. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of  Space. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991. Levitas, Ruth. “Educated Hope: Ernst Bloch on Abstract and Concrete Utopia.” Not Yet: Reconsidering Ernst Bloch. Eds Jamie Owen Daniel and Tom Moylan. London: Verso, 1997. 65–79. Mannheim, Karl. Ideology and Utopia, Collected Works, Vol. I., Abingdon: Routledge, 2000. Reprint: English trans., Routledge, 1936. First German edition: Bonn: F. Cohen, 1929.

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Marx, Karl. Capital. Vol. I. London: Penguin, 1990. Miles, Malcolm. Urban Utopias: The Built and Social Structure of  Alternative Settlements. London: Routledge, 2008. Sargisson, Lucy and Lyman Tower Sargent. Living in Utopia: New Zealand’s Intentional Communities. Aldershot U.K.: Ashgate, 2004. Sieben Linden. 7 July 2010 . Stiegler, Bernard. Technics and Time. Vol. 1. The Fault of Epimetheus. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. Todd, Nigel. Roses and Revolutionists. Newcastle upon Tyne: People’s Publications, 1986.

Diane E. Davis and Tali Hatuka

Transcending the Utopian-Pragmatic Divide in Conf lict Cities: Applying Vision and Imagination to Jerusalem’s Future

Setting the Stage Jerusalem is a crucial part of  the process towards a peaceful future, but the conf lict itself  has roots and branches reaching beyond the boundaries of the city, and even far outside of Israeli and Palestinian Territories. Therefore our considerations had to go beyond the city limits. — Sigi Atteneder and Lorenz Potocnik, 20071

Our epigraph comes from the design of a new regional map for Jerusalem, a visionary idea produced by two Austrian architects built around a grounded historical reading of  the cultural, environmental, economic, and political history of  the city. The design’s underlying premise was that Jerusalem could be considered just one of many Middle East cities with a similarly contested and multicultural past, making it mundane as well as exceptional, and thus inspiring ef forts to locate the roots of  the city’s potential transformation in a shared history that could serve as the basis for new regional connections in the future. The logic of  the project is also built on shared environmental and demographic characteristics of  the region as well as the vast number of cities and towns to which it is home, and the strikingly short distances between them, that characterize 1

For further information, see

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the proximities of  the principal urban agglomerations along an extended Eastern Mediterranean Sea belt. The project therefore aimed at the ecological, social, economic, and historical integration of  Jerusalem into a much larger and interlinked city-region that would include countries ranging from Egypt, Israel, and Jordan but also including Cyprus and up through southern Turkey as well. As imagined by the project, these dif ferent locations would keep their unique historical attributes, cultures, and identities, many of  them ref lected in the built environment of  their key cities, but together they would also comprise a diverse and newly imagined whole, both tangible and imaginary, that ideally might serve to tie their fates to each other in constructively positive ways. Aspiring to a notion of solidarity, all urban areas in the East Mediterranean Sea belt, of which Jerusalem would be but one, hypothetically could use their specific strengths to help each other develop both individually and collectively in order to promote and cultivate peace (cf. Figures 32, 33 and 34). Sigi Atteneder and Lorenz Potocnik’s visionary proposal – not entirely utopian but not entirely pragmatic either – was one of  four premiated schemes among many entries submitted to a Massachusetts Institute of  Technology (MIT)-generated ideas competition that solicited innovative visions for a just, peaceful and sustainable Jerusalem by the year 2050.2 Titled Just Jerusalem, to signal the search for justice and to highlight the importance of focusing (solely) on the city rather than on competing nations, the global competition was launched (via the web) in March 2007 and closed in January 2008. A key point of departure for this experiment in visioning was the concept of  “the right to the city” elaborated on by Henri Lefebvre in his seminal writings on the theme, which have great resonance for those living in divided or conf lict cities like Jerusalem, where mobility and 2

In the interests of full disclosure, the co-authors of this chapter were involved in the crafting, organization, and implementation of  this project and the global competition. Some of the assessments of the project’s aims come from personal knowledge, although much of  the information is documented on the Jerusalem 2050 website: . For more elaboration on the project, and for closer examination of  the entries to the competition (discussed in greater detail by entry number in the paper’s final section), please visit the website.

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access to everyday activities and the urban built environment are hindered or strongly curtailed. In his philosophical writings, Lefebvre conceived of  the city as gathering the interests of the whole society as much as of those who physically inhabit it. He also saw social relations and society – not the state or nation – as the conceptual reference point for a city’s humanitarian promise. Moreover, for Lefebvre, those “inhabitants” who are to be guaranteed rights to the city are not necessarily bounded in space or in the formal territorial confines of the city proper. Indeed, arbitrary territorial boundaries coercively imposed by national or other state authorities would be antithetical to and violate Lefebvre’s notion of  the right to the city if  they also restricted the f lows by limiting “place(s) of encounter”: the natural spaces of sociability in and surrounding formally-drawn city borders, or by emphasizing the exchange value of spaces within the city rather than the “priority of use value” (Lefebvre, “Right” 158). In this sense, Lefebvre was as concerned with the right to cosmopolitan urban life as with the right to the physical city itself, a presupposition that inexorably locates the notion of urbanism at the center of any emancipatory political vision of a new society. To bring Lefebvre’s utopian ideas to life means to re-imagine both cities and urbanism in such a way as to further the humanitarian and democratic potential of both. These were precisely the aims of the Just Jerusalem Competition, which sought to transcend the pragmatic and utopian conceptions of place that have for so long limited socially just planning/architectural theory and action (whether in Jerusalem, other conf lict cities, or elsewhere), and to focus instead on “visioning” as a practice that straddles conventional divides between the ostensibly possible and supposedly impossible in design and architectural or planning practice. Arguably, these aims were also clearly embodied in the prize-winning East Mediterranean City Belt entry, which elaborates on a vision for a new city-region that holds out the potential to transcend the politically debilitating constraints of nationalism that have kept Jerusalem divided, while also promoting territorial fragmentation and political conf lict in the region. The visionary ideas developed in the East Mediterranean City Belt project not only owe their power to the authors’ ef forts to steep the scheme in the city’s historical past and possible future, or to the authors’ imaginative praxis that allowed them to take a

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critical stance towards nationalism and territorial boundaries, or even to their bold decision not to accept the self-limiting constraints that have characterized most urban design in or for Jerusalem; rather, the greatest contribution of  the plan is in fact the willingness it demonstrates to of fer a possible future without first requiring an identifiable client waiting in the wings to build it. If there is one limitation to utopian thinking in architecture and urban design that suggests its inevitable failure, it is not merely that context is frequently missing, a point already made by the editor of  this volume, Nathanial Coleman. A more fundamental limitation and challenge to any hope of success is the lack of a specific client, or builder, for most utopian visions. It is this latter constraint as much as the former that encourages ideas for “nowhere” that unavoidably fail to address the context and realities of a place and thus also all but guarantee that they will never get built “somewhere.” However, the authors of  the East Mediterranean City Belt made a virtue of the absence of a standard client in the Just Jerusalem Competition, capitalizing on the open invitation to constructive imagination presented by the competition. They also took the competition organizers’ willingness to let design entrants “define their own Jerusalem” in social, spatial, and symbolic terms as an inducement to think outside the conventional design or planning mindset. Both atypical conditions made it possible to think about the city in both utopian and practical terms – as both “nowhere” and “somewhere” – leading the designers to of fer an idea that was relevant to both Jerusalem and nearly everywhere else in the region, further transcending the apparent “nowhere-somewhere” divide that conventionally bedevils utopian thinking, and even more so its practice. All of  this suggests that it may be the absence of a client, and even a well-defined physical location for design, that brings out the most that utopian thinking and imaginative visioning can of fer, a realization already suggested by Thomas More in the exotic island setting of  Utopia. With the above in mind, in this chapter we assess the real potential of utopian ideals and visionary practices in urban design, particularly in terms of  their relevance for conf lict cities. To accomplish this we will examine the epistemological aims and outcomes of  the Just Jerusalem Competition in light of architectural and planning history and theory. Beginning with an assessment of  how this imaginative design experiment dif fered

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from traditional urban design and planning practices, both pragmatic and utopian, we will then consider whether this actually made a dif ference to the ways place is conventionally envisaged. More specifically, the chapter proceeds as follows: the first two sections discuss utopianism and pragmatism in theory and practice so as to situate the Jerusalem 2050 project and its “visioning” methodology in a path-dependent context of urban architectural/planning theory. The third section develops the concept of visioning and discusses how it straddles the traditions of both planning and architectural theory, not just in light of planning history but also relative to the Just Jerusalem Competition specifications. The penultimate section presents an overview of  the entries to the competition and evaluates the extent to which they suggest imaginative ideas for rethinking Jerusalem. The chapter concludes with some thoughts on visioning as a new method of design practice for working within conf lict cities.

From the Utopian to the Pragmatic: Situating Visioning in the Tradition of  Architecture and Planning The last few decades have brought massive political, economic, and social change to urban areas. Trends such as population growth, the rise of dual economies and oppressive political regimes, and continued transnational migration have accelerated urbanization and caused urban resources and territories to become increasingly contested. The nature of  these conditions, far more symptomatic of economic, social, and political forces than environmental design, raises the question as to whether or not architecture and planning have the capacity to ef fectively respond to these changes. Intriguingly, just when the range of problems confronting the development of cities seems insurmountable, utopian vision has all but vanished from practitioners in our most urbanized, conf licted epoch, prompting the question, how is this possible? Given the potential Utopia harbors for the imaginary reconstitution of society and its settings, how can we justify distancing ourselves from utopian discourse at a time when urban resources and territories are becoming increasingly contested?

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Utopian ideals have not always been relegated to the sidelines in planning and architectural practice. Creating future visions for cities was once a standard element of planning theory and practice. From Plato’s ideal republics to Aristotle’s ideals to more recent utopian visions in western architecture and planning (i.e., those of  Robert Owen, Charles Fourier, Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright, Lewis Mumford, Le Corbusier, and Paul Goodman, to name just a few), visioning, defined as the task of creating new physical, discursive, or experimental renderings of a desired state of af fairs, has persisted. Creative visions have not only inf luenced the form and character of contemporary cities, the new concepts of urbanism their inventors developed received considerable attention because of  the potential these schemes held out to improve the welfare of individuals and communities through architecture and engineering. The combined inf luence of these innovators helped to create an urban planning approach combining rationality and physical design tools for solving community problems with an array of visionary ideals undergirding these practices. The Garden City by Ebenezer Howard and Ville Radieuse by Le Corbusier are key theoretical examples of the apparently utopian projects that inf luenced twentieth-century architecture and urbanism, before falling into disrepute from the late 1950s onwards.3 The rise and demise of  these visions should be seen in the context of ongoing tensions, established in the nineteenth-century, between pragmatism (the “is” as fact) and optimism (the “ought” as potential), fueling an intense debate that ended in the mid-to-late twentieth century with victory for those advocating pragmatism as the guiding approach for urban planning (Coleman 38). In part, the triumph of  the pragmatists owed to unresolved disputes over the strengths and weaknesses of  the original modernist utopian projects of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. The harshest critics (Karl Popper and Colin Rowe amongst them)

3

On questioning the extent to which Howard, Wright, and Le Corbusier all projected Urban Utopias, see Fishman. For further reading on utopian visions in western architecture and planning, see Coleman and Fishman. For criticism of utopian visions in architecture and planning, see Tafuri; Rowe and Koetter.

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argued that utopian ideals always required totalitarian coercion and physical determinism to be realized; while supporters saw utopian thinking as a crucial catalyst and pathway for any kind of incremental social change (Ernst Bloch and Henri Lefebvre, for example). Adding to the complexity of this debate in architecture and planning, the term Utopia has often been used to describe schemes characterized as being impossibly static physically, socially, and economically, completely lacking in any dynamism (Rowe and Koetter 9–31). Thus, after the initial excitement generated by Howard’s and Le Corbusier’s theories, their visions, despite never being realized in constructed reality, came to be heavily criticized as rigid spatial regimes of control and order (see Harvey, Spaces; Tafuri; Yiftachel, “Planning”). The demise of utopian thinking, then, was partly an unavoidable outcome of its own contradictory logic: if the ideal or promise of utopia was tantamount to commitment to dynamic processes of social change, more often than not, in achievement, Utopia re-produced the stultifying order and social control of existing conditions (only more intensively); inevitably, Utopia diminished the enthusiasm for its own enactment (Harvey, Spaces 173). Due to the apparent internal contradiction within Utopia between initial promise and the likelihood of disappointing results, and the obvious material constraints on actually realizing Utopia in the twentieth century, planning and architecture have generally disassociated themselves from the sort of grand forward thinking allied with utopianism. Leading thinkers, Jane Jacobs in particular, went so far as to insist that urbanists should no longer try, as Howard, Wright, and Le Corbusier did, to actively define the central goals of society and present a unified plan for attaining them (Fishman 269). By helping erode confidence in the search for a common good or purpose as the basis for city life, such postures further debilitated the commitment to utopian thought (Fishman 267). In architecture, the postmodern opposition to utopian projects became particularly evident in the late 1960s and 1970s, through ef forts to celebrate the consumer society as well as the “here and now,” and in what was named by the architect Philip Johnson as “functional eclecticism” (a fanciful use of  historical elements determined by pleasure alone). More recently the work of, Rem Koolhaas, Frank Gehry, Hani Rashid, and Lise Anne Couture are good examples of a “post-critical” posture, dominated by a pragmatic

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approach that emphasizes materiality and technology while also turning cities into spectacles by celebrating the global economy, avoiding political agendas, and developing technological devices rather than responding to urgent issues of urbanization or larger social justice ideals (Frazer 320). This combination of elements, which sustains an emergent anti-utopian acceptance of  things as they are by encouraging opportunism, is particularly promoted by Rem Koolhaas, who has become “a global favorite of the intelligentsia and students alike” (Coleman 84). Yet when coupled with development of a critical discourse on knowledge, power and truth, the embrace of anti-utopianism has led to a disjuncture between lived experience and imagined space, accentuating what Bernard Tschumi called “the architectural paradox,” and further explaining why architecture so frequently disregards the existing reality while also attempting to create an alternative (see Foucault; Stuart Hall; Tschumi; Lefebvre, Everyday). In planning, the disassociation from utopianism has been no less extreme, although the path has been dif ferent. The failures associated with Robert Moses-style big plans that trampled with abandon over neighborhoods and residents led to a reductive anti-utopianism position that identified Utopia with absolutism or totalizing projects (Caro). The shift began with the heavy critique of comprehensive and master planning, leading to ongoing tensions between advocates for “planning from above” and “planning from below,” with the latter calling for more conscientious ef forts to reduce the scope and scale of planning as well as the number of main actors involved ( Jacobs, Death). The relative global success of  the “planning from below” approach resulted from new relationships forged between public sector planners and civil society groups, many of whom relied on non-government organizations as partners in the construction of alternative planning projects and processes. In many urban settings, civil society advocates sought to produce alternative projects that could challenge free market developments associated with master planning. These bottom-up planning practices not only emerged in welfare states of  the advanced capitalist world, but also in poorer countries of  the developing world where limited prosperity made it relatively easier for governments to of fer participatory mechanisms to citizens than to actually build better cities. One exception to this trend is currently seen in resource-heavy regions

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of the developing world where massive mega-project developments requiring top-down coordination are built in the service of macro-economic development goals (as in the cases of  China and Dubai, for example). But as a recognized approach in most contemporary democracies, with powerful advocates in key multilateral institutions like the World Bank, participatory planning is now practiced world-wide. Whatever its origins, as Bish Sanyal has recently argued, the reliance on planning from below has had an inadvertent side ef fect – in the form of a lack of attention to public-sector planning and institutional mechanisms that are essential to any social development and change (Sanyal, “Planning”). Furthermore, strategies of “planning from below” have shifted professional focus from the object itself, the city, to action-oriented participatory approaches such as advocacy and communicative planning, both of which tend to focus on much smaller geographic constituencies.4 Proponents of  these strategies – which map and act upon the claims of groups defined in relatively circumscribed terms – accept the current distribution of resources and operate within an existing order. Thus, even if  they help foster inclusive negotiation and well-crafted advocacy, the trade-of fs come in the limited geographic scope of action. Inclusive negotiation and advocacy work well at smaller scales, where homogeneity is more likely and claims are tied to manageable constituencies. However, such methods are less ef ficacious at larger scales where heterogeneity predominates and urban claims multiply, which by their very nature make “planning from below” ill suited for producing macro visions of social justice in cities. Finally, the involvement of citizens in the planning process – with its supposed emphasis on individual and competing voices and visions – paradoxically all but finalized the shift toward expediency in planning, predictably leading also to the further discrediting of utopian ideals, which are seen as paralytic, rather than action oriented by mainstream planning thinkers (Healey, “Pragmatic”). If until the 1970s the citizen could be considered

4

The turn to direct participation at the local scale began with Davidof f and still persists as a key element in planning practice; see Forester; Healy, Collaborative; Huxley and Yiftachel; Innes.

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a relatively passive actor, for whom plans were being produced, in recent decades the citizen as subject has been born. Citizens have not only become increasingly visible consumers of professional services, in some cases, they have also become active participants in the planning process. The apparent democratization of planning by way of inclusiveness and participation has, at least superficially, challenged prevailing planning paradigms, in which states have traditionally been more likely than citizens to create the general conditions driving market forces and private sector activities. Up until very recently, responsibility for identifying and defining new planning principles, like zoning, urban circulation policies, the physical distribution of  housing, and the structure of cities would have resided with the state rather than its citizens. Much of  the shift toward citizen involvement can be traced to the 1970s, when the divergent social characteristics of cities became ever more visible, particularly with respect to the poor and disadvantaged who faced increased poverty and unemployment, and as a consequence frequently turned to protest and mobilization (Lipton; Lupton). In response, planners sought new methods for targeting poverty and other pressing concerns by addressing both the physical and social needs of urban residents in ways that might improve their productivity, income, and welfare. During this period, urban programs went beyond housing and other physical needs in cities to address broader social questions such as safety, gender, experience, and cognition, to name but a few (see Jacobs, Death; Hayden; Calthorpe; Lynch). And even if  these expanded social concerns were not fully taken up by planners in a convincing way, because many of  these new programs focused on the human scale, they reinforced a preoccupation with human agency and subjective interpretation in the design of cities, a trend which paralleled the developing concern among urban designers and urban planners with citizen input. The spreading popularity of participatory planning, combined with the more circumscribed focus on ever smaller scales, added a further layer of skepticism about physical planning in general and master planning in particular, and in turn, about large-scale solutions to fundamental urban problems (although never so much as to put an end to them). To the extent that cities were now being perceived as fragmented – a complicated collection

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of spaces, individuals, and identities sharing little beyond the immediate cognitive terrain of the quotidian – these developments in planning theory led to considerable criticism of planning strategies that addressed the city as a whole, or the “general public interest” as a totality. In its stead, critical thinking became ever more central to planning education, even leading to questions about the need for problem solving, and once liberated from the preoccupation with problem-solving, planners turned to the fields of geography, economics, and sociology for clues to some way forward, a tendency which helped to conclusively sever the long-established link between architecture and physical planning (Sanyal, “Critical”; P. Hall). Although inspired by laudable theoretical developments, planning’s move away from imagining how to shape the city or physical interventions in it quickly transformed into a preoccupation with policy and management. Perhaps unintentionally, all of these shifts in the scope and scale of planning and architectural practice have been further entrenched by the neoliberal economy and the decentralization of urban planning, which has ef fectively dismantled much of the planning authority of the state, giving more power to local government but mostly to private developers.5

The Possibilities and Limitations of  Transformative Intent in Contemporary Architecture Planning Practice The preceding historical narrative paints a relatively depressing picture of what has become of utopian visions and concerns for transformative largescale urban change in the planning profession. This is not to say that desires to eliminate structural problems of inequality and injustice, or ef forts to insure rights to the city, have completely disappeared. Indeed, the positive side of the picture painted above is that much of contemporary neoliberal 5

For more on the impact of markets on the state’s planning capacity, see Harvey, Neoliberalism and Capital; Marcuse and Van Kempen, Globalizing and States.

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planning practice is normatively built on recognition of an array of rights that guarantee accessibility, participation, and even insurgency regarding territory in place-making. Equally, these developments have encouraged progressive calls for sustainability, human rights, accountable governance, and the social values necessary to produce the good city, the just city, and inclusive multiculturalism (see Friedman; Fainstein; Sandercock). Still, a good portion of the rights- and justice-oriented strategies now in play build on an understanding of formally recognized inclusion, including citizenship, which tends to privilege the selective inclusion of certain of ficially sanctioned voices. People may gain more access to state institutions through local governments and the possibility of participation, as well as social and political inclusion in institutions of  the state, but all of  this does not necessarily translate into substantive inclusion, even for those with formal citizenship, as noted by scholars such as Mike Davis, James Holston, Jane Jacobs, Faranak Miraftab, Ananya Roy, and Oren Yifchatel, to name a few. And independent of degrees of  formal or even informal inclusion, planning strategies built on guaranteed rights to civic engagement and democratic accountability are just as likely to reinforce as challenge the status quo. As such, truly transformative outcomes may depend as much on the scales at which participation, inclusion, and rights are guaranteed – and on the substantive, as opposed to formal, recognition of citizenship – as on the theoretic intent of planning policies. To the extent that empowered, participatory, and rights-claiming citizens are most likely to make spatial demands at the local level, they leave planners to think about what might make the city as a whole more just. Ultimately, however, neither set of actors really concern themselves with what might achieve the more universal ideals of freedom, justice, and emancipation in the city, such as Lefebvre highlighted. To a certain extent, planners’ privileged knowledge of the ways that complex and inter-related city-systems reproduce exclusionary dynamics for certain neighborhoods or individuals could paradoxically help achieve the transformative aims of  freedom, justice, and emancipation, at least in theory. But in actual practice, such knowledge rarely makes its way to a radical re-visioning of  the status quo, not least because most planning action tends to be governed by conventional interpretations of what can and cannot be changed (in social,

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spatial, and symbolic terms) and now also by the models of decentralized political participation that citizens also welcome. In this context, even the most progressive of planners, no matter how committed to rights, participation, and accountability they may be, still tend to depend on pragmatic self-censoring to get the job done. The usual consequence of  this is that any proposals for alternative urban futures which do not readily fall into standard urban frames will likely require significant alteration to make them more conventional. Unless readjusted to be less critical of  the governing status quo by conforming to existent political and economic constraints, such schemes will almost certainly be rejected outright. Although citizens and neighborhood-level advocacy planners may be much less constrained by the pragmatic institutional and financial requisites of overall urban governance, the relatively circumscribed territorial domain of their action – which tends to be bounded by community or individual experience – is apt to prevent them from seeing problems of access, inclusion, or rights to the city at the Lefebvrean scale of  humanity. To be sure, particular individuals, communities, or localities may be relatively successful in leveraging specific claims vis-à-vis planning actors and agencies, thus guaranteeing their own particular rights to the city. Yet, by their very definition, few local advocates are willing or able to guarantee such claims for multiple communities simultaneously, while planners themselves tend to avoid such large tasks, not just out of well-founded skepticism of the limits of master planning, but because such ef forts f ly in the face of sector-specific planning action targeted toward tangible results with particular services or communities in mind. And to the extent that local citizens engage in a grounded struggle over tangible social and political resources, they too are governed by material constraints and self-limiting actions that define or circumscribe their negotiation capacities. In this sense, most participatory citizen planning practice – even when governed by radical or transformative ideals – serves as a form of pragmatism, with both planners and citizens seeking immediately practical, constructive, and grounded ways to negotiate socially responsive outcomes in an environment of clear power imbalances, rather than anything more widely transformational, such as the utopian imaginary makes possible.

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The Special Case of  Conf lict Cities Although the limitations of pragmatism tends to foreclose on alternatives in any context, the constraints of pragmatism are even more complex and challenging in those cities where stark power imbalances drive conf lict and where the state’s neutrality is at best an illusion and at worst, completely absent. In such instances, states – both local and national – may actually seek to preserve their autonomous planning power vis-à-vis mobilized citizens, limiting the array of participatory planning institutions in order to guarantee social, political, or economic exclusion, or the continuing direct control of specific preferred political groups, including taking the side of one group of citizens over another. In such instances, excluded citizens may reject participatory structures altogether, because they merely legitimize an unequal status quo, preferring instead the route of social mobilization or even violence. This is particularly the case when the state’s social, spatial, political, and economic biases are visually legible to all in the urban-built environment (Davis and Libertun de Duren). If in response, or as a preemptive strike, a state oppresses, occupies, or violates territory or quotidian spaces in ways that exclude individuals or groups or is seen as excluding access, citizens will be more likely to turn to violence, driving forward the vicious cycle of citizen-state conf lict, which in turn increases the sense of urgency and fear among its citizens, ultimately creating social camaraderie amongst excluded citizens. In such situations, conventional planning techniques may be all but useless for mitigating challenging conditions, not just because they might actually legitimize or reproduce unequal power relations, but also because political mediation, concession, and compromise – the hallmarks of participatory planning practice – are extraordinarily dif ficult to achieve when violence is used to assert authority.6 Moreover, in deeply divided conf lict cities contestation will be as much over symbols, infrastructure, and resources as it may focus on the physical6

For more on divided cities and ef forts to plan in the context of violence see Bollens.

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ity of citizenship, which is just as important to residents as jobs, housing, transportation, water, and other requisites of  the built environment. So, too, questions of governance and civic authority will draw considerable attention, with sovereignty concerns mixing with both citizenship and built environmental priorities to drive desired urban policy outcomes (Davis and Libertun de Duren). Given these dynamics, planning practice for conf lict cities must seek to do more than transcend conventional strategies such as participation and negotiation, by introducing utopian or transformative ideals into the mix, at least if violence over scarce and unequally distributed resources is to be avoided. Planners must be prepared to rethink the scope and scale of planning practice by identifying a range of civic, symbolic, economic, and infrastructural domains that comprise the city. Targeted planning actions across a variety of domains, with the aim of readily minimizing social, political, and economic exclusion, could be achieved by focusing on an imagined future, what it might look like and how it might be lived, so as to not be constrained by the power imbalances and inequalities of the present. Only by opening the visioning process beyond stalemated local and national actors to include global civil society will it be possible to imagine the seemingly impossible condition of an epoch beyond conf lict. If in situations of stark conf lict pragmatism only serves to reinforce dif ference and exclusion, urban designers and planners must be prepared to mediate between the polar extremes of  the mundane and the utopian, between daily action and wider vision. The question, however, is whether and how utopian models can be useful in the design and development of  these places, and whether and how utopian inspiration can be mixed with pragmatic action. Is a methodology based on visioning capable of  freeing planners and designers from the constraints of  the pragmatic while also inspiring utopian ideals, and thus allowing both critique and synthetic revision? To ask these questions is to consider what constitutes the best methodology for arriving at what Bloch has called “concrete utopia,” as well as to consider whether such an approach might contribute to the invention of new design ideas that could positively inf luence the future of conf lict cities.

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Visioning a Just Jerusalem: Inspiring the Imagination through Formalized Competition Guidelines The desire to see the aims and objectives of new design ideas that might actually play a beneficial role in the future of conf lict cities translated into action was given life in the form of a real world “experiment,” developed by the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT in conjunction with the Center for International Studies at the same institution. Inspired by Lefebvre’s declaration of  the “right to the city” as a transnational claim on urban livability and social justice, project participants elected to turn their sights to Jerusalem, one of the most divided and complicated conf lict cities of our times, where political struggle and urban planning practice have contributed to social exclusion and acts of injustice recognized by resident Palestinians and Israelis alike (see Clarno; Hatuka; Segal and Weismann; Yacobi; Yacobi and Cohen; Yiftachel, Ethnocracy). In developing this experimental project, an interdisciplinary working group of planners, architects, and political scientists sought to marry the insights of  their distinctive disciplines into a single initiative where peace-making and place-making are inextricably bound to one another. The ultimate aim of the project was to consider how social justice might materialize out of radical urban planning and urban design practices in novel and unexpected ways. Originally titled Jerusalem 2050: Visions for a Place of Peace, the MIT-based initiative sought to inspire citizens around the world to use their imaginations to craft visionary ideas that could help break the current stalemate in traditional peace-making channels dominated by politicians and diplomats.7 Although obvious enough, it is worth emphasizing that the fundamentally utopian core of the project is revealed in its aim to illuminate a correlation between spatial practices and social justice and peace. Also utopian is the objective of  the project to inspire as many individuals as possible globally to engage in visionary thought experiments conceptualized as having real world relevance to the resolution of apparently intractable problems in conf lict cities.

7

For more discussion of  the initiative and its faculty steering committee, see the project website .

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The centerpiece of these ef forts was the international “ideas” competition discussed above that was geared towards eliciting innovative visions from representatives of civil society, wherever they might be, for a just, peaceful, and sustainable Jerusalem by the year 2050. The Just Jerusalem Competition did more than simply attempt to appropriate an imaginative visioning methodology from multiple sources with the hope that doing so would generate socially just planning ideas for this city and other conf lict locales. The Just Jerusalem Competition also established itself around the premise that guaranteeing the “uncensored” right to vision alternative futures for Jerusalem must be an essential component of  the experiment, and that the “right” to vision a dif ferent Jerusalem should be open to anyone (another example of the practical utopianism that both inspired the project and was anticipated as a viable outcome of it). As such, participation in the competition was not confined only to residents and/or inhabitants of  Jerusalem. In this sense, the project departed from standard participatory planning practice while also expanding on Lefebvre’s own notion of  the right to the city, building on the idea that the “right to vision” should be a form of  freedom available to all. To achieve this, town, city, and urban planning would have to be reimagined as being based on humanist principles rather than on exclusive, rigidly selective, or pre-determined access to planning processes, which is conventionally restricted to representative groups determined by established power relations, authority, and typical individual or collective self-interest.8 Stated dif ferently, the underlying

8

It is worth noting that development and use of  the notion “the right to vision” was not advanced during the initial stages of the project, or even during the formatting of  the competition. It has been developed by the authors for this essay not only owing to Lefebvrean ideals, which were acknowledged in the prior project stages, but also in reaction to the numerous email attacks and personal criticisms that the project organizers ultimately received from extreme political groups who questioned the steering committee’s motives. Specifically, many openly challenged the “right” of scholars at MIT to even discuss the future of Jerusalem, let alone develop a new planning theory and practice that sought to make it a more just, peaceful, and sustainable city. It was this real-world experience and the looming specter of censorship – built on the assumption that only a small number of anointed actors and institutions should have the “right” to of fer peace-producing ideas for Jerusalem – that further inspired us to turn to this phraseology and conceptualization to summarize our methodology and experience.

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premise of  the global visioning competition was that: a) all humans – no matter their nationality or where they reside – possess visioning potential for conf lict cities where residents have faced dif ficulties in transcending their own fights and divisions; b) all visionaries (and their ideas) are equal, no matter their identity, ideology, location, or professional training; and c) the greater the number and diversity of ideas, the more likely that a few will emerge around which shared consensus can be found for future action.9 To accomplish these aims in a project focused on Jerusalem, where some would argue the national political logic of urban boundary drawing has helped fuel social exclusion and injustice, the competition was structured around four key elements that departed from conventional planning practice: 1) Its “core practice” was “visioning,” conceived as a utopian method to generate out-of-the box ideas that could engage planners and citizens and create dialogic interaction between them, as well as among competing constituencies within Israeli and Palestinian civil society; 2) So as to bypass the thorny issue of which boundaries should or should not prevail and whose citizenship claims on the city should or should not be recognized, the “visioning process” built on the participatory involvement of global civil society, rather than just on narrowly defined locallysanctioned constituencies in Jerusalem proper; 3) The competition brief  “deconstructed” the city into its component parts, asking for separate innovations targeted at physical, civic, economic, and symbolic infrastructure, so as to avoid the impression of asking for top-down, master planning type ideas that generally lack appreciation for the quotidian; and 4) it actively sought a critical and open-ended definition of what physical (or virtual) spaces should define or constitute the scale and contours of  the city, to which rights would be guaranteed, precisely to maximize the likelihood that social justice concerns would unfold in universal human terms rather than in the context of partial or fragmented territorial domains. 9

This same logic also echoed the great experiment in moral philosophy constructed by John Rawls, who argued that principles of justice must always be established in the abstract precisely because the empirical grounding of real-world inequalities structures a set of  biases in normative perception that both ref lect and reproduce unequal distribution of powers.

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These specifications – not just the competition’s emphasis on the right to the city, rather than the nation, as well as the importance of moving beyond the usual suspects to involve global civil society, and the centrality accorded to visioning and the future, as well as the willingness to let constituents define city boundaries – primarily respond to the unique governance and sovereignty situation in Jerusalem. The city’s reputation as centerpiece to one of  the world’s most intractable conf licts is owed in no small part to the urban governance and sovereignty situation surrounding it, which includes occupation, physical exclusion, and checkpoints, the continual politicized and/or militarized re-drawing of urban boundaries, as well as the fact that competing national states’ ef forts to inscribe their political projects on Jerusalem have both fueled a cycle of violence, revealing traditional planning practices as top-down, exclusionary, and contested.

From Theory to Practice: What the Visioning Process Produced The project drew expressions of interest from 1,150 people in close to eightyfive countries around the world, all of whom formally registered on the Just Jerusalem Competition website.10 It also produced myriad news stories on television, radio, and in the conventional print press.11 In the end, close to 250 individuals or teams chose to submit entries to the competition 10

11

The project also raised the ire of partisan observers and organized lobbies, some of whom used blogs, emails, and other forms of expression (sometimes hostile) to suggest that no one but elected of ficials, state actors, or global diplomats had the “right” to of fer visions for Jerusalem. As noted earlier, we dif fered, in ef fect suggesting that no one controlled the “right to vision,” that ours was a university-based academic project without a partisan political objective, and that opening this right to global civil society would help create new possibilities for socially just spatial production in conf lict cities. Among those covering the competition were the BBC, the CBC, and Reuters.

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(although about sixty were disqualified), from which four winners and seven honorable mentions were selected by an international jury of architects, planners, artists, historians, geographers, journalists, and diplomats.12 To establish the broadest basis for creative and imaginative deliberation, nine jurors were selected who represented an array of disciplinary backgrounds, divergent degrees of knowledge, or attachment to Jerusalem, and relatively eclectic views about the role of theory versus practical action in engendering social and political change.13 The process of judging was central to the competition outcomes, and in fact held the potential to derail the project’s larger aims. Bearing in mind that choosing a single vision for a complex conf licted city would undermine the project’s commitment to generating ongoing dialogue about the range of possible imagined futures, jurors were asked to identify a number of visions, holding the potential to address multiple dimensions of urban life (physical, symbolic, civic, economic) in eclectic ways, that could contribute to peace, prosperity, and justice. In recognition of the fact that finding consensus about which entries might best embody these heterogeneous aims would be dif ficult, not only given the jurors’ own disciplinary diversity but also given the uncharted conceptual territory of  the project, jurors began by first deliberating among themselves about the criterion for judging. To the extent that the project sought to avoid both the limits of pragmatism and the potential excesses of utopianism, there was recognition that taking the “both/and” approach would ultimately undermine project aims, thus leading the jury to use an “either/or” criterion for selecting those proposals

12 13

Competition guidelines prevented any identifiable marks on entries (such as names and addresses). Such entries were not evaluated, as were incomplete entries and those missing key specifications called for in the guidelines. Jurors included William J. Mitchell (architect, urban theorist, and jury head), Suha Ozkan (planner), Sadako Ogata (diplomat), Meron Benvenisti (historian, geographer, and ex-deputy Mayor of Jerusalem), Salim Tamari (historian, sociologist, and Director of the Institute for Jerusalem Studies, Ramallah, West Bank), Amy Dockser Marcus (journalist), Ute Meta Bauer (curator and visual artist), and Herman Hertzberg (architect/urbanist). A final jury member, Harvey Cox (theologian), withdrew a few days before the selection for health reasons.

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or parts of proposals that were deemed most promising (Harvey, Spaces 173–96, 235, 246). Yet even this criterion was somewhat problematic because jurors held stark dif ferences of opinion about 1) the distinction between naïveté and imagination; 2) the “appropriate” conceptual starting points for visionary thinking; and 3) the time-space dimension of visioning; that is, how much into the future an idea could or should be situated to achieve the aims of  “practical” utopianism, at least enough to make a dif ference within a single generation, to name but a few of  the many dif ficult issues that divided the jury.14 In negotiating this dif ficult terrain, jurors did have some pre-set constraints. They were to identify no more than five winning visions, and their authors would be invited to MIT as Visiting Fellows, where they would not only fine tune their own visions but also develop synergies among themselves as a group. These guidelines allowed for the possibility that further visionary ideas might emerge as a product of  future collective interactions, through the juxtaposition of individual entries and dialogue about them. By conceptualizing visioning as a dynamic process of exploration involving utopian and pragmatic elements, rather than a static set of design forms, the jury found a workable consensus. They thus selected a composite set of visions that accommodated both utopian and pragmatic sensibilities by engaging multiple problems in the city, ranging from environment to infrastructure, which also operated at a variety of scales, from the individual, to the neighborhood, to the region. Thus, the judging process became an active ingredient in the visioning ef fort to

14

In order to protect juror confidentiality and create an environment where selfcensoring would not constrain open deliberation, jury sessions were closed even to project organizers and participants. Steering committee members were only allowed to hear the final discussions of winning entries and honorable mentions in an open session after all decisions were made. No tapes were made of jury deliberations. As such, the above assessment is drawn from partial knowledge of the jury’s deliberative process, gleaned from open jury-steering committee discussions of the final entries, from a short question and answer period with steering committee members afterwards, and from formal written statements by the jurors on the winning entries and about the competition. The latter document is available on the website.

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imagine, and ultimately construct, a more peaceful and just city. Because jurors used their deliberations to actively establish a conceptual “staging platform” for further visioning – built on collective deliberation among proponents of ideas with a range of utopian and pragmatic elements – the selection process circumvented numerous impasses, or at least it helped to bypass them. Most importantly, by engaging in a dynamic process privileging deliberation as key to achieving peace and justice for Jerusalem, the jury avoided constraints typically associated with totalizing conceptualizations of utopia that inevitably emanate from top-down visioning exercises. In short, the judging process played a role in synthesizing the pragmatic and utopian elements of the Just Jerusalem Competition in ways that individual competitors or any single vision could not. So what general conclusion might be drawn from this experiment in visioning? Did either the entries produced by the competition call or the winning ideas selected by the jurors of fer a new basis for challenging the constraints of pragmatism and the excesses of unfettered utopianism while addressing both content and process? If so, could this methodology constitute a new approach to building better cities, one that might be considered helpful in setting the guidelines for achieving the best of what many urbanists and planning theorists hope a city can of fer: an “environment in which modern values [of  tolerance, freedom, and so on] can be realized,” a location that hosts “togetherness in dif ference” and a place where “people grow only by processes of encountering the unknown” (Berman 318; Merrifield 201; Sennett 295)? And finally, in the case of  the Just Jerusalem Competition in particular, has enabling the “right to vision” produced anything of significance that could benefit this highly conf licted and socially and spatially fragmented city? Given that this was a theoretical “experiment” intended to generate ideas for an urban future apparently still out of reach, it may be impossible to arrive at uncontested answers to the questions posed above. Nonetheless, we can address the question of content, or the competition ideas themselves. For example, were there any notions of significance produced by this experiment, or are its actual (or potential) contributions to be made primarily through the dissemination of  the results, the dialogue this could encourage, and the communicative interaction produced merely by the act of insisting on the “right to vision”

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and in the setting up of a visioning process? Despite the fact that few earthshattering or even particularly novel ideas were actually produced, one can say that the competition did facilitate the generation and documentation of several key views of  the city that promise to be potentially quite valuable for future planning/architectural practice. In particular, a review of  the entries in their entirety reveals several “mega-narratives” and discourses about the city’s essential character and its predominant dilemmas, which any future planning process ought to take into account. Specifically, there were three main themes that threaded through the majority of entries, which suggested that most competitors saw Jerusalem through one of  three distinct lenses: as a city that was either “connected” or “fragmented”; as a city whose fate depended on “a shared past” or “a shared future”; or as a city whose significance rested in its “symbolic” as opposed to “real” character. That is, perhaps unsurprisingly, questions of space, time, and meaning hovered over almost all of the visions. Nevertheless, not all of  the visions advanced fit neatly into one or the other end of  these seeming dichotomies (for example, some saw translating a shared past into a shared future as key), and many of  the visions adopted a combination of concerns encompassing space, time, and meaning. Taken together as aspects of a larger framing narrative, the entries tell us a lot about how Jerusalem is seen by those who care most about it. And, arguably, recognition of these views – whether as constraining or enabling peace – must be accommodated or addressed in any future planning exercise. The degree to which all of  the visions taken together form a larger framing narrative is confirmed, for example, by an examination of  the “fragmented/connected” theme, the ways it emerged, and the policy or project recommendations attached to such a view. Many entries began with a description of divides. Whether spatial or metaphorical, boundaries of separation run prominently through many of the depictions of present-day Jerusalem including between peoples, geographies, highways, or opportunities. Many of the proposals focused on the physical distinctions, such as the village and settlement “which turn their back on each other,” as described in the Viaduct of Synchronicity project. But many more homed in on the political, social, or environmental aspects of division, and proposed to bridge, connect, or fill these gaps with a space of overlap. Likewise, in all

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of  the visioning projects preoccupied with connection and division, the justification for the bridges, humane borders, shared television shows, and financial arrangements they proposed echoed with a shared conviction that for a peaceful and socially just Jerusalem to emerge, the physical, social, and psychological fractures that now tear it apart must be repaired. The future of  these divisions, however, was much more contested. For some of  the competitors, Jerusalem was a “city of pieces,” an organic patchwork of semi-autonomous spaces which define its past and present. Recommendations advanced by these submissions typically advocate sharpening the definition of edges and/or strengthening the internal identity of a specific unit of analysis. A sharpening of edges is interpreted broadly; the Gulf of  Peace project, for example, advocates widening the dividing line in the city by a large body of water, while the In Back Home project proposes the gradual development of a Palestinian refugee camp as an independent “social island.” Other proposals, however, identified divisions as the result of an unnatural fragmentation of urban life. In fact, this was the predominant view. These entries envisioned Jerusalem’s past and future as necessarily more interconnected to one another than its present (which these projects viewed as anomalous), and so recommend restoring, strengthening, or creating connections to make the city whole. Finally, there were entries that sought to transcend the fragmented/connected divide by identifying “points of convergence,” or spaces that might attract divergent populations or interests from dif ferent parts of  the fractured city; youth, beliefs, foods, and finance, for example, could be drawn to a single site of potential overlap and interaction. Submissions abounded in this category as well. Proposals for sites of  learning and training were also common, as were submissions that proposed shared spaces for cultural ref lection and historical memory. The existence of these mega-narratives about the city and whether it is or should be fragmented or connected (some would say divided or united) ought to be addressed in all future planning practice, because it is one of  the key fault lines upon which societal consensus, citizen participation, and democratic deliberation will be negotiated. And while the visioning process did not produce any magic solution for how to deal with the lack of consensus, it did document the significance of the dilemma of social and

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territorial unity/division among those seeking peace in the city, and the undeniable importance of recognizing this issue in all future discussions of urban planning and policy (even if  this is not generally a habit identified with conventional planning practices). More significantly, perhaps, the visioning process of fered up an array of tangible proposals for the city that brought these dilemmas into stark relief, ideally forcing a more widespread discussion of  the larger issue of unity/division in the context of specific urban policy proposals focused on the quotidian. The overarching narratives of  time and meaning as developed in a number of  the proposals also hold out the promise of inf luencing an expanded conversation for planning. In these entries, shared temporal experience among the variety of religious, political, or social groups living in the city was emphasized, although there was little consensus as to whether the future or the past should serve as the reference point for such interventions. For some, commonalities emerged out of dif ferences, or were reinforced over time; for others, common experiences in the past laid a trajectory for contemporary or future dif ferences. Either way, this idea of “sharing something,” whether in the past or the future, did nonetheless help to enable visions of peaceful coexistence. Submissions that focused primarily on a shared past and then diverged over time often proposed the construction of museums, cemeteries, or memorials. Conversely, submissions that focused on a shared future often articulated a common goal that all groups, regardless of their prior histories, could work towards achieving together. There were also entries that viewed groups as existing alongside each other, or in parallel, without presuming either a shared past or future. Many of  these submissions focused on “conditions or venues of coexistence.”15 Finally, some submissions focused on the dif ferent religious and ethnic groups resident in Jerusalem, but rather than emphasizing a parallel existence for them, these proposals highlighted the shared experiences of these residents 15

The Station project exemplifies this idea by enacting a dramatic performance revealing the co-existence of epochs and peoples in a single setting, the old Ottoman Railway Station. The play transports its audience through the present, past, and future almost seamlessly, emphasizing the importance of understanding and accepting both historical and contemporary dif ferences between Israelis and Palestinians.

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of the same city. Entries in this category were concerned with the identical nature of the urban experience, regardless of religion or ethnicity, and often focused on the strife associated with living in contemporary Jerusalem.16 Again, given that discourses about a shared past or shared future emerged so consistently within the submissions, viable planning exercises will most likely need to take into account the notion of sharing, as well as the variety of spatial or temporal reference points for facilitating it. Planners in Jerusalem and other conf lict cities really ought to ref lect upon and assess the theoretical and practical value of stressing historical commonalities rather than dif ferences; they should be prepared to query urban residents as to whether they perceive commonalities, and whether or not they imagine these (can) transcend time and space, as well as group or individual experience. And planners will need to be able to consider, and possibly even determine, how important it is to address or accommodate the past while preparing for the future. One of the great gains of the visioning methodology, then, has been its capacity to generate knowledge about the larger mega-discourses in which planning action, even practical planning action, must unfold if it is going to resonate with residents, whether related to sharing, the past versus the future, or the value of unity versus division, or some combination of all of  these themes. Such concerns are undoubtedly applicable to many conf lict locales, not only Jerusalem, and one of  the advantages of a global competition is that the universality of  these particular concerns has risen to the surface. But one must also examine the capacity of a visioning methodology to produce knowledge that is equally valuable for particular cities, and this is where the large number of entries concerned with the significance of  Jerusalem’s symbolic status must be acknowledged. This final narrative may be the trickiest of all, as Jerusalem’s importance as a representative site of hotly contested spiritual, religious, or humanist convictions drives conf lict in much deeper and more existential ways than do struggles over space. To be sure, many entries considered Jerusalem a platform for practical projects. For them Jerusalem may be a remarkable place, but also one with 16

Safe Design, Open City is one such entry whose premise is safety and security, the right to which all people should have.

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tangible everyday urban problems awaiting thoughtful and imaginative but grounded and pragmatic interventions. To establish a starting point, these entries often accepted most of the existing structural conditions of the city as fixed, and designed their interventions around its existing laws, social norms, politics, and geographies. Other proposals, however, embraced a long tradition of projecting Jerusalem as a key symbolic – or sacred – site, a city whose activities have meaning beyond the quotidian experience of housing, transportation, commerce, etc. Complicating matters, embedded in this dichotomy are stubborn conf licts over territory or land, and the intractability of people when it comes to borders, politics, and ways of living in certain physical settings, all of which links to questions about sovereignty, religion, democracy, and rights, including the right of return. Extracting the symbolic from the material meaning of these activities and patterns is as dif ficult as it would be to arrive at any agreement on the symbolic reference points that Jerusalem represents. Are visions of  the city founded on religious ideals or on more enlightenment-inspired ideals, such as a commitment to human rights and democracy conceived of as universal? Recognition and negotiation within such larger narratives will be crucial for arriving at both the content and legitimacy of future planning actions in Jerusalem. And again, the competition entries give some sense of how this might be accomplished. While almost all submissions naturally contained both metaphoric and pragmatic elements, surprisingly few sought to blend both in a single proposal in ways that could inspire both transformative ideas and practical action. Those projects that came closest to doing so of fered up the most utopian or imaginative ideas, jettisoning more constraining matter-of-fact approaches. And those entries that combined these elements most creatively, tackling questions about the city’s symbolism and re-casting it in terms of  tangible reality, past, present, and future, were indeed the most successful at capturing the attention of the international jury that evaluated all of the entries to the competition, for the reasons noted earlier. Ultimately, the winning proposals and honorable mentions embodied a practical utopianism capable of weaving together wide visions of a dif ferent future but with a grasp of existent realities and possible avenues for practical application.

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Concluding Remarks Just like grassroots organizing ef forts at the level of the neighborhood, the Jerusalem 2050 project methodology, its winning entries, and the global website that showcases these and other elicited visions have helped to establish, generate, and maintain dialogue about how to move toward peace and social justice in Jerusalem. The dif ference here, however, is that this is a virtual community, drawing on a planning/architectural exercise based in the conviction that global civil society can make a substantial contribution to a singular problem in a way that may even surpass the general convention of most urban planning processes in which local citizens come together in face-to-face contact. Ultimately, the hope of the competition organizers is that although visioning Jerusalem remains for the moment in the virtual realm, its potential to catalyze a larger network of activists will persist. The tangible impact this network will have on of ficials empowered to make decisions for Jerusalem remains to be seen. But in keeping with the utopian spirit of the whole enterprise, that it has not happened yet does not mean that it will not happen. The point here is one of process, not unfamiliar to planners/architects: both short- and long-term planning gains frequently depend on first laying the organizational and social-networking groundwork for alliance-building, which can promote the development of ideas, lend credence to proposals, and thus inf luence decision-making, leading ultimately to action. What is dif ferent in the Jerusalem case – and critically so, given the current conf lict and struggle in that city – is the limited scale at which these participatory process dynamics unfold. If change is to come, expanding the scale and scope of participation so as to create some distance from the overly localized framing of planning discourse and action will be absolutely critical. It is in light of this point that the large number of pragmatic entries that focused on small-scale, site-specific projects has significance. Even if  the authors of these entries of fered up their proposals as forward moving, being able to defend them in light of a global conversation in which participants from outside the city are involved could prove more dif ficult, especially when entrants from further afield appear to be more willing to

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ask questions about the implications of certain small-scale projects, which is likely exactly the kind of dialogue that is needed to produce “visionary” ideas capable of straddling both utopian thought and pragmatic action. Another way to think about process issues is to consider how embrace of  the “right to vision” – whether for Jerusalem or elsewhere – can help fortify knowledge-based democratic dialogue, built upon the free exchange of dissenting ideas. In a global marketplace of  thought, visions for Jerusalem or other conf lict cities have and will continue to stand or fall on their own merits as they enter into competition with other visions; a particular vision prevails in this world only by being tested against less worthy ideas. The Just Jerusalem Competition only scratched the surface of possible ideas that could be assessed, debated, and of fered; but at least it did so in the domain of civil society, bypassing states and other authorities who generally seek to limit the range of ideas and options under consideration. Clearly, the supposition behind this process is that all individuals have equal access to what the liberal United States Supreme Court Justice William Brennan has called “the market place of ideas.”17 Yet, it must be noted that by engaging in this process, citizens must also consider themselves as part of a larger whole, resisting retreat into a private sphere of isolation, and thereby expanding on what Ruth Levitas called the imaginary reconstitution of society (IROS): “the construction or constitution of a society as it is, as it might be, as it might not be, as it might be hoped for or feared” (47). Proposal of visioning as a hopeful design praxis aims at balancing the range of  “as it might” possibilities with re-engagement of  the citizen in imaging a reconstituted society for the collective public good. Thus this experiment’s long-term significance ultimately depends on how large and active the global community of visionaries becomes, and whether the website will continue to generate new ideas for Jerusalem and other conf lict cities while simultaneously facilitating debate as to the relative merits of proposals. The methodology and tools for the imaginary reconstitution of society do exist, and if individuals continue to use the Jerusalem 2050 website to engage in a collective process that fuels public circulation of ideas and knowledge, more gains can be made. 17

See Lamont v. Postmaster General 1965. 381 U.S. 301 (Mitchell 47).

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As Lefebvre asked, “Why should the imaginary enter only outside the real instead of nurturing reality? When there is a loss of thought in and by the imaginary, it is being manipulated. The imaginary is also a social fact” (“Right” 167). Social facts, both “real” and imaginary, have and will create the landscape of cities, and thus they can and should also be the basis around which planning/architecture action unfolds. The visioning process crafted for Jerusalem created a set of narratives that serve as evidence of larger perceptions that themselves should be understood as “social facts” about the city that could not have been arrived at through conventional planning techniques and processes. However, to paraphrase Karl Marx, the point is not merely to understand the facts but also to change them. To do so, both imagination “and” practical action are equally necessary, especially in conf lict cities where the weight of the present and the extent of injustice so frequently reduce hope. However, Frederic Jameson argues, postmodern life is characterized by the fragmentation of  history, leading to the vanquishing of humanity’s hope for the future (36). In other words, it is dif ficult to keep alive, however feebly, the possibility of socio-political change, urban or otherwise, without an “alternate” or utopian vision of society. To counteract cynicism in the absence of progress, imagination may well be all that is left. If it can be attached to practical action, that is all the better. But the movement forward has to start somewhere if change is to come and if “the right to the city” is to become more than an empty utopian dream. Finally, the design professions play significant roles in demarcating spatial order and negotiating and mediating among contesting forces. Reengagement with visioning as a process promises built environment professionals a better methodology for thinking about places and for addressing the social and political covenant this both presupposes and demands. Yet, whatever the potential the act of visioning may hold out, it is crucial to recollect that utopian thinking undergirds it. Visioning can be seen as a method for creating substantive social and spatial change, for enabling a dif ferent awareness, especially as a means of critiquing how we live and think; equally, it is a methodology for negotiating a myriad of competing perceptions and conf licting interests. Although it may seem as though we live in a post-utopian age, or that there are no alternatives, the utopian mindset will only cease to be pertinent for envisioning an alternative and more socially just city when it can no longer act as a catalyst for envisioning change in our urban environments.

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Nevertheless, the aim should be to move beyond assessment of  the utopian as mere success or failure, and toward embracing it as a tool for mediating among contesting forces, interests, and communities. What will happen if we continue in our refusal to address contemporary issues through visionary methods? In that case, the design professions will continue their long decline in actively inf luencing the social order. By embracing the idea of the right to vision as a method of thinking and acting, the design professions can regain their social purpose and thus their authority as well. And by applying visioning to concrete problems, the urban designer, planner, and architect could become engaged in contemporary social struggles, no matter how far-fetched or utopian that might seem.

Works Cited Berman, Marshall. All That is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity. New York: Penguin Books, 1988. Bloch, Ernst. The Principle of Hope. 3 Vols. 1938–1947. Trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1986. Bollens, Scott. On Narrow Ground: Urban Policy and Ethnic Conf lict in Jerusalem and Belfast. Albany: State University of  New York Press, 2000. Calthorpe, Peter. The Next American Metropolis: Ecology, Community, and the American Dream. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1993. Caro, Robert A. The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. New York, Vintage Books, 1975. Chase, John, Margaret Crawford, and John Kaliski (eds). Everyday Urbanism. New York: Monacelli Press, 1999. Clarno, Andy. “A Tale of Two Walled Cities: Neoliberalism and Enclosure in Johannesburg and Jerusalem.” Political Power and Social Theory. Vol. 19. Eds Diane Davis and Christina Proenza-Coles. (Emerald Group Publishing Limited, 2008): 159–205. Coleman, Nathaniel. Utopias and Architecture. Abingdon: Routledge, 2005. Davidof f, Paul. “Advocacy and Pluralism in Planning.” JAIP 31.4 (1965): 331–7. Davis, Diane, and Naura Libertun de Duren., Cities and Sovereignty: Identity Politics in Urban Spaces. Indianapolis: University of  Indiana Press, 2010.

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Davis, Mike. “Planet of Slums: Urban Involution and the Informal Proletariat.” New Left Review 26 (March–April 2004): 5–34. De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of  the Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of  California Press, 1984. Fainstein, Susan. “Planning and the Just City.” Paper presented at the Conference on Searching for the Just City, GSAPP, Columbia University, 29 April 2006. . Fishman, Robert. Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1982. Foucault, Michel. The Order of  Things: An Archaeology of  the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage Books, 1970. ——. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977. Ed. Colin Gordon. New York: Pantheon Books, 1980. Forester, John. Planning in the Face of  Power. Berkeley: University of  California Press, 1989. Frazer, Murray. “The Cultural Context of Critical Architecture.” Journal of Architecture 10.3 (2005): 317–22. Friedman, John. “The Good City: In Defense of  Utopian Thinking.” International Journal of  Urban and Regional Research 24.2 (2000): 460–72. Hall, Paul. “Planning: Millennial Retrospect and Prospect.” Progress in Planning 57.3–4 (2002): 263–84. Hall, Stuart. “The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power.” Formations of Modernity. Eds Stuart Hall and Bram Gieben. London: Polity Press, 1992. 275–320. Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. ——. The Limits to Capital. London and New York: Verso, 2006. ——. Spaces of  Hope. Berkeley: University of  California Press, 2000. Hatuka, Tali. Violent Acts and Urban Spaces in Contemporary Tel Aviv. Austin: University of  Texas Press, 2010. Hayden, Dolores. Redesigning the American Dream: The Future of  Housing, Work, and Family Life. New York: W. W. Norton, 1984. Healey, Patsy. Collaborative Planning: Shaping Places in Fragmented Societies. London: Macmillan, 1997. ——. “The Pragmatic Tradition in Planning Thought.” Journal of Planning Education and Research 28 (2009): 277–92. Holston, John. “Spaces of  Insurgent Citizenship.” Planning Theory 13 (1995): 35–52.

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Holston, John, and Arjun Appadurai. “Introduction: Cities and Citizenship.” Cities and Citizenship. Eds John Holston and Arjun Appadurai. North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1999. 1–18. Huxley, Margo, and Oren Yiftachel. “A New Paradigm of  Old Mytopia? Unsettling the Communicative Turn in Planning Theory.” Journal of  Planning Education and Research 19.4 (2000): 333–42. Innes, Judith E. “Information in Communicative Planning.” Journal of the American Planning Association 64.1 (1998): 52–63. Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Random House, 1961. Jacobs, Jane M. Edge of  Empire:Postcolonialism and the City. London: Routledge, 1998. Jameson, Fredric. “The Politics of  Utopia.” New Left Review 25 ( Jan-Feb 2004): 35–54. Lefebvre, Henri. Everyday Life in the Modern World. London: Transaction Publishers, 1984. ——. The Production of Space. 1974. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. ——. “The Right to the City.” Writings on Cities. Eds & Trans. Elenore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996. Levitas, Ruth. “The Imaginary Reconstitution of Society: Utopia as Method.” Utopia Method Vision. Eds Tom Moylan and Raf faella Baccolini. Oxford and Bern: Peter Lang, 2007. 47–68. Lipton, Michael. Why Poor People Stay Poor: Urban Bias in World Development. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1977. Lupton, Ruth. Poverty Street: The Dynamics of Neighborhood Decline and Renewal. Bristol: Policy, 2003. Lynch, Kevin. The Image of  the City. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT. Press, 1964. Marcuse, Peter, and Ronald Van Kempen (eds). Globalizing Cities: A New Spatial Order? Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. ——. Of  States and Cities: The Partitioning of  Urban Space. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Merrifield, Andy. “Social Justice and Communities of  Dif ference: A Snapshot from Liverpool.” The Urbanization of  Injustice. Eds Andy Merrifield and Eric Swyngedouw. New York: New York University Press, 1977. 200–22. Miraftab, Faranak. Insurgent Planning: Situating Radical Planning in the Global South. Planning Theory 8.1 (2009): 32–50. ——. “Public-Private Partnerships: The Trojan Horse of Neoliberal Development?” Journal of  Planning Education and Research 24.1 (2004): 89–101.

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Mitchell, Don. The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space. New York: Guilford Press, 2003. Rowe, Colin, and Fred Koetter. Collage City. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1978. Roy, Ananya. “Praxis in the Time of  Empire.” Planning Theory 5.1 (2006): 7–29. Sandercock, Leonie. Towards Cosmopolis: Planning for Multicultural Cities. Chichester: John Wiley, 1998. Sanyal, Bishwapriya. “Critical about Criticality.” Critical Planning: A Journal of  the UCLA Department of  Urban Planning, 15th Anniversary Issue (2008): 143–61. ——. “Planning as Anticipation of  Resistance.” Planning Theory 4.3 (2005): 225–45. Segal, Rafi, and Eyal Weizman. A Civilian Occupation: The Politics of Israeli Architecture. London and New York: VERSO; Tel Aviv: Babel, 2003. Sennett, Richard. The Fall of  Public Man. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977. Tafuri, Manfredo. Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development. 1973. Trans. Barbara Luigia La Penta. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. Tschumi, Bernard. “The Architectural Paradox.” 1975. Architectural Theory Since 1968. Ed. K. Michael Hays. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1998. 218–28. Watson, Vannesa. “Deep Dif ference: Diversity Planning and Ethics.” Planning Theory 5.1 (2006): 31–50. Yacobi, Haim. “From Rakevet to the Neighborhood of  Neve-Shalom: Planning, Dif ference, and the Right to the City.” Makan: Adalah’s Journal for Land, Planning, and Justice 1 (2006): 25–39. Yacobi, Haim, and Sheli Cohen (eds). Separation: the Politics of  Space in Israel. Tel Aviv: Xargol and Am Oved, 2006. Yiftachel, Oren. Ethnocracy: Land, and the Politics of  Identity Israel/Palestine. Philadelphia: University of  Pennsylvania Press, 2006. ——. “Planning and Social Control: Exploring the Dark Side.” Journal of  Planning Literature 12.4 (1998): 395–406.

Phillip E. Wegner

“The Mysterious Qualities of  This Alleged Void”: Transvaluation and Utopian Urbanism in Rem Koolhaas’s S,M,L,XL

They were blind to the mysterious qualities of this alleged void, especially to its unlimited freedom. — Rem Koolhaas, S,M,L,XL But the future comes not by itself. Only if we do our work in the right way will it make a good foundation for the future. — Mies van der Rohe Where do you go from here?

— Rem Koolhaas, S,M,L,XL

Rem Koolhaas is among the best-known auteur architects at work today, part of a small group, along with Frank Gehry, Peter Eisenmann, Jean Nouvel, Zaha Hadid, and a handful of others, whose projects claim the attention of  both a popular audience and scholars from across a range of disciplines. This was, however, not the case with the 1978 publication of  Koolhaas’s first book, Delirious New York, a “retroactive manifesto” for the utopian urbanist project Koolhaas dubs “Manhattanism.” Quickly falling out of print and a for a long time remaining largely unknown, it is a text that in its original context is what Alain Badiou calls “out-of-place.” The concept of  the out-of-place comes from Badiou’s own recently translated 1982 book, Theory of  the Subject, a contemporary to Delirious New York and a similarly out-of-place intervention. To this pair, we might also add Antonio Negri’s Marx beyond Marx (1979) and Fredric Jameson’s

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The Political Unconscious (1981), all essential works, for reasons that I hope will become clearer in what follows, for any student of Utopia. Like these contemporaries, Delirious New York did become something of a cult classic, an almost samizdat text, clandestinely circulated among a small group of intellectuals in the moment of a high postmodernism that dominated the subsequent decade, especially in architectural theory and practice. One of those early devotees to Koolhaas’s book was Fredric Jameson. Jameson was the first to explore its ramifications for thinking through the problematic of Utopia more generally. Delirious New York, Jameson argues in the lectures assembled in The Seeds of  Time (1994), helps us recognize that the target of representation in any utopian text is not the lived experience we might find in the radical otherness of a utopian society, but rather the “machinery” concentrating and localizing necessity, those structures that enable a particular social order to function and (re)produce itself.1 A change in these structures thus would enable new forms and spaces of  human existence to come into being. Koolhaas accomplishes a figuration of this new machinery through a dramatic transvaluation of the modern technology of the urban street grid. While acknowledging the arbitrariness and even violence of its original imposition upon the space of  the island of  Manhattan, Koolhaas argues that the grid condenses the structural necessity, the machinery that enables a collective human inhabitation of this space, around which then accretes “delirious” possibilities of urban space. (This grid is later extended into a third dimension by the crucial technological innovation of  the elevator.) Moreover, Koolhaas maintains that the grid “forces” – and the resonances with the concept of “forcing” developed in Badiou’s later work are appropriate here – heretofore unimagined forms of spatial innovation and social experimentation, shattering the repetitious structure of established architectural practice (its laws or Symbolic order, or what Badiou calls in Theory of  the Subject, its “splace”):2

1 2

I discuss Jameson’s use of  Koolhaas further in “Horizons, Figures, Machines.” See Badiou, Being and Event, 400–6.

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The Grid makes the history of architecture and all previous lessons of urbanism irrelevant. It forces Manhattan’s builders to develop a new system of  formal values, to invent strategies for the distinction of one block from another. The Grid’s two-dimensional discipline also creates undreamt-of  freedom for three-dimensional anarchy. The Grid defines a new balance between control and de-control in which the city can be at the same time ordered and f luid, a metropolis of rigid chaos. With its imposition, Manhattan is forever immunized against any (further) totalitarian intervention. In the single block – the largest possible area that can fall under architectural control – it develops a maximum unit of urbanistic Ego. […] It follows that one form of human occupancy can only be established at the expense of another. The city becomes a mosaic of episodes, each with its own particular life span, that contest each other through the medium of  the Grid (Delirious 15–16).

According to Koolhaas such a program of spatial practice is at best only fitfully hinted at in the course of  the actual history of  the development of the city (the retroactive narrative focus of the book), its full realization then part of the agenda, performatively announced in the text (manifesto), for a radically Other future. In this early book, Koolhaas thus brushes against the grain of conventional wisdom and recovers the Utopian potentiality of a number of modernist urbanist and architectural technologies that in postmodern theory, pace Max Weber by way of Michel Foucault, had come to be understood as the very embodiment of dystopian closure.3 Moreover, Koolhaas helps us see how these postmodern critiques, much like the earlier late-modernist fiction of  George Orwell, quickly come to serve the cause of a far more pernicious anti-utopianism. Lyman Tower Sargent defines anti-utopia as “a non-existent society described in considerable detail and normally located in time and space that the author intended a contemporaneous reader to view as a criticism of utopianism or of some particular eutopia” (9).4 Koolhaas’s encounter with the dynamic possibilities represented by 3 4

Although for other discussions of utopian deployments of  the grid, see Choay, Modern City; Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia, Ch. 1; and Carter, The Road to Botany Bay, Ch. 7. See my discussion of Orwell in Imaginary Communities, Ch. 6; and of dystopia more generally in Life Between Two Deaths, Ch. 5.

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Manhattan’s past unleashed a wave of utopian speculation in his written work, and later enabled the development of innovative urbanist and architectural programs by him and his firm, the Of fice for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA). Many of these projects are chronicled in Koolhaas’s next major book, published nearly two decades later, co-authored with OMA and photographer Bruce Mau, and entitled simply, S,M,L,XL (1995). S,M,L,XL represents a truly monumental undertaking, 1,345 pages long, three inches thick and tipping the scales at nearly ten pounds, a compendium of  the plans and models of many of OMA’s projects, more often than not unbuilt, alongside “essays, manifestoes, diaries, fairy tales, travelogues” (back cover). All of  this material is arranged according to a series of scales (hence the volume’s title). In the opening pages of S,M,L,XL, directly preceding reproductions of  the tattered dust jacket and original Appendix of the first edition of Delirious New York (both appearing in very dif ferent forms in the 1994 paperback republication of the book), the reader encounters an even earlier project of  transvaluation in the form of Koolhaas’s 1972 student architectural thesis, “Exodus, or the Voluntary Prisoners of  Architecture.” In this early work, Koolhaas locates a utopian kernel in one of  the most reviled symbols of  the Cold War period, and a powerful emblem for so many of  the inevitable destiny of all of  the utopian projects of  the first half of  the century: the Berlin Wall. Counter to reigning assumptions, Koolhaas asserts, “The Wall was a masterpiece. […] its psychological and symbolic ef fects were infinitely more powerful than its physical appearance” (5). While the Wall itself  “was the guilty instrument of despair,” Koolhaas claims that It is possible to imagine a mirror image of  this terrifying architecture, a force as intensive and devastating but used in the service of positive intentions. Division, isolation, inequality, aggression, destruction, all the negative aspects of  the Wall, could be the ingredients of a new phenomenon: architectural warfare against undesirable conditions (5).

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Koolhaas subsequently makes clear the deeply modernist or totalizing utopian program he has in mind here, one that prefigures what will be elaborated upon in far more detail in Delirious New York: This would be an immodest architecture committed not to timid improvements but to the provision of  totally desirable alternatives. The inhabitants of this architecture, those strong enough to love it, would become its Voluntary Prisoners, ecstatic in the freedom of  their architectural confines. Contrary to modern architecture and its desperate afterbirths, this new architecture is neither authoritarian nor hysterical: it is the hedonistic science of designing collective facilities that fully accommodate individual desires. From the outside this architecture is a sequence of serene monuments; the life inside produces a continuous state of ornamental frenzy and decorative delirium, an overdose of symbols (S,M,L,XL 5, 7).

I am not interested in debating the merits and limits of  the utopian program Koolhaas outlines here and elsewhere in this volume, or even those of OMA’s various subsequent ef forts to embody a utopian impulse in their real-world built projects. Indeed, I am largely in agreement with the main thesis of  Manfredo Tafuri’s classic study, Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development (1973), which Jameson summarizes as follows: “The practicing architect, in this society and within the closure of capitalism as a system, cannot hope to devise a radically dif ferent, a revolutionary, or a ‘Utopian’ architecture or space either” (“Architecture and the Critique of  Ideology” 346). Jameson later shows how the built projects of  OMA figure an arrested utopian dialectic, expressing the modernist “desire called totality,” while eschewing the equally important modernist commitment to the new in favor of what Jameson calls the logic of replication: “Replication meanwhile also means the depoliticization of  the former modern, the consent to corporate power and its grants and contracts, the reduction of social conscience to manageable, practical, pragmatic limits; the Utopian becomes unmentionable, along with socialism and balanced budgets” (Seeds 141, 144).5 (Although it might also be worth speculating on the ways 5

I discuss Jameson’s use of  the Gremasian semiotic rectangle to visually think this arrested dialectic in “Greimas avec Lacan.”

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that “two types of  the Utopian” evident here – the built project and the textual program – might also be rewritten as “two historical stages” in a way parallel to what Jameson has more recently argued in a discussion of  Lenin’s State and Revolution, such that the “failures” of the former, far more than whatever ostensible successes they may achieve, teach us significant lessons about the labor involved in realizing a truly Other world.) Rather, in what follows, I want to take up the question of  the role that the Berlin Wall, and the original spaces of postwar Berlin more generally, play in the formation of what we might call Koolhaas’s literary or textual global utopian imagination. In a memoir printed at the beginning of  the “M” section, Koolhaas notes that his first encounter with the Wall while a young architectural student had all the force of what Badiou describes as a “Truth-Event”: “What arises from a truth-process, by contrast, cannot be communicated. Communication is suited only to opinions (and again, we are unable to manage without them). In all that concerns truth, there must be an encounter. […] To enter into the composition of a subject of  truth can only be something that happens to you” (Ethics 51). Exemplifying Badiou’s claim, Koolhaas writes, “I had not known what to expect on this journey. I had hoped to ‘do’ the wall in a day and then explore the rest of  the cit(ies). It was so endless, I would say, that it could not be measured. But its attraction was hypnotic. It made me a serious student” (228, 231). It is this “Evental” encounter that would place Koolhaas squarely in opposition to the refusal of utopian imagining, let alone planning, that became a hallmark of postmodern architectural and urban thinking. The personal and professional consequences of this apostasy, OMA’s inability to secure contracts and get their projects built, are then chronicled throughout this volume. This too is presaged in the opening section of the work when Koolhaas writes of an early installation: A surprised participant in the 1980 Venice Biennale, “The Presence of  the Past,” OMA felt displaced among the 20 over-eager facades of its Strada Novissima. Our booth faced Frank Gehry’s (the only other clear misfit); “Our New Sobriety,” a declaration of relative independence (or at least of pedantic moralistic dif ference), was barely noticed (S,M,L,XL 47).

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And yet what is even more remarkable in the volume that follows – what its back cover describes as among others things “a novel about architecture” – are the ways Koolhaas and OMA sustain their commitment, what Badiou would call “fidelity,” to the program first announced in the early 1970s. Thus, in addition to the negative critical project of S,M,L,XL, its undermining of postmodern clichés and presuppositions, we find the performance of a far more af firmative one, a veritable reinvention of  the modernist fidelity to the Absolute (“Architecture or revolution,” as Le Corbusier formulated it in 1923, the doubleness of Le Corbusier’s conjunction “ou” at once sustaining reformist – build new buildings in order to prevent revolution – and radical – new architecture is revolutionary – horizons).6 This is what Negri names the “passion for totality,” or, in other words, Utopia (13). Not only does the Berlin Wall inaugurate Koolhaas’s fidelity, it is a significant presence throughout the narrative of  S,M,L,XL. Or more precisely, I should say that it is equally a significant absence in the project, for both the Wall and its “disappearance” in early November 1989 are at the heart of  S,M,L,XL. However, as a two-page photo spread that opens section “M” makes clear, even when the Wall remained in place, it needed to be understood, as Koolhaas does in the moment of  his initial youthful encounter, as a void uniquely situated at the heart of a major European metropolis (212–13): In fact, in narrowly architectural terms, the wall was not an object but an erasure, a freshly created absence. For me, it was a first demonstration of  the capacity of  the void – of nothingness – to “function” with more ef ficiency, subtlety, and f lexibility than any object you could imagine in its place. It was a warning that – in architecture – absence would always win in a contest with presence (S,M,L,XL 228).

(It is exactly this that Koolhaas attempts to recreate in the “Exodus, or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture” project, imagining a similar generative Wall Zone in the heart of  London.) In the 1985 document, significantly titled “Imagining Nothingness,” Koolhaas writes, “Berlin is a laboratory” (200). The nature of  this laboratory is made clear in the epigraph that opens the essay: “Where there is nothing, everything is possible. Where there is architecture, nothing (else) is possible” (199). 6

See also the discussion of  Le Corbusier in Coleman, Utopias and Architecture.

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Literally a spatial void, the Wall also represents for Koolhaas a temporal void, a site of real emergent possibility: “Also, the wall is not stable; and it is not a single entity, as I thought. It is more a situation, a permanent, slow-moving evolution, some of it abrupt and clearly planned, some of it improvised” (219). It is the Wall that thus paradoxically gives lie to one of  the defining myths of postmodernism, or a post-Cold War global neo-liberalism, what Francis Fukuyama infamously named the “end of history.” Koolhaas further asserts that it is to “the mysterious qualities of this alleged void, especially to its unlimited freedom” that the adherents to a postmodern orthodoxy, which denies the possibility of a total transformation of society and culture, remain blind (S,M,L,XL 207). Finally, the Berlin Wall becomes in S,M,L,XL an index to the situation in which this reemergence of a modernist utopian architectural and urbanist energy becomes newly possible, a reemergence I would suggest that also occurs simultaneously on a number of other fronts, in literature, theory, and collective political action to name only a few. For the volume itself is a testament to the fact that something has begun to change in the latter parts of  the period chronicled here: as we come nearer and nearer to the book’s mid-1990s present, the once-marginal speculative projects of  Koolhaas and OMA not only garner increasing attention, they are given the opportunity to be realized, sometimes to great acclaim. The Event that occurs is one that renders a historical fact what Koolhaas understood to be the truth of  the wall, its status as a void. This is, of course, the unexpected and unplanned Event of the “fall” of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989 that opens what I describe in my book, Life Between Two Deaths, 1989–2001: U.S. Culture in the Long Nineties (2009), as the period of  the 1990s: a moment of  tremendous social, cultural, and political innovation and experimentation made possible by the “end” of the Cold War. The fallof-the-Berlin-Wall and end-of-the-Cold-War enable Koolhaas to begin to communicate, or “name,” the Truth that he had encountered there in the early 1970s; and this retroactive naming is crucial, Badiou maintains, for our ability to act ef fectively in the world: “The act of nomination of  the event is what constitutes it, not as real […] but as susceptible to a decision concerning its belonging to a situation” (Being and Event 203).

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Moreover, the fall of the Berlin Wall makes the global situation that of  the old Wall zone writ large: a space between two deaths, or a heterotopia, open to a range of possible “symbolizations/ historicizations,” a place, in short, wherein history might move in a number of very dif ferent directions, and thus once again become the site of collective political struggle. In the concluding line of  his 1996 review of  S,M,L,XL, Jameson writes, “let us first read this big book as the mimesis of radical choice, decisiveness, cutting through the knots, inventing new solutions – that is, as a story that must always exhilarate” (561). In other words, this book represents a call to action, an appeal to seize the moment, or Augenblick, that is its present. This is exactly what Koolhaas calls for in his essay, “Bigness, or, the Problem of  Large” (1994), that serves as a centerpiece of  S,M,L,XL: “But in spite of its dumb name, Bigness is a theoretical domain at this fin de siècle: in a landscape of disarray, disassembly, dissociation, disclamation, the attraction of Bigness is its potential to reconstruct the Whole, resurrect the Real, reinvent the collective, reclaim maximum possibility” (510). Far more than its programs, projects, or visions, then – the limitations of which we noted above – it is in this challenge to leap into the void of its moment wherein lies S,M,L,XL’s real utopian force. The concept of the Augenblick comes from one of the other key documents of  the 1990s, Georg Lukács’s A Defence of  History and Class Consciousness: Tailism and the Dialectic (first published in 1996, though written in 1925 or 1926). Here Lukács writes: What is a “moment” [Augenblick]? A situation whose duration may be longer or shorter, but which is distinguished from the process that leads up to it in that it forces together the essential tendencies of that process, and demands that a decision be taken over the future direction of  the process. That is to say the tendencies reach a sort of zenith, and depending on how the situation concerned is handled, the process takes on a dif ferent direction after the “moment.” Development does not occur, then, as a continuous intensification, in which development is favorable to the proletariat, and the day after tomorrow the situation must be even more favorable than it is tomorrow, and so on. It means rather that at a particular point, the situation demands that a decision be taken and the day after tomorrow might be too late to make that decision (55).

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In his Postface to this book, Slavoj Žižek further characterizes the Augenblick as “the moment when, brief ly, there is an opening for an act to intervene in a situation […] the art of seizing the right moment, of aggravating the conf lict before the system can accommodate itself  to our demand” (164). The opening of the Augenblick is limited in duration and our failures to leap into it will continue to haunt us. Koolhaas too elsewhere marks the closure of  the particular moment from which S,M,L,XL emerges. In the June 2003 issue of Wired magazine, for which he served as the guest editor, Koolhaas published an essay entitled, “Delirious No More.” The essay of fers a capsule architectural history of  New York City from the 1850s through the present. The essay’s concluding paragraph reads: Instead of the two towers – the sublime – the city will live with five towers, wounded by a single scything movement of  the architect [Daniel Libeskind, also responsible for Berlin’s Jewish Museum, one of  the great 1990s projects in that city], surrounding two black holes. New York will be marked by a massive representation of  hurt that projects only the overbearing self-pity of the powerful. Instead of the confident beginning of the next chapter, it captures the stumped fundamentalism of the superpower. Call it closure (168).

The maintenance of this spatial void in the heart of the plan for the rebuilding of  the World Trade Center site has the ef fect of  filling in the historical void that was the 1990s with the terrible new dystopian order of  the global war on terror (nor does the plan’s subsequent modifications lessen this ef fect).7 Moreover, there is also a way in which S,M,L,XL itself seems to of fer within its own pages an uncanny prefiguration of this moment of closure. One of the other earliest essays reprinted in the volume, “Las Vegas of the Welfare State” (1976), discusses the Bijlmermeer housing project located in Amsterdam. As we might anticipate, Koolhaas refuses the postmodern revulsion, “fear and loathing, almost panic” (863), directed at this belated example of modernist urban planning. Koolhaas argues for the potentiality of the structure in ways that echoes his earlier assessment of the architectural possibilities of  the Berlin Wall and later those of  Manhattanism: 7

I discuss Libeskind’s project in Life between Two Deaths, 38–9.

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The Bijlmer of fers boredom on a heroic scale. In its monotony, harshness, and even brutality, it is, ironically, refreshing. It no doubt presents – to all categories of its inhabitants – dif ficulties, problems, some of  them insurmountable; but it has not removed, through excess of sensitivity or overdose of good intentions, the element of adventure. It even communicates, in its barrenness, something of  the sensation of settlement, the now unfashionable exhilaration of  the new, the secret thrill of modernization (871).

He then goes on to outline what he sees to be some of  the weaknesses of  the structure as it currently exists. “But most wasteful and unfortunate of all,” he notes, “has been the complete neglect and underexploitation of  the highway as potential instrument of desirable social activity” (874). He concludes the essay with a call to explore these last potentialities: In the Dutch seventies, almost universal car ownership could and should have generated “socialistic drive-in culture,” a deliberate strip, not of crass, exploitative casinos, but an exhilarating boulevard of social condensers, all accessible by car, old and new types of facilities that would also have articulated the polarity Bijlmer vs. Amsterdam = modern vs. traditional, and thus positively reinforced the Bijlmer’s identity and reasons for existing. Unless this still latent potential is realized, there is every reason to consider the Bijlmer as historic, or at least unfinished (877).

Then in 1986, Koolhaas tells us OMA was unexpectedly given the opportunity to begin to actualize these visions as the city encouraged them to present a plan for the redevelopment of what by that time had become “an exhibition – a fair almost – of urban decay” (881). The plan OMA proposed again expresses their continued fidelity to the project outlined in Delirious New York, exploiting the potentiality inherent in the grid structure of the development: “Each hexagonal courtyard will have its own programmatic identity: soccer field, beach, theater, etc. Connected to the parking bands and the boulevards by straight paths that lead directly to specific destinations, they will liberate tens of  thousands from the enforced idleness of  the circuitous circulation now in place” (884). Koolhaas concludes his narrative by relating why this vision never came to be realized:

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Phillip E. Wegner For a moment the project “saved” the Bijlmer – then followed years of inaction. A standof f developed: the Bijlmer was not destroyed; our plan was not implemented. Then one day a jumbo jet fell from the air and made a start with the destruction. The other side had won (886).

Koolhaas here refers to a disaster that occurred on 4 October 1992: “an Israeli El Al cargo plane, f light 1862 (a Boeing 747–200F), crashed into a 12-story apartment block in the Amsterdam suburb of  Bijlmer. At least thirty nine people on the ground, and all four people aboard the aircraft, were killed” (“The Bijlmer Crash”). Interest in the Bijlmer crash f lared up in the months after the events of September 11, 2001, especially among conspiracy theorists who claim that a comparison of photographs of damage in the Amsterdam building and the United States Pentagon “proves” that the latter could not in fact have been hit by a commercial airliner (whether it was a missile or a U.S. fighter plane is more a matter of disagreement among them). My interest here is not to debate the dubious merits of  these conspiratorial claims, but rather to highlight the striking parallel between these two events, especially in terms of the former’s narration by Koolhaas, brought to light by this accidental convergence: just as the events of 4 October 1992 mark the closure of  the utopian potential of  OMA’s particular redevelopment project, so too, as Koolhaas himself later notes, do the events of 9/11 signal the arresting of  the more global possibilities opened in the 1990s. I would like to conclude this essay with a pair of parables, both drawn from Koolhaas’s work. These stories move from Moscow to New York and back to Moscow again, and are concerned with swimming pools. Together they encapsulate in summary allegorical form the historical developments narrated above and have significant lessons for understanding how we might begin to respond to the situation we find ourselves in today. I mentioned earlier that Delirious New York concludes with an Appendix that, Koolhaas notes, “should be regarded as a fictional conclusion, an interpretation of  the same material, not through words, but in a series of architectural projects” (242). The final entry, “The Story of  the Pool” (1977), of fers a fantastic fable about the coming confrontation of  the postmodern with the modernist utopianism Koolhaas wishes to reignite. It tells of a “f loating swimming pool” designed and built in 1920s by Moscow architectural

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students swept up in the utopian delirium of their moment.8 However, “In the early thirties,” Koolhaas writes, “the political situation, which had once stimulated projects such as the pool, became rigid, even ominous. […] The ideology [the pool project] represented became suspect” (Delirious 253). The architect/lifeguards thus decide to relocate their machine for living to Manhattan, propelling “the pool away from Moscow by swimming their relentless laps in the direction of the golden onions of the Kremlin” (253). Their voyage takes forty years; and when they arrive, they discover a very dif ferent place than the one they imagined they had set out for: “The New Yorkers did not hesitate to criticize the design of  the pool. They were all against Modernism now. […] (In its ruthless simplicity, the pool threatened them – like a thermometer that might be inserted in their projects to take the temperature of their decadence)” (254). The fable then concludes with “the dapper spokesman of  New York’s architects” awarding these relics of  the past a medal: The medal had an old inscription from the thirties, he reminded the swimmers. It was by now irrelevant, he said, but none of Manhattan’s present architects had been able to think of a new motto … The Russians read it. It said, THERE IS NO EASY WAY FROM THE EARTH TO THE STARS. Looking at the starry sky ref lected in the narrow rectangle of their pool, one architect/lifeguard, still dripping wet from the last lap, answered for all of  them: “We just went from Moscow to New York …” Then they dove into the water to assume their familiar formation. 5 MINUTES LATER In front of Welfare Palace Hotel, the raft of the Constructivists collides with the raft of  the Medusa: optimism vs. pessimism. The steel of the pool slices through the plastic of the sculpture like a knife through butter (Delirious 255).

Another Soviet pool is part of a fable reprinted in S,M,L,XL, “Palace of  the Soviets. Virtual Architecture: A Bedtime Story” (1994). Here Koolhaas tells the true story of the digging in the 1930s of the foundation pit for the Palace of  the Soviets to be located along the banks of  the Moskva River. 8

For further discussion of the various utopian experiments of this moment, see Stites, Revolutionary Dreams.

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With the outbreak of  the war, construction stopped and the foundation gradually f looded. “Then,” Koolhaas writes: the war was over; Stalin still reigned; the country was exhausted. The palace was a strange “navel” in the heart of  the city, an extinguished ideological volcano. The thought of resuming the work was beyond even the most Stalinist imagination. Another solution was found. Instead of a solid, the building would become a void: an absence. The foundation, inundated anyway by the persistent leaks, was declared pool. It was big enough for Moscow’s entire population (824).

As we might expect, Koolhaas mines the utopian potential created by this void: The pool becomes positively Roman: arena, absorber, social condenser, great emancipator, connector – undeniably fabricator of a community … The evaporation of the actual building infinitely enlarged its possible programs. On certain windless nights, this edifice of vapor seems like a colossal enlargement of  St Basil’s on the other side of  the Kremlin, and bigger still than the absurd structure it replaces. Annunciation of virtual architecture? (825).

Two footnotes are required to complete this story. Koolhaas doesn’t mention that the site of  the pool was that of what he refers to as the “absurd structure” of  the Russian Orthodox Cathedral of  Christ the Savior, first built by the czars in the decades following the Napoleonic Wars, and then dynamited by the Soviets on 5 December 1931.9 Secondly, in 1994, the very year that Koolhaas first published this essay, this void too was filled in, and on the site a simulacrum of the Cathedral was constructed, complete with monumental statues honoring Czars Alexander II and Nicholas II, both too now recuperated as nationalist heroes, martyrs to the terrorist violence of  Russia’s past.10 The challenge for us today is thus much as it was for Koolhaas (and Negri and Badiou and Jameson) in the moment of  the beginning of  this 9 10

A short 1931 Soviet documentary of  the Cathedral’s dismantling can be seen at a number of sites online. An outline of  the history of  the site is of fered in the Wikipedia entry, “Cathedral of  Christ the Saviour.”

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narrative: how to dive back into the void, cut through the superficial closures of the present, and begin again the arduous task of forging a path from the earth to the stars. It is in its vision of  the necessary perseverance – “‘Keep going!’ [Continuer!]” (Badiou, Ethics 52) – to accomplish these tasks that makes this book, as well as the others alluded to above, so vitally relevant for all who would still number themselves today in the party of  Utopia.

Works Cited Badiou, Alain. Being and Event. Trans. Oliver Feltham. New York: Continuum, 2005. ——. Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of  Radical Evil. Trans. Peter Hallward. New York: Verso, 2001. ——. Theory of  the Subject. Trans. Bruno Bosteels. New York: Continuum, 2009. “The Bijlmer Crash – Joe Valis – Caught in a Lie.” 9–11 Research. 16 December 2009. . Carter, Paul. The Road to Botany Bay: An Essay in Spatial History. London: Faber and Faber, 1987. “Cathedral of Christ the Saviour.” Wikipedia. 16 December 2009 . Choay, Françoise. Modern City: Planning in the 19th Century. New York: Brazillier, 1969. Coleman, Nathaniel. Utopias and Architecture. Abingdon: Routledge, 2005. Jameson, Fredric. “Architecture and the Critique of Ideology.” The Ideologies of Theory. London: Verso, 2008. 344–71. ——. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981. ——. The Seeds of  Time. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. ——. “Space and Congestion: Rem Koolhaas and S,M,L,XL.” The Ideologies of Theory. London: Verso, 2008. 555–62. ——. “Utopia and Marxism Today.” Unpublished manuscript, presented at the Society for Utopian Studies Annual Conference, Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina, 30 October 2009.

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Koolhaas, Rem. Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Mannhattanism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978. ——. “Delirious No More.” Wired. June 2003. 166–8. Koolhaas, Rem, and Bruce Mau. S,M,L,XL. New York: The Monacelli Press, 1995. Lukács, Georg. A Defence of History and Class Consciousness: Tailism and the Dialectic. Trans. Esther Leslie. New York: Verso, 2000. Negri, Antonio. Marx beyond Marx:Lessons on the Grundrisse. New York: Autonomedia, 1991. Sargent, Lyman Tower. “The Three Faces of  Utopianism Revisited.” Utopian Studies 5.1 (1994): 1–37. Stites, Richard. Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. Tafuri, Manfredo. Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development. 1973. Trans. Barbara Luigia La Penta. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1976. Wegner, Phillip E. “Greimas avec Lacan; or, From the Symbolic to the Real in Dialectical Criticism.” Criticism 51.2 (Spring 2009): 211–45. ——. “Horizons, Figures, and Machines: The Dialectic of  Utopia in the Work of  Fredric Jameson.” Utopian Studies 9.2 (1998): 58–73. ——. Imaginary Communities: Utopia, the Nation, and the Spatial Histories of Modernity. Berkeley: University of  California Press, 2002. ——. Life between Two Deaths, 1989–2001: U.S. Culture in the Long Nineties. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2009.

PART FOUR

Commentary

Nathaniel Coleman (N. C.), Ruth Levitas (R. L.), Lyman Tower Sargent (L. T. S.)

Trialogue

L. T. S. The first thought that these essays brought to mind was that a common problem of inter- and multidisciplinary fields like utopian studies is that few people are experts in both their specialization (architecture here) and the broader field that it intersects with (utopianism here). One problem is that without knowing the field, most of the authors tend to over-generalize about utopias from the relatively few utopias that they know. One simple example is the comment about the circular nature of most utopias. In fact, while circles do occur regularly, so do grids, particularly in the U.S., where the grid tends to predominate, often with the sense that it is easier to distribute land equally with a grid than with a circle. R. L.

Intellectual fields can be distinguished either by their theoretical approach or by their subject matter, or by a combination of  the two. In the case of  Utopia, then, we are either concerned with a form of analysis of architecture informed by utopian theory, or the delineation and critique of a subfield of architecture deemed in some way to be utopian. In this set of essays, both approaches are at work, and both suggest ways in which the discussion of  the relation between architecture and Utopia can be taken forward. My comments are organized around these two related matters.



The first raises the thorny question of what is meant by Utopia, a matter on which there is considerable disagreement in utopian studies. I have suggested elsewhere that while this is sometimes due to lack of conceptual rigor, it is also because one may define

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N. Coleman, R. Levitas anD L. Tower Sargent Utopia dif ferently for dif ferent purposes (Levitas “Why Sociologists”). That is, I think, the root of the dif ference between Lyman and myself. While Lyman considers it useful to attempt definitions of  “a” Utopia, eutopia, dystopia, anti-utopia, I am less convinced by this. My own preference is, as you note, to eschew classification in terms of an analytical definition: that utopia is the expression of  the desire for a better way of living. The ef fect of this is to dissolve boundaries, but also to sidestep the question of whether a particular text, plan, building, or musical work is or is not utopian (or for that matter dystopian); thus the question of  how it could “be possible to construe something as real and concrete as a building as a Utopia” does not arise in that form.

L. T. S. I think the disagreement between Ruth and me is more language than concept. I use utopianism where Ruth uses utopia because, first, as a bibliographer trying to usefully characterize material, I need the distinctions among sub-types, and, second, because I think that utopianism captures the diversity better than utopia. N. C. Drawing out the dif ficulties of engaging in inter- and multidisciplinary scholarship, as Lyman does in his comments above, is, I believe, perhaps the most important contribution this book can make, especially in terms of how work on utopia and architecture might proceed. In terms of architects’ apparent preoccupation with circles in their dealings with Utopia, Colin Rowe is probably the main culprit here (Coleman, Utopias 49–52). The understanding of  Utopia and architecture he encouraged was restricted, limited to an identification of apparently shared formal qualities on the one hand (for him, primarily circular) and an absolute rejection of Utopia on the other as always totalitarian, thus dangerous, and the cause of the failure of twentieth-century modern architecture and cities. (Coleman, Utopias 65–8).

Ruth, I think I understand your introductory comments, especially in terms of what you observe as an “expression of  the desire for a better way of living” being the single criterion of Utopia. However,

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it is precisely this prospect that bedevils architects (theorists and practitioners alike) in their ef forts to come to terms with Utopia. If architecture is, arguably, in some way always about realizing the “good life” (at the scale of room, building, or city), or at least aims to provide a setting where this could take shape, then Utopia is an unnecessary distraction, of little relevance to ongoing developments in the built environment disciplines. If analysis is all that is required to determine whether or not something is utopian (in the sense that definition is unnecessary), then Utopia becomes, it seems to me, exclusively the province of meta-discourses on architecture (or any other cultural expression) but of  little use or interest to practitioners, which might explain why relatively few architects take up an interest in utopian studies or participate in conferences on Utopia.

On the other hand, the value of an analytic approach to Utopia may indeed have relevance to architecture (including planning and urban design) inasmuch as the claim architecture generally makes to being an “expression of  the desire for a better way of  living” is rarely tested or verified. If, like Utopia, the single criterion for evaluating architecture turns on whether or not it harbors such a desire, precisely because this is a claim it generally makes for itself, the question remains as to what value Utopia might have in this regard, especially if it is just another way of identifying what architecture claims to do anyway. However, and this is my view, if something is missing from the theory and practice of architecture and the social, political, and economic context in which they are carried out – which begins to explain why architecture and the city are, in our epoch, generally so hard pressed to make good on their claims to manifest and support the “desire for a better way of  living” – it may well be because practices have been dramatically separated from this desire and that Utopia of fers a way to name it and a means for reconnecting with it. But this, it seems to me, returns the problem to one of identifying a particular desire as desirable.

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R. L.

I haven’t been clear enough. I don’t think definition is unnecessary – I just prefer a dif ferent form of definition. And an analytic definition doesn’t imply Utopia is just a form of definition, any more than does a descriptive one. In both cases, there may be a posthoc naming of things as utopian or otherwise, for rather dif ferent reasons. Equally, in both cases – whether you use Lyman’s holism/ authorial intent criteria or my category of desire – they are embedded in practice. I think the category of desire (with all its own attendant problems), like a more Blochian lack and anticipation (see Bloch, Hope), means that it is quite possible for people to believe that they are providing the setting for the good life without really interrogating what that might mean, or engaging with it at any critical level. So your sense that “something’s missing” is absolutely compatible with my position.



The problem of defining a particular desire as desirable isn’t, to my mind, a matter of definition but of evaluation: and I think Lyman would agree here. Utopia is always contested – which is why I don’t think it is possible to define it in terms of content, and why it is entirely possible for not just a building but a way of  life to be utopian in some respects, dystopian in others.

N. C. In light of  this, I can certainly see why “evaluation” is potentially much more useful than “definition,” especially in terms of practice. However, I think it is precisely on this matter, understood by most of the authors in this collection as “definition” but perhaps better expressed as “evaluation,” that the contributors to this collection could not help but run into problems, including not successfully mastering the literature. Even if  “evaluation” is the better way of conceptualizing Utopia’s value for practice, definition remains a significant problem in Utopian studies, including the dif ficulties some have had with Bloch, because he seemed to see utopia everywhere (except, of course in contemporary architecture), raising the prospect that it might be nowhere at all. To be honest, in most instances, I cannot for the life of me make heads nor tails of what most discussions on architecture and utopia really intend

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by “Utopia,” it is either presumed that we all already know, or it is cryptic or it is just too vague, or not even discussed at all, beyond its statement in the title or headings. However, I don’t think this is the case with the chapters making up this volume, even if  there is still not agreement across them as to what is intended by “Utopia,” and some of  the readings may be eccentric, or even heretical in some way (with regards to both the mainstream and to Utopian studies). R. L.

I completely agree with you about the inevitability of the problem of definition, both generally and in relation to the Utopia/architecture encounter. I’m not trying to impose a definition – indeed, my argument has always been for conceptual clarity rather than conceptual convergence. I perhaps find the essays less clear on this point than you do.



An analytic definition also runs counter to the acceptance of a sort of utopian canon presumed to begin with Thomas More, or retrojected to Plato’s Republic, a view reproduced in some of the essays here. For me, the question becomes always, what is the utopian aspect of  this cultural artifact – or what is revealed to us by looking at it from this point of view. So this concept of  Utopia gives rise to a particular method of analysis. However, I have recently become more inclined to Lyman’s view that the holistic construction of utopias has its own role – though here too I think it should be understood as a method, not as the construction of didactic blueprints for the social or spatial world. Utopia as method, in this more holistic sense, has three interlinked aspects: the archæological, which reveals the implicit model of  the good society in a political program, text, artwork or indeed piece of urban design; the architectural, which proposes an alternative set of social institutions based on a set of premises, such as the need for sustainable production; and the ontological, which addresses the nature of the subjects or agents interpellated in the society in question. In this sense, utopia is a kind of speculative or constructive sociology – the imaginary reconstitution of society – but one which should

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N. Coleman, R. Levitas anD L. Tower Sargent always be understood as exploratory and provisional rather than perfectionist (see Levitas, Inaugural Lecture). Lyman and I agree that this is more usually the intention of utopian speculation, and that the misreading as wholly didactic is an ideological device to stif le the politics of alterity. Moreover, as Jameson has argued, the very nature of utopian imagination embeds necessary failure, since it reveals the f laws in and limits to our imaginative faculties imposed by our actual historical circumstances.

L. T. S. Perhaps Ruth’s utopia as method and my utopianism have af finities because I do want to capture the “three interlinked aspects,” but, since I include intentional communities, which I now discuss under the broader category “utopian practice,” I may be a bit broader. At present, I’m not entirely sure I understand all the ramifications of utopia as method, although I like the sound of it. N. C. I find this extremely revealing. So far as I can tell, suggested by Ruth’s comment above is that “Utopia as method” – in the way she intends – is a “method of analysis” rather than a “method of practice.” The degree to which analysis is also a “practice” notwithstanding, what I mean to say here is that as a “method of analysis” rather than of “practice,” Utopia could again appear to be of little relevance to architecture as a discipline. Even if  the “method of analysis” suggested by Utopia holds out the potential for being “a kind of speculative or constructive sociology” that aims at “the imaginary reconstitution of society” this seems to presuppose a way of working, or curiosity about the “archæological,” “architectural,” and “ontological.” However the decidedly vocational character of architecture education, which is skills based and thoroughly embedded within the dominant economic system, generally precludes the development of such a humanistic and holistic approach. Here again, it seems to me, that something is missing, and I have come to the view that what is missing is Utopia, in this sense understood as a developing mindset, rather than as a method, that in time could become a method.

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That’s not my intention at all. Indeed, the architectural and ontological elements of utopia as method clearly involve practice, whether it be of  textual, social/institutional, or architectural practice. The point is that the imaginary reconstitution of society, the re-imagining of  the practices of everyday life, is necessary to its actual reconstruction – and to the landscapes, cityscapes, and buildings within which that takes place. David Harvey draws attention to the unintended consequences of  the modes of redevelopment of regenerated watersides, of which we have our own version here in Bristol. I can see that the institutional context of architectural education makes social (rather than visual) imagination dif ficult, and Richard Sennett is very interesting on the role of computergenerated design in exacerbating this problem. However, no discipline is hermetically sealed as long as it is undertaken by people, perhaps especially young people. In so far as you are encouraging students to think holistically about the lives enabled or constrained by their designs, at the individual and social level, you are already employing utopia as method.

N. C. To my mind, the redeveloped Baltimore Inner Harbor Harvey draws attention to is not the way it is because of a range of  “unintended consequences” but rather by design, in its architectural, social, and economic senses, precisely because it is the product of minds unable to imagine outside of  the limiting perspectives of capitalist development that conditions them, which Harvey convincingly outlines in his book. The only way that the consequences could be construed as unintended is if  the language used to sell the project in the first place is taken at face value. So, just to be clear, in no way do I believe that the character of the built environment, as it continues to be made, is the fault of architects alone, “hermetically sealed” within their own discipline, but rather it is the internal fallacy that architecture is in any way “autonomous” that dupes architects into believing that they need not be engaged with all of the other forces that shape buildings and cities. However, Ruth is correct in suggesting that I am “already employing utopia

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N. Coleman, R. Levitas anD L. Tower Sargent as method” by “encouraging students to think holistically about the lives enabled or constrained by their designs, at the individual and social level.” But it is worth keeping in mind that I am in no way representative in this regard, not least because, unlike most architects, I decided some time ago to join the “party of Utopia.”

L. T. S. It is extremely dif ficult to generalize about utopias within one language within one time period even if one has read all the appropriate texts, which is probably only possible in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. You, Nathaniel, and Wegner are exceptions to my statement above regarding the problems of inter- and multidisciplinary fields, in that you are an architect who has gained expertise in utopianism and Wegner is a scholar with wide-ranging interests that include both subjects.

I come to these essays with the reverse problem, as an expert on utopianism who knows little about architecture except in some of  the areas where the two intersect. Therefore, because the connections between the two areas are well established, my thoughts turned to those areas of intersection.



The earliest such intersection was probably in the design and planning of cities, particularly of ideal cities, which was common in the Renaissance and probably earlier (See Eaton, Meller, Reiner, and Rosenau). And at roughly the same time, monastic orders developed designs to fit their way of  life (see Braunfels and Horn and Born). Later many intentional communities (communes, utopian experiments) planned but rarely built buildings or collections of  buildings to support the new way of  life they hoped to live (for general studies, see Green, 1976, Hayden, and Pearson). Followers of Charles Fourier (1772–1837) and Robert Owen (1771–1858) developed elaborate plans for buildings (on Owen, see Whitwell; for an actually built Fourierist community, see Le Familistère). And the U.S. communal group the Shakers designed their buildings

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to ref lect both their communal life style and the separation of  the sexes, with separate exterior doors and internal staircases (see Andrews and Rocheleau; on other nineteenth-century U.S. commu­ nities, see the two articles by White). More recently, the cohousing movement that originated in Denmark and has now spread throughout Europe and North America has developed designs for communities that combine some private ownership with a strong community life (see McCamant and Durrett).

And many utopian novels depicted in words and, in some cases, illustrations, the city layout and some of the buildings that the new way of life required. For example, in Edward Bellamy’s (1850–98) Looking Backward: 2000–1887 (1888), when the protagonist first sees the future city he says:



At my feet lay a great city. Miles of  broad streets, shaded by trees and lined with fine buildings, for the most part not in continuous blocks but set in larger or smaller enclosures, stretched in every direction. Every quarter contained large open squares filled with trees, among which statues glistened and fountains f lashed in the late afternoon sun. Public buildings of a colossal size and an architectural grandeur unparalleled in my day raised their stately piles on every side (22).



And in Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of  Time (1976), the protagonist’s first response to the future she experiences is,



She saw … a river, little no-account buildings, strange structures like long-legged birds with sails that turned in the wind, a few large terracotta and yellow buildings and one blue dome, irregular buildings, none bigger than a supermarket in her day, an ordinary supermarket in any shopping plaza. The bird objects were the tallest things around and they were scarcely higher than some of  the pine trees she could see. A few lumpy free-form structures with green vines (68).



The point of  the community designs and the descriptions in the novels was to describe or create a setting that would make a dif ferent way of  life possible. In Thomas More’s (1478–1535) Utopia (1516), for example, all the houses are as nearly identical as possible, but

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N. Coleman, R. Levitas anD L. Tower Sargent since settings would necessarily vary, equality was at least approximated in an inegalitarian situation by exchanging houses on a regular basis.

N. C. Although I do not think it was your intention to do so here, the overview you of fer highlights the divergence between how most practicing architects view themselves – as artists, businessmen (or women), or scientists – primarily preoccupied with the production of some kind of  “original,” profitable product, or rationally functional object rather than as a social creation shaped around the rituals, or habits, of individuals and groups. In fact, it is the rare architect (and in my use, architect includes planner, urban designer, and perhaps even landscape architect) who is able to give shape to a setting that can act as a “counterform” to individual and social life, which returns us to the typical preoccupation of architects with Utopia as one of “form” on the one hand and explanation of  “failure” on the other. L. T. S. A community called Creekside in Christchurch, New Zealand, hired an architect to design the buildings of  their community to their specifications, with the intent of enhancing community interaction. Over time, they made some modifications (children have dif ferent requirements than when they become teenagers), but the architect designed what they wanted. Since architects often have to compromise with the people paying the bills, I see no reason that they could not equally design FOR communities and FOR real people. N. C. Although I tend to focus on the design OF communities FOR real people, there is, as you point out, no reason why an architect could not design FOR a community. On the matter of  “compromise,” well, I think it is something of a paradox: architects, it seems to me, tend to imagine the ideal condition as being one where compromise is not necessary, which assures significant tensions between what is designed, for an unrealizable ideal condition,

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and its actual appropriation by real people. The corrective, as you and Ruth observe can, as I am convinced, only materialize out of a re-conceptualization of  the architect as also embedded within the social and ethical, rather than with only the aesthetic and the technical. Of course, the problem of  how clients think of architecture remains, but perhaps architects could take the lead in reconceiving this as well.

I think architects (and planners / urban designers) shy away from Utopia precisely because there is little if any confidence that they are equipped to “describe or create a setting that would make a dif ferent way of  life possible,” which perhaps explains Koolhaas’s preoccupation with the “void” and “auteur” architects in general with autonomy, and other sorts with either profit or technique.

L. T. S. While writing these ref lections the U.S. celebrated twenty years since the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed, and that made me think about how design features can radically change a life. Person after person, mostly wheelchair users, testified to how their lives had been changed for the better by ramps, wider doors, and so forth. And as the university where I taught transformed itself with such features, I had more and more students in wheelchairs attending and earning degrees. While the attitudinal changes needed to fully integrate these people into society and, in particular, get them employment commensurate with their abilities has proved much harder, without the design changes they would have had no chance whatsoever. And this makes the point that in utopia the focus is on people. And one of the problems I saw in a majority of  the essays in this volume is that people rarely appeared. There is a lot of specific detail about the buildings and a few generalizations about the use to which they were to be put, but almost nothing on the fit been people and building. But it is that fit and what is done with the building that are of the greatest importance to those who will use/inhabit them.

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N. C. Interestingly, whereas “barrier free” design has opened up access to opportunities (or possibilities) previously inaccessible, I can still remember when the act was being debated and subsequently signed into law. Many architects at the time were quite frustrated with the restrictions such legislation would inevitably place on their creative freedom. The fantasy of autonomy emerges again and again within architecture, primarily as an imagined escape route out of  the restrictions conditions “as they are” (cultural, economic, political, and bureaucratic) apparently place upon the creative freedom of architects. Such a view, no matter how it is spun, emphasizes architecture as aesthetic, or as excess value, in short as an art-forart’s-sake object, rather than as a vehicle for assuring social good by establishing settings for it that give it a concrete form and tangible manifestation.

As you suggest, “barrier free design” directs the focus of architecture toward people and the diversity of possible bodies, and with this you hit upon one of  the most peculiar dichotomies of architecture: it would seem self-evident that the primary preoccupation of architects should be with the people who will inhabit the buildings (settings) they design; however, because architecture education is primarily vocational, in that its primary aim is to train operatives for ready insertion within architecture firms subsumed within the building industry, the main preoccupation of the system is with practical skill development above all else, which is a technical matter rather than a social one related to the fitness of  buildings to emotional purpose. Interestingly, in professional journals and books that publish photographs of  buildings, the images are almost pornographic in character but most importantly nearly always absent of any occupants. Representations that do include people tend to do so for promotional purposes alone, to sell the project as a kind of  lifestyle apparatus.

L. T. S. The failure of public housing built as high rises/tower blocks, most notoriously in South London and the Pruitt-Igoe complex in St Louis, illustrate the issue of  the split between architectural

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forms and the social life they house. Families with small children were housed high in buildings with slow elevators/lifts, no play areas or toilet facilities at ground level, and poor to non-existent maintenance and security. This meant that a dystopia was built and the dystopian features were ignored after they were created when the idea was to bring about a better life for the inhabitants. And in the St Louis case, a far from eutopian but definitely a vibrant community that was relatively secure because neighbors knew and looked after each other was destroyed. Symbolically, Pruitt-Igoe was blown up at 3:32 pm on July 15, 1972. N. C. Here again, the gap that architecture (and planning) as ocularcentric, emphasizing images of the good life, without any deep understanding of what is required to assure it, opens up and is revealed as being fundamentally a social void because it is aesthetic rather than ethical. L. T. S. When the first Italian utopia conferences were organized by Eugenio Battisti in the 1980s, the School of Architecture at the university in Reggio di Calabria was deeply involved. My impression was that at least there architecture was considered first part of the humanities and only secondarily vocationally. N. C. This is not surprising, on the one hand because the conferences took place in Italy, rather than in the United States or United Kingdom, for example, and on the other because for a short period during the post World War II period, and in light of  the failures of  high modernist architecture, the discipline took a decidedly humanistic turn, which by the late-1980s had pretty much receded, though perhaps less so in Italy. L. T. S. Public housing was a major issue throughout much of the twentieth century and many countries made the same mistakes as Britain and the U.S. The Soviet era housing in the USSR and Eastern Europe is as notorious as St Louis and South London as are the banlieue’s surrounding Paris. Even Sweden, which many think of

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N. Coleman, R. Levitas anD L. Tower Sargent as people-oriented, destroyed parts of  Stockholm to erect poorly designed public housing. There is a possibly apocryphal anecdote about Mayor Richard J. Daley (1902–76) of  Chicago who, on being criticized by architects for the poor design of Chicago public housing, responded, “I built them the way you told me to.”



But people without children often love high rises/tower blocks if  they are well maintained and secure because of  their views, their lack of gardens needing work, and the interaction with others in the building like themselves, such as the gay man I know who lives in a South London tower block inhabited mostly by gay men. Thus it is not necessarily the building that is the problem, but the fit between people and building, and, it must be repeated, maintenance and security. What is done with the building after it is built is as or more important than the building itself. This topic is the theme of your essay, Nathaniel, in which you illuminate the central issues of fit and use that, to my mind, do not get suf ficient attention in most of  the other essays.



Given the nature of utopianism, I find something of a disjunction between architecture and city planning. Leonie Sandercock attributes this to the way the professions developed, writing “In the United States and the United Kingdom (although somewhat less so in continental Europe architecture and city planning have emerged as two quite separate professions since the early part of  the twentieth century, with urban designers sitting uncomfortably between the two” (22). In utopian speculation they have to meld together. For example, most of the utopian fiction that is concerned with the question focuses first, and often only, on city planning. In the mid- to late-nineteenth century, for example, utopias were often concerned with, among many other things, pollution and sanitation, the desirability of separating pedestrians and vehicles (see, for example, Richardson on these three concerns), and, more radically, the separation of housing and work, particularly industrial production (see Hale), all of which require city planning. The goals

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of such designs were to produce better living arrangements where people would not be sickened by pollution and poor sanitation, injured or killed by vehicles, and would be freed from the noise, dirt, and pollution of industry. N. C. In your first point two paragraphs above, you raise a very important area for consideration: how a building that may have failed to satisfy the emotional and functional needs of its inhabitants might be exceptionally successful in satisfying the needs of a dif ferent group of inhabitants. For example, because Le Corbusier’s Marseille Block is now inhabited by people who want to live there it is quite successful. Another example includes prisons transformed into luxury hotels, confirming that “fit” between occupant and structure really is crucial in the way you suggest.

My conviction, however, is that the professional split between architects and planners, with urban designers sitting uncomfortably between the two is so new as to be both fundamentally artificial and destructive. In fact, much of my own work is bound up with arguing for the undoing of these non-productive splits. In fact, I am one of  the few people in the school of architecture and planning in which I teach with both architecture and planning degrees, the latter from a program in urban design. More pointedly, when I was studying urban design, a then (and still somewhat) world famous architect, in whose of fice I worked, said that doing so was, something to the ef fect of, “the stupidest thing an architect could do”: that autonomy thing again. In fact, I am convinced that reintegrating the artificially separate professions of architecture, planning and urban design is a fundamental first step toward fostering settings that are welcoming to people, who are all too often absent from their conception.

R. L. Returning to the volume itself, it seemed useful to clarify my own starting point in engaging with the essays in this book, partly because there are some occasional misunderstandings (for example,

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N. Coleman, R. Levitas anD L. Tower Sargent architecture as a metaphor for a facet of method has nothing to do with architecture per se), but more importantly because utopian studies is not a theoretically unified field, and there are substantial dif ferences between theorists – although I fear I have driven us rather too far down the cul-de-sac of definitional dispute. It does pose real dif ficulties for the integration of utopian studies with architecture, as with other fields such as music or law. It seems to me that an implicit but uninterrogated concept of Utopia operates within the field, informed by but not identical with that operating in lay discourse, where it customarily implies impossibility at best and totalitarianism at worst. The ghost of impossibility is present in Davis and Hatuka’s essay on the competition Just Jerusalem, an exemplary instantiation of  Utopia as method, but one where “vision” is used as a halfway house between pragmatism and Utopia: “visioning […] straddles conventional divides between the ostensibly possible and supposedly impossible.” There is an oscillation between the identification of  Utopia as precisely this process of visioning, and as something other and potentially impossible or excessive – drawing, as others do, on Paul Ricoeur’s notion that there are pathological forms of utopian thinking (and indeed of ideology).

N. C. One thing I would like to address here is your assertion above that “architecture” in the way you use it in elaborating on “Utopia as method […] has nothing to do with architecture,” which I continue to find perplexing, even in light of your clarification above that “architecture as a metaphor for a facet of method has nothing to do with architecture per se.” In point of fact, for some architectural theorists, educators and practitioners, architecture is seen in itself as being “a facet of method,” something of a great metaphor for all human doing, linking self-improvement (the body as temple) with the making of the world into a better place. In this sense, each act of  “making in the world” is akin to “making the world.” So, for some engaged with architecture, theorists and practitioners alike, your description of  “architecture as a metaphor for a facet of method”

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captures exactly architecture’s potential at its most potent, as a way of  thinking and of doing “which proposes an alternative set of social institutions based on a set of premises, such as the need for sustainable production.” Although something of a paradox, thought of in this way, “architecture as a metaphor for a facet of method” reveals architecture as a method for realizing its objects as manifestations of  the method that characterizes it at its best (which I suggested above is its mostly absent utopian propensity for, as you aptly put it, expressing “the desire for a better way of  life,” manifested in the small contributions it makes to remaking the world, especially by surpassing earlier ef forts). I think this goes some distance in also explaining why many of the chapters are preoccupied with the habits of mind of an architect that precede the making of something concrete (such as a building): the predisposition is thus “theoretical” rather than “critical” or “aesthetic,” seeking that which if present might begin to assure something better. R. L.

That’s interesting. But I was not suggesting that it was irrelevant to architecture, or that architecture is irrelevant to remaking the world. I was just aware that in the context of  this discussion, it was possible to be confused (just as the use of  the term “concrete utopia” in a Blochian sense in a number of essays in this collection may be confusing, ironic, or both). I was thinking primarily of the practice of imagining alternative social institutions.



But Davis and Hatuka’s chapter, which I found methodologically one of  the most interesting in the collection, follows Ricœur and many other writers (including Ernst Bloch) in making a distinction between good and bad utopianism, and parallels Roberto Unger who also distinguishes between visionary imagination (which he describes as pragmatism unbound) and utopianism (which he is against). Davis and Hatuka, however, also make this distinction, following Lefebvre (but implicitly also echoing Habermas), in terms of content. The ground rules of  the competition include that “all visionaries (and their ideas) are equal, and the greater the

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N. Coleman, R. Levitas anD L. Tower Sargent number and diversity of ideas,” the greater the probability of consensus around a few; and “the fundamentally utopian core of  the project is revealed in its aim to illuminate a correlation between spatial practices and social justice and peace.” The appeal to content and consensus is there in your introduction and in your critique of  Alice Coleman’s Utopia on Trial. You argue that whatever the problems of post-war mass housing in Britain, Utopia was not the problem. Rather the reverse, as the technocratic imperatives governing the development of high-rise housing in particular emptied these projects of imagination and desire, and was part of an ideology which saw public housing as residual provision for the poor. The question of whether the ef fect of utopian plans was dystopian, or Utopia was not really present in the first place, hinges on the assumption that Utopia is good, dystopia bad. In terms of  fictional representations this (sort of ) works if either authorial intention or readers’ response is used as the criterion. It works less well in relation to the built environment, for there is no contradiction between utopian impulses in construction and dystopian experiences in habitation. Even consensus about content may be historically transient.

L. T. S. I think that these days the simple eutopia-dystopia split is too simple, even in the literature. I have always argued that dystopias have a positive message: that is, human choice will lead to this; therefore, other human choice can lead elsewhere. Also, today most eutopias are well aware of  human failings, even in a better society. N. C. This is definitely one place where my position diverges considerably with Ruth’s, perhaps “because” as Ruth observes “Utopian studies is not a theoretically unified field, and there are substantial dif ferences between theorists,” and this is an instance of that. More likely, however, I think our dif ferences here have at least something to do with my background as a practicing architect and as an educator who also teaches design and is mostly (admittedly) disappointed with the state of  the built environment. The point being that in

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teaching architecture I do emphasize the value of an architect’s consideration of  the correlation between “authorial intention” and user “response” or “experience” in terms, mostly, of emotional adequacy of  the proposed setting. And even though “consensus about content may be historically transient,” and habitation may never coincide exactly with an architect’s intentions, my contention is that there is indeed a “contradiction between utopian impulses in construction and dystopian experiences in habitation.” When this is the case, the work has failed (unless, or until, it is transformed by an alternative use that is not “dystopian”). Returning for a moment to the diversity of theoretical positions on Utopia, in the way that I have been developing it in relation to architecture, Utopia is definitely seen as potentially “constitutive” (if not “good”) for the constructive act of architecture. In its “pathological” (or “bad”) form it would have nothing to of fer. L. T. S. The problem I have, as I think my comments in response to the essays in this collection suggest, is that architecture is rarely utopian because it fails quite consistently to be concerned with people and communities. R. L.

When I say there is no contradiction between utopian impulses in construction and dystopian experiences in habitation, I just mean they can coexist, so I think we are agreed there. I don’t like the term pathological Utopia. I tend to agree with Bloch that even the most extreme and fantastic imaginings of  things (including the built environment) otherwise have their place – and, as Jameson says, that they alert us to the limits of our imagination. But what about the practice of imagining (currently) unbuildable buildings? Has that nothing to of fer? Was Leonardo da Vinci wasting his time imagining f lying machines? Your point about emotional adequacy is important: this touches both on the element of desire and on the assumed and actual subjectivity of the human beings living in the buildings. The capacity to imagine this is vital, and needs to be cultivated. Interestingly, Lyman picked up the fact that there was very little about actual people in the essays in this collection.

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N. C. Yes, of course there is real value in imagining the presently unbuildable or undoable, especially when doing so moves the conversation beyond the apparent limits of the possible ( Jameson’s observation that we can only imagine what is imaginable notwithstanding). My concern, however, is with those fantastic imaginings that are primarily compensatory (or “abstract” in Bloch’s sense) rather than developmental (or “concrete” in Bloch’s sense), as a kind of “militant optimism.” R. L. Although we’ve already noted the problem of definitional diversity and the impossibility of expecting contributors to have a comprehensive grasp of this, the associated theoretical literature or the conventionally defined utopian literature itself, I would like to return for a moment to Lyman’s earlier comment that this leads people to draw on and generalize from fragments of the field. Sometimes the utopian framing also seems tangential to the main drift of the chapters. There is a certain amount of reinvention of  the wheel (for example the idea of utopia as provocation rather than plan), invention of  the occasional square wheel (for example a contrast between “the conceit of  travelogue” and the “conceit of didactic”), based on limited knowledge of  the theoretical literature or the substantive corpus of conventionally-defined utopian novels. David Harvey’s Spaces of  Hope is cited by a number of writers in relation to the alleged stasis of utopian thought especially in its spatial manifestations; there is little reference to Tom Moylan’s work on critical utopias and dystopias embedding process and dissent in Demand the Impossible and Scraps of  the Untainted Sky and his work with Raf faella Baccolini and others in Dark Horizons. And there are some examples of straightforward misunderstandings. The term “concrete utopia” recurs throughout the essays, mostly with little real grasp of what Bloch meant by this.

What Karl Mannheim meant by a relative utopia was utopias that appear “to be unrealizable only from the point of view of a given social order which is already in existence” (Mannheim 177).

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William Morris was not a utopian socialist in the usual understanding of that term, but a Marxist and communist agitator who believed (like Lenin) that the dream of a new society should be kept before the eyes of the working people. These sorts of dif ficulties are not confined to the project of an architecture/Utopia rapprochement. They appear to be a feature of the interdisciplinary character of utopian studies itself, which intrinsically involves drawing on texts without being steeped in their conceptual habitus, and in the early stages of dialogue between fields these problems are perhaps more acute. There may also be an element of a general tendency since the postmodern turn of appropriating statements and texts out of context without fidelity to the original arguments, a problem exacerbated by the productivist imperatives of contemporary academic life. N. C. I suppose, as the editor of  this collection, I would say this, but I am less troubled by the fragmentary nature of  the engagement of many of  the authors with the literature of  Utopia and the developing concepts of Utopian studies than either you or Lyman may be. I would like to believe that this is not so much evidence of some recalcitrant intellectual slovenliness on my part, or even of some street level postmodernist “devil may care” attitude toward the content and context of original arguments. Rather, I think my tolerance (promiscuity?) derives from my awareness that observing these limitations sheds light on the gaps that exist between architects’ (of any stripe) knowledge of  Utopia and its understanding by hardcore Utopian studies scholars, whatever discipline they may come from. Which, I believe, is good: each represents a partial understanding of reality; in much the way linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf conceived of each language as a kind of universe of fering its speakers their own (partial) understanding of reality. His message being that simultaneous multiple understandings – speaking more than one language or thinking cross disciplinarily or interdisciplinarily – promises a fuller understanding of reality, though by no means ever complete.

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Thus (jargon aside), each scholarly discipline of fers a partial worldview or perspective on reality, but the tensions are probably ultimately irresolvable beyond developing (and demanding) as broad and as deep an understanding of  the various fields one chooses to walk in as is possible. Moreover, within limits, misunderstandings, cross culturally as much as cross disciplinarily, are potentially generative, in much the way the translator always betrays the original text in order to make it understandable in another language, and tradition is as much a handing down of  habit as it is a handing over, or surrender, of it to subsequent generations who will refresh it through interpretation and reinvention.



Even so, I think my protestations ultimately emphasize the value and importance of you and Lyman highlighting the dif ficulties of working cross-disciplinarily or inter-disciplinarily; doing so really does help to clarify and sharpen the debate with regard to architecture and Utopia, especially as relates to the seemingly irresolvable tensions that must exist between architecture and Utopian studies and between any field of  knowledge and another.

R. L.

Well, I’m not sure what a hardcore Utopist is, although I suppose I’m a hardcore member of Jameson’s invisible party of utopia: I’m absolutely committed to the need for social transformation, and for the need to cultivate imaginative and visionary thinking, as well as dialogue, towards that end. I do agree that the value of this collection is that it illuminates the complex and varied interactions between Utopia and architecture, as well as ways in which that could be sharpened and taken forward. And the fragmentary nature of  the encounter is not in itself necessarily a problem – it’s just that it has an inbuilt predisposition to misunderstanding and error, which again can be clarified over time.



There is another point, though, that I’d like to raise. In terms of  the substantive field emerging here, or the object of analysis of  the Utopia/architecture encounter, I am struck by how few of the papers actually engage directly with the built environment. Several

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of the papers are about plans (Miles on Cerdà, Davis and Hatuka on Jerusalem, Powers on Filarete, Kerr on Gautier), about representation (Sullivan on Geddes, Narayana on Balzac and Zola), about writing about architecture (Wegner, and partially also Ersoy). Miles, yourself, Ersoy, and Haney do in dif ferent ways engage with actually built projects, plans or experiments, but for the most part not directly or at length, and in Haney’s case partly through secondary sources – again, writing about writing about intentional communities. There is an underlying assumption that utopian architecture is about the unbuilt environment, either because the presumption is that it becomes dystopian when built, or, as suggested in Philip Wegner’s piece, that the constraints of the capitalist market mean that genuinely utopian architecture never leaves the drawing board. Your introduction notes the emphasis on representation rather than praxis in discussions of Utopia and architecture, and the tendency for actual praxis to renounce “architecture as a world-making art by recasting it as either a technical problem of image or representation alone.”

What is posited here is a disjunction between the disciplines of architecture and of  Utopian studies. Indeed, a similar problem arises in relation to work on Utopia and music, most of which does not actually talk about the music itself (see Levitas “Ref lections”). Although music is deemed (by Bloch and others) to be quintessentially utopian, most of  the focus on the utopian character of music (in Bloch too) is about the words; or alternatively about the social relations of performance. The main problem seems to be a synthesis of expertise. It’s a rare musicologist (called Maynard Solomon; see Solomon Marxism, Beethoven, and Mozart) who can do the utopian bit, and a rare (or non-existent) utopian who can talk about music as music. I suspect something of  the same problem exists in the Utopia/architecture field – and that the importance of this problem lies in your own work and your attempt to initiate that dialogue, even if  the dialogue is in some respects subject to Jamesonian necessary failure.

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I am however less convinced that matters are as dire as you or Wegner (or Koolhaus, the subject of  his essay) suggest. Indeed, I can think of a number of buildings or projects that could very easily be discussed in terms of their utopian intention – that is, in terms of what they project in terms of the desire for a better way of living and of being. Indeed, Ersoy’s essay on Bruno Taut’s Glashaus seems to be precisely an exploration of the utopian resonance of an actual building, if aided by Paul Scheerbart’s writing about the Glashaus. Kerr’s essay on Gautier also picks up a key element here, when he refers to Gautier’s awareness of  “contemporary utopianism’s aspiration to enhance emotive and sensuous impact on the spectator through amplification and incandescent color.” Both remind me of  Scriabin’s planned musical work Mysterium of which he said:



There will not be a single spectator. All will be participants. The work requires special people, special artists and a completely new culture. The cast of performers includes an orchestra, a large mixed choir, an instrument with visual ef fects, dancers, a procession, incense, and rhythmic textural articulation. The cathedral in which it will take place will not be of one single type of stone but will continually change with the atmosphere and motion of  the Mysterium. This will be done with the aid of mists and lights, which will modify the architectural contours.



What is clear is that in artistic terms, there’s a utopian and modernist drive towards pure form and color – and in terms of the education of desire, a belief that color works directly on the emotions. I think this essay is useful also in the way it encourages a dif ferent kind of  thinking about modernism and Utopia that is not so easily debased into the modernism=dystopia trope. But it put me in mind also of  the glass in Liverpool’s Catholic Cathedral, an unequivocally modernist building from the 1960s. The central glass funnel is a collaboration between John Piper and Patrick Reyntiens, which, like Taut’s design similarly uses dif ferent colors to achieve its ef fect, in this case of  being cradled in grace. Other modernist architecture which embodies hope would include Coventry Cathedral. It would seem to me possible to analyze Daniel Libeskind’s Berlin Jewish Museum in utopian terms. The architectural voids shafted through it represent the absences of Jewish contributions to culture

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resulting from the Shoah. There is critique and grief here, but opening to af firmation and anticipation as the best critical dystopianism does. And, at another extreme, the winner of  the 2009 Stirling Prize for architecture was Maggie’s Centre, a cancer-care centre in Hammersmith, London, designed by Richard Rogers’s firm Rogers Stirk Harbour and Partners. These centers do explicitly set out to frame a humane ethos and a better way of caring for cancer patients – although it may be significant that they are charitably funded rather than emanating from corporate or state sectors. One might similarly explore Peabody’s east London BedZED (Beddington Zero Energy Development) in utopian terms; this too was shortlisted for the Stirling Prize in 2003; or Richard Rogers’s Cities for a Small Planet, although this is again writing about planning. Like many of  the critiques embedded in this collection of essays, and theorists such as Lefebvre on whom they draw, such projects can be assessed as vehicles of utopian desire in their intention and physical presence, but also in the transformed lives imagined and enabled within them. N. C. Points taken; however, my perspective is that it is exceptionally dif ficult to write about constructed buildings as utopian because of  the uncertainty of what that might be and how it could be ascertained and described. Nevertheless, I have attempted to do this in my book Utopias and Architecture, which also includes an analysis of  Daniel Libeskind’s Berlin Jewish Museum in utopian terms (Utopias 257–70, 292–6). But I also think the authors’ general lack of confidence in writing about specific buildings as utopias derives, implicitly, from an understanding (awareness), after Bloch (as well as Jameson and Tafuri), that because it is so fully entrapped within the dominant system of advanced capitalism, architecture is incapable of of fering access to the Not Yet, which led Bloch to write, “Only the beginnings of a new society will make a true architecture possible again.” In important ways, Bloch’s position parallels both the late Ruskin and Morris, in the view that before the artefacts of culture can be renewed, or “speak” renewal, the society that gives them life will need to be renewed.

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N. Coleman, R. Levitas anD L. Tower Sargent Although I think the total rejection of  the utopian potential of architecture and city planning is too absolute, it does follow that the first steps toward renewing the results of practice requires reforming its theoretical basis and the “habits of mind” of practitioners (which is my own developing position). In view of this, I can much better understand why nearly all of  the chapters are more theoretical in approach than descriptive of an object identified as utopian, or as a Utopia (save, as has been noted, for Miles’s, Ersoy’s, Haney’s and my own). If  the theoretical basis, or “habits of mind” need to be understood before practitioners and their practices can be transformed (in anticipation of changing the built environment), perhaps the virtue of the chapters resides in the degree to which they tacitly identify that it is the “education of desire” in the habits of  “social dreaming” of architects and planners that must be changed before the world can be changed (mirroring Harvey’s observation that “[t]hrough changing the world we change ourselves” and that we cannot “change ourselves without changing the world,” because it is not possible for “us to talk about social change without at the same time being prepared, both mentally and physically, to change ourselves”) (Spaces 234–5).

R. L. Well, I think both Bloch’s and Morris’s strictures are somewhat hyperbolic. In Bloch’s case they run counter to his idea of cultural or utopian surplus. In Morris’s case, it is notable that while he did indeed argue that art might have to die awhile, he nevertheless spent the whole of  his life as a practicing artist. If you accept that buildings may have a utopian aspect – rather than being utopian or not – this is less of a problem. Understanding a building as utopian, as you say in the Introduction, involves eliciting how it embodies social imagination, how it “structures and negotiates relationships of individuals to each other, to society, to the world and to nature.” In this respect, it would be possible to provide a much more positive reading of twentieth-century public housing in Britain – most of which, even after 1945, was low rather than high rise. It included prefabricated bungalows (prefabs), intended as temporary, which were much loved by their occupants even

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fifty years on. It also included large numbers of  terraced or semidetached houses with decent gardens, indoor toilets, and baths. The aspiration, however misguidedly applied in some ways, was of decent, collective provision for all, and liberation from slum conditions and racketeering landlords. What changed this was not only the move to high-rise building. Most of  the better housing stock was sold of f at knock-down prices under Thatcherite rightto-buy legislation, while social inequality and poverty escalated and punitive attitudes to the poor and “dependency” were cultivated. Again, the residualization of public housing was the product of a utopian project: the pursuit of a property-owning democracy in the context of a neoliberal economy. N. C. In significant ways, this brings our positions close together again, apparently bridging the divergence I earlier identified. We seem to be in agreement that a core aspect of  Utopia is social imagination and that it will be identifiable as either present or absent in a work and in the processes that brought it about, but also in social processes as well. But because I am coming from the perspective of  the producer of architecture (intended for its consumption through inhabitation), I can’t escape the need to comprehend its purposefulness for architecture in terms of “authorial intent” and “occupant response,” believing that when intent is comprehended bodily at the moment of experience, even if inchoate, the work will have succeeded (provisionally at least). L. T. S. When architects and city planners become utopians, sometimes the results, at least with planners, are similar to those of other utopians in being primarily concerned with enhancing the lives of the people. At other times, perhaps particularly with architects, the structures dominate. But I have wondered if perhaps architecture up to modernism took people into account and that they disappeared with modernism. At least one author appears to support part of this idea in that she contends that postmodern architecture is returning to people and uses intentional communities, among other things, to support her argument (see Scott).

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And these concerns led many authors to consider the sorts of buildings that people would occupy. The answers ranged from individual houses with gardens to immense multi-occupancy buildings, from family units, single or multi-generational, related or not, to every­ one with their own separate space. Many, including some with individual homes, had arrangements for collective cooking and housekeeping that would obviously af fect the design (on cooperative housekeeping, see Hayden). In Bellamy’s Looking Backward, for example, large, separate buildings were built for dining with many dif ferent possibilities available depending on how individuals or groups wanted to eat their meal. And most multi-occupancy buildings had many community facilities, including space for sports, a library, lecture halls, and space available to the inhabitants to use as they chose (see, for example, Petzler). Rarely were the exteriors of buildings described except in the most general terms, and when buildings were depicted in illustrations, they invariably ref lected the architectural tastes of  the times (see, for example, Peck and Putnam). But the authors were not architects or city planners.



Utopianism is about changes in human behavior and the question inevitably arises of what relationship, if any, architecture has to such changes. Can changed architecture change behavior or simply provide the setting in which changed behavior takes place with the impetus for the change provided by something else? This is one on the themes of  Miles’s essay. One argument is that without changing the setting, changing behavior will be more dif ficult. Another argument is that while that may be true, architecture is definitely secondary. Yet another argument is ref lected in one of  the attacks of Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward that depicts the future Boston with much improved housing, but the people have not changed, and they recreate the slums that the better housing was intended to replace (see Roberts). This anti-utopian argument, which relates to your essay, is really about the dif ficulty of changing human behavior, but it contends that changed physical conditions are simply irrelevant to that process and that, therefore, architecture is irrelevant to utopianism.

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The problem is that all of the arguments are plausible and real-life examples of each of them can be found. The most obvious example of  the first argument is to be found in convents and monasteries. The second argument is supported by the fact that in many intentional communities behavior changed in settings that were essentially the same as those in which the people had previously lived. And the third argument is supported by one of  the most often repeated explanations for why public housing failed, the people did not change their behavior to fit the new setting.

R. L.

I personally think that the argument that public housing failed is – at least in Britain – a piece of ideological hogwash integrally related to the neoliberal project. The starkest failure of public housing in the last three decades has been that virtually none has been built. I also think the general attack on modernism referred to here is overstated. We’ve discussed questions of the fitness of buildings to the lives of their inhabitants, and the importance of maintenance and so on, in relation to the rehabilitation of high rise public housing. But their predecessors in, say, Berthold Lubetkin’s High Point 1, or the nearby Isokon building, were both utopian in their aspirations for facilitating communal life and very fashionable with particular groups in the 1930s.

N. C. “Postmodern” architecture is contentious, except perhaps when it means something like overcoming the modern, such as intentional communities might suggest. In most instances, stylistically postmodern architecture is little more than packaging design or a rebranding exercise that does little to move beyond the instrumental social science of modern architecture that so often seems to forget people.

Also, I think there is another view that sees a circular interrelationship between changing oneself and changing the environment. On the one hand, Bloch was convinced (in much the way that Ruskin, Morris, and Tafuri were) that only a new society could bring about

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N. Coleman, R. Levitas anD L. Tower Sargent a “true architecture.” On the other, Lefebvre clearly saw a relationship between renewed social life and the kind of settings provided. Although he did not believe the city could be “cured,” in the way urban renewal proponents did, simply by unmaking and remaking it, he did believe a spark of possibility (a crack potentially giving rise to a utopian moment) persisted in the traditional city and in the kind of social life and individual relations it fostered and sheltered. Nevertheless, he viewed the space produced in the present as being inexorably bound by the conditions of capitalism that restricted its possibilities (in much the way Bloch did), which was also a solvent of social life and possibilities for its renewal. In this sense, for architects (planners and urban designers) to ascribe some purpose to their work, they must adopt a false consciousness that does not permit access to understanding what really shapes it, lest they realize it is little more than window dressing for conditions as they are, or worse still, simply provides settings for the smooth operations of capitalism.



Ruth, yes, I definitely agree that it would be impossible to deem a failure public housing that has not even been built, and that doing so must serve an ideological position hostile toward social housing provision in general. Also, although I do take your point regarding my apparent overstatement of modernism’s failings in architecture, to my mind, your counterexamples represent exceptions rather than the rule: the work of, as Tafuri put it, “golden, [primarily] isolated individuals,” rather than indicative of the mainstream (History 111). To get a sense of why I am pessimistic, Tafuri’s inf luence in this regard, and how I believe things could be otherwise for architecture, see my recent article on professional architectural education (“Limits”).

L. T. S. There always has to be a transition; the new society developing in the womb of  the old. It seems to me, and Nathaniel’s comments seem to support this, that the problem is threefold. First, architectural education is deeply f lawed. Second, most architects have

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been socialized, perhaps by that education, to see themselves as artists. Which is really a joke because the overwhelming majority of active architects will design what their paymasters tell them they want and never design anything (at least with any hope that it will be built) that anyone would consider art. Third, architects have internalized the dominant capitalist ideology, which cares nothing for people or communities. N. C. I could not agree more with Lyman’s characterization of the problem, which illuminates the sources of both potential optimism and the pessimism encouraged by the present condition. The challenge is: who makes the first move to break out of the conditioning perspectives of the dominant capitalist ideology. Education can play a part but there is surely no consensus amongst educators that there is a problem, or, even if there might be, there is little agreement on what the causes might be. And this is where Utopia’s vocation for re-imagining what is and how it might become is particularly valuable. I think architects hold dear the myth of art for two reasons. The first is something of a compensation for the overriding reality of architecture, which, as Lyman observes, is that “the overwhelming majority of active architects will design what their paymasters tell them they want and never design anything (at least with any hope that it will be built) that anyone would consider art.” The second is what I am coming to see as the peculiar coincidence of narcissism and capitalism (as consumer society), in this way, “art” (for art’s sake) becomes a way for architects to make a virtue of the “the dominant capitalist ideology” that they “have internalized” and “which [inevitably] cares nothing for people or communities.” L. T. S. Clearly, and this is certainly one of  the messages of  these essays, there is no single relationship between architecture and utopianism. This is well illustrated by what I consider to be the three best essays in the collection, Sullivan on Geddes, Coleman on Coleman, and Wegner on Koolhaas. Geddes is an important, though neglected, figure in utopianism, and his ideas figured in two non-

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N. Coleman, R. Levitas anD L. Tower Sargent fictional works that include utopias, in one of which Geddes was the co-author with his assistant Victor Branford and the other by Branford but both based on Geddes’s work. Sullivan’s essay, based on original archival research, adds significantly to our understanding of  Geddes. Coleman’s treatment of a book that is fairly well known in both architectural and utopian circles shows the way in which ideology can lead to the misunderstanding of  both utopia and architecture. Koolhaas’s Delirious New York deserves to be much better known by utopian scholars and Wegner’s excellent study should help.

R. L. All I would add (apart from indicating my appreciation of Ersoy’s essay) is that both the intent and the response to architecture are embedded in social structures, social conditions, and social roles. This includes, as Lyman points out, the ongoing maintenance of  buildings, their relevance to the needs of particular groups of people, and whether those people have enough money and social stability to live in the buildings as architects and planners imagined.

In 1968, at the height of architectural modernism, Cambridge New Hall’s entrance paper included the question, “The problems of urbanization have turned architects into sociologists. Discuss.” The need now is to turn both architects and sociologists into utopists, placing their joint expertise at the service of a humane and sustainable future. And this present collection of essays is the brave beginning of an exploration of  how useful a tool Utopia might be in exploring the field of architecture, and what light the fields of architecture and planning might shed on our thinking about Utopia itself, whether as concept, method, or eventual reality.

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Works Cited Andrews, Edward Deming. “Communal Architecture of  the Shakers.” Magazine of  Art 30.12 (December 1937): 710–15. Bellamy, Edward. Looking Backward: 2000–1887. Boston: Ticknor and Company, 1888. 2nd edn. Boston, Massachusetts: Houghton, Mif f lin, 1888. Rpt. edn. Matthew Beaumont. London: Penguin, 2007. Bloch, Ernst. The Principle of  Hope. 3 Vols. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986. Branford, [Frederick] Victor and Patrick Geddes. The Coming Polity: A Study in Reconstruction. [The name of the series, The Making of the Future, is at the head of  title.] London: Williams and Norgate, 1917. Branford, [Frederick] Victor. Whitherward? Hell or Eutopia. London: Williams and Norgate. Includes his The Drift to Revolution. No. 9 of  Papers for the Present. London: Cities Committee; and A New Year’s Message: Earth, Hell and the Third Alternative. No. 14 of  Papers for the Present. London: Cities Committee, 1921. Braunfels, Wolfgang. “The St Gall Utopia.” The Monasteries of  Western Europe: The Architecture of  the Orders. London: Thames and Hudson, 1972. 37–46. Coleman, Nathaniel. Utopias and Architecture. Abingdon: Routledge, 2005. ——. “The Limits of Professional Architectural Education.” International Journal of  Art and Design Education 29.2 (2010): 200–12. Eaton, Ruth. Ideal Cities: Utopianism and the (Un)Built Environment. Antwerp, Belgium: Mercatorfonds, 2001. U.S. edn. New York: Thames and Hudson, 2002. Le Familistère de Guise ou les equivalents de la richesse. The Guise “Familistére” or the Equivalents of  Wealth. Brussels: Archives d’Architecture Moderne, 1976. Green, Ernest J. “The Social Functions of  Utopian Architecture.” Utopian Studies 4.1 (1993): 1–13. Hale, Edward Everett. How They Lived in Hampton: A Study of  Practical Christianity Applied in the Manufacture of  Woollens. Boston: J. Stilman Smith and Co., 1888. A British edn. reversed the original title to Practical Christianity Applied in the Manufacture of Woollens; or, How They Lived in Hampton. London: Cassell and Co., 1892. Harvey, David. Spaces of  Hope. Berkeley: University of  California Press. 2000. Hayden, Dolores. Seven American Utopias: The Architecture of Communitarian Socialism, 1790–1975. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1976. ——. Redesigning the American Dream: The Future of  Housing, Work, and Family Life. Rev. and exp. edn. New York: W. W. Norton, 2002.

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Horn, Walter, and Ernest Born. Plan of St Gall: A Study of the Architecture and Economy of a Paradigmatic Carolingian Monastery. 3 vols. Berkeley: University of  California Press, 1979. Levitas, Ruth. The Concept of  Utopia. Oxford and Bern: Peter Lang, 2010. ——. “The Imaginary Reconstitution of  Society, or Why Sociologists and Others Should Take Utopia More Seriously.” Inaugural Lecture at the University of  Bristol, October 2005. ——. “The Imaginary Reconstitution of Society: Utopia as Method.” Utopia Method Vision: The Use Value of  Social Dreaming. Eds Tom Moylan and Raf faella Baccolini. Oxford and Bern: Peter Lang, 2007. ——. “In eine bess’re Welt entrückt: Ref lections on Music and Utopia.” Utopian Studies 21.2 (2010): 219–31. McCamant, Kathryn and Charles Durrett. Cohousing: A Contemporary Approach to Housing Ourselves. 2nd edn. With Ellen Hertzman. Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 1994. Mannheim, Karl. Ideology and Utopia. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979. Meller, Helen (ed.). The Ideal City. Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1979. More, Thomas. Libellus vere aureus nec minus salutaris quam festivus de optimo reip[ublicae] statu, deq[ue] noua Insula Vtopia. [Louvain, Belgium]: Arte Theodorice Martini, 1516. There are many, often very dif ferent translations. A good recent one is Utopia A Revised Translation, Backgrounds, Criticism. 2nd ed. Trans. and ed. Robert M. Adams. New York: W. W. Norton, 1992. Moylan, Tom. Demand the Impossible. London: Methuen, 1986. ——. Scraps of  the Untainted Sky. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Perseus, 2000. Moylan, Tom and Raf faella Baccolini. (eds). Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination. London: Routledge, 2003. Pearson, Lynn F. The Architectural and Social History of Cooperative Living. London: Macmillan, 1988. Peck, Bradford. The World a Department Store. A Story of  Life under a Coöperative System. Cover has the subtitle A Twentieth Century Utopia. Lewiston: Bradford Peck, 1900. Rpt. New York: Arno Press and The New York Times, 1971. [Petzler, John Aloys]. Social Architecture; or, Reasons and Means for the Demolition and Reconstruction of  the Social Edifice. By An Exile from France [pseud.]. London: Samuel Tinsley, 1876. Piercy, Marge. Woman on the Edge of  Time. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976. Putnam, J. Pickering. Architecture under Nationalism. Boston, MA: The Nationalist Educational Association, 1890. Originally published as by J. P. Putnam in The American Architect and Builders News 29–30 ( July 12, 19, August 16, 30,

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September 13, 27, October 11, 1890): 21–5, 40–2, 98–9, 134–5, 168–70, 199–202; 20–3. Letters to the Editor regarding the series appear ( July 19, 26, and August 2, 1890): 48, 59, and 75. Reiner, Thomas A[ndrew]. The Place of  the Ideal Community in Urban Planning. Philadelphia: University of  Pennsylvania Press, 1963. Richardson, Benjamin Ward. Hygeia: A City of  Health. London: Macmillan and Co., 1876. Rpt. New York: Garland, 1985 bound with Robert Pemberton’s The Happy Colony (1854). Ricœur, Paul. Lectures on Ideology and Utopia. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. Roberts, J[ohn] W. Looking Within. The Misleading Tendencies of “Looking Backward” Made Manifest. New York: A. S. Barnes. Rpt. New York: Arno Press and The New York Times, 1971. Rocheleau, Paul and June Sprigg. Shaker Built: The Form and Function of  Shaker Architecture. New York: The Monacelli Press, 1994. Rogers, Richard and Philip Gumuchdjian. Cities for a Small Planet. London: Faber and Faber, 1997. Rosenau, Helen. The Ideal City: Its Architectural Evolution in Europe. 3rd edn. London: Methuen, 1983. Rowe, Colin and Fred Koetter. Collage City. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1978. Sandercock, Leonie. Towards Cosmopolis: Planning for Multicultural Cities. Chichester: John Wiley and Sons, 1998. Scott, Felicity D. Architecture or Techno-Utopia: Politics after Modernism. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2007. Scriabin, Alexander Nikolayevich. Wikipedia entry on Scriabin, (Scriabin) (accessed September 7 2010). Sennett, Richard. The Craftsman. London: Penguin Books, 2009. Solomon, Maynard (ed.). Marxism and Art: Essays Classic and Contemporary. Sussex: Harvester Press, 1979. ——. Mozart: A Life. London: Pimlico, 1996. ——. Beethoven. New York: Schirmer Trade Books, 1998. Tafuri, Manfredo. Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development. 1973. Trans. Barbara Luigia La Penta. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1976. ——. History of  Italian Architecture, 1944–1985. Trans. Jessica Levine. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1989. Unger, Roberto Mangabeira. The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2007.

336

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White, Janet R. “Designed for Perfection: Intersections between Architecture and Social Program at the Oneida Community.” Utopian Studies 7.2 (1996): 113–38. ——. “The Ephrata Cloister: Intersections of Architecture and Culture in an Eighteenth-Century Utopia.” Utopian Studies 11.2 (2000): 57–76. Whitwell, Stedman. Description of an Architectural Model from a Design by Stedman Whitwell, Esq. for a Community upon a Principle of United Interests as Advocated by Robert Owen, Esq. London: Hurst Chance and Co. and Ef fingham Wilson, 1830.

Notes on Contributors

Nathaniel Coleman is Senior Lecturer in Architecture at Newcastle University, U.K. He first studied architecture at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in New York City, holds BFA and BArch degrees from the Rhode Island School of  Design, a MUP degree from the City College of New York Program in Urban Design, and MSc and PhD degrees from the University of Pennsylvania, where Joseph Rykwert was his supervisor. A licensed architect, Coleman has practiced in New York and Rome, including with Hardy Holzman Pfeif fer and Eisenman/Robertson. A recipient of  Graham Foundation and British Academy grants, Coleman’s primary research interest is the problematic of Utopia in relation to architecture history, theory, and design and the city. He is author of Utopias and Architecture, has contributed chapters to The Hand and the Soul: Aesthetics and Ethcs in Architecture and Art (ed., Sanda Iliescu) and Constructing Place: Mind and Matter (ed., Sarah Menin), and articles to journals including Cloud-Cuckoo-Land, Interfaces, ARQ, and the International Journal of  Art and Design Education. Diane E. Davis is Professor of Political Sociology in the International Development Group in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), U.S.A. Davis’s research interests include the politics of urban policy, cities in conf lict, and the relationship between cities and national development. Recent research, supported by both the MacArthur Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation, focuses on violence and insecurity in cities of the global south. Recent publications include Cities and Sovereignty: Identity Conf licts in Urban Spaces (with Nora Libertun de Duren), and “Divergent Epistemologies in the Search for Co-Existence: The Jerusalem 2050 Project,” in Moshe Moaz (ed.), The Meeting of  Civilizations: Muslims, Christians and Jews. Davis has also published articles in MITIR: The MIT International Review; Block # 03, special Issue on Y-Utopia; and the International Journal of 

338

Notes on Contributors

Politics, Culture, and Society. Davis, a member of  the European Research Council, has been editor of the research annual Political Power and Social Theory for the past fifteen years. Ufuk Ersoy is a practicing architect and Assistant Professor of Architecture at the Izmir Institute of  Technology in Turkey. He is also a guest lecturer in the Program of Architecture, University of New South Wales. He completed his PhD in Architecture under the supervision of David Leatherbarrow at the University of Pennsylvania, where he also received Master of Architecture and Master of Science in Architecture degrees. His research focuses on the glass cultures of nineteenth- and twentieth-century architectures, and the consequences of  technological changes on the discipline of architecture. He has published and presented his research nationally and internationally. Most recently, he guest-edited a special issue of the journal World Architecture on “Architecture in Turkey: A Glocal Production.” David H. Haney is a Lecturer in Architecture at the University of Kent, U.K. Haney received a Masters degree in Architectural History and Theory from Yale University, and a PhD in Architecture from the University of  Pennsylvania in 2005. He carried out his PhD research while living in Berlin for five years, having arrived there on a Fulbright study grant. He has recently published a book based on his PhD, When Modern was Green: Life and Work of Landscape Architect Leberecht Migge. His research interests focus on the relationship between landscape and architecture, as well as the history of green design, and alternative settlement. Tali Hatuka is Lecturer and Head of the Laboratory for Contemporary Urban Design in the Department of Geography and Human Environment at Tel Aviv University, Israel. She is author of Violent Acts and Urban Spaces in Contemporary Tel Aviv: Revisioning Moments. Author of a variety of publications on the architecture and planning of conf lict cities, she was guest editor of  Block # 03, special Issue on Y-Utopia and curator of  the international installation and design exhibition called “Urban Design and Civil Protest: A Socio-Spatial Laboratory.” She was previously the Fulbright and Marie Curie European Community Research Fellow in the Department of  Urban Studies and Planning at MIT.

Notes on Contributors

339

Greg Kerr is Lecturer in French Studies at Lancaster University, U.K. He previously held a lectureship at the University of  Oxford and wrote a doctoral thesis at Trinity College, Dublin, on the theme of urban utopia and prose by poets in nineteenth-century France. He has published articles and book chapters on Saint-Simonian writing, the prose poetry of Arthur Rimbaud, and the journalistic prose of  Théophile Gautier. Ruth Levitas is Professor of Sociology at the University of Bristol, U.K. She is co-founder and former Chair of the Utopian Studies Society-Europe and Vice Chair of  the William Morris Society. She has written widely on aspects of  Utopia and political and social theory. Her books include The Ideology of  the New Right; The Concept of  Utopia; The Inclusive Society: Social Exclusion and New Labour; Poverty and Social Exclusion in Britain: The Millennium Survey (ed. with Christina Pantazis and Dave Gordon). She is currently writing a book on Utopia as Method: the Imaginary Reconstitution of  Society. Malcolm Miles is Professor of  Cultural Theory at the University of  Plymouth, U.K., where he convenes the Culture-Theory-Space research cluster. He is author of Urban Utopias (2008), Cities and Cultures, Urban Avant-Gardes, and Art Space and the City, co-author of  Consuming Cities (with Steven Miles), and co-editor of the City Cultures Reader (with Tim Hall and Iain Borden). He has contributed to journals including Space and Culture, Urban Studies, and Parallax. His current research is on the writing of  Herbert Marcuse and aspects of  late modern and contemporary art. Valérie Narayana is an Associate Professor of  French Literature at Mount Allison University, New Brunswick, Canada. Her research explores the links between science and literature as well as the intersections between utopian discourses and the French scientific tradition in the nineteenth century. She is particularly interested in the rhetoric of scientific popularization during this period. Her recent work includes articles on the inf luence of  the French popularizer Louis Figuier and the work of  his wife Juliette, long thought to be that of  her husband’s. Recent work includes publications in Études Littéraires and a contribution to Jeu de masques: Les femmes et le travestissement textuel.

340

Notes on Contributors

Jonathan Powers is a doctoral candidate in History and Theory of  Architecture at McGill University in Montréal, Canada. His doctoral dissertation concerns the relationship between rhetoric and architectural theory in Quattrocento Italy. Lyman Tower Sargent is Professor Emeritus of  Political Science at the University of  Missouri-St Louis, U.S.A. He has been a visiting professor at various universities in the U.K. and New Zealand. He was the founding editor of Utopian Studies, and is author of British and American Utopian Literature, 1516–1985: An Annotated, Chronological Bibliography, Utopianism: A Very Short Introduction, Contemporary Political Ideologies: A Comparative Analysis, New Left Thought: An Introduction, co-author with Lucy Sargisson of Living in Utopia: Intentional Communities in New Zealand, editor of Extremism in America: A Reader, and Political Thought in the United States: A Documentary History, and co-editor with Gregory Claeys of  The Utopia Reader. Ellen Sullivan is a PhD candidate in the College of  Architecture and Urban Studies at the Washington Alexandria Architecture Center of Virginia Tech, U.S.A. She is investigating the graphic strategies of Sir Patrick Geddes. Her research includes nineteenth-century visual culture and collecting practices as they apply to Urban Design. Phillip E. Wegner is a University Research Foundation Professor and the Coordinator of  the Graduate Program in the Department of  English at the University of  Florida, U.S.A., and President of  the U.S. Society for Utopian Studies. He is the author of  Life Between Two Deaths, 1989– 2001: U.S. Culture in the Long Nineties; Imaginary Communities: Utopia, the Nation, and the Spatial Histories of  Modernity; and the forthcoming Ontologies of  the Possible: Utopia, Science Fiction, and Globalization, and Periodizing Jameson; or, the Adventures of  Theory in Post-contemporary Times. He has published or has forthcoming nearly forty articles on topics including twentieth-century culture, genre theory, utopian fiction, literary theory and history, cultural studies, Marxism, spatial theory, globalization, contemporary film, and science fiction.

Index

Adorno, Theodor, and Max Horkheimer  159 Dialectic of  Enlightenment  161 Alberti, Leon Battista  41, 44 n, 56, 107, 160 On the Art of  Building (De re aedficatoria)  41, 44n, 56, 107, 160 d’Alembert, Jean-Baptiste le Rond  88, 89, 104 Encyclopédie  88, 89, 104 Alienation  18, 208, 231, 232, 234, 237, 244 Amsterdam, Netherlands  79, 292, 293, 294 Andreae, Johann Valentin  32, 40, 41 n, 55 Christianopolis  40 Arendt, Hannah  46, 47, 48, 53 The Human Condition  47, 54 “Tradition and the Modern Age”  46, 54 Aristotle  22 n, 24, 254 Arts and Crafts Movement  234 Averlino, Antonio di Pietro (“Filarete”)  3, 9, 16, 23, 29, 31, 33–45, 47, 49–54, 55, 56, 166, 323 Sforzinda  9, 34–5, 37–40, 42–5, 47, 49, 55, 166 Trattato  29, 33–4, 36, 38–9, 41–5, 47, 53, 55 Badiou, Alain  283, 284, 288, 289, 290, 296, 297 Being and Event  284n, 290, 297 Ethics  57, 297 Theory of  the Subject  283, 284, 297

Ballanche, Pierre-Simon  60, 61 de Balzac, Honoré  vii, 71–2, 79, 81, 83–7, 94–7, 99–100, 102–3, 104, 323 Le Curé de village  81, 83, 85, 87, 94, 95, 97, 99, 103, 104 Barcelona, Spain  viii, 15, 141, 144–7, 153–4, 156, 161, 161, 162, 163 Barthes, Roland  77, 78, 93, 104 Battisti, Eugenio  313 Bauhaus, the  116 Behne, Adolf  112–14, 121, 127, 128, 131–3, 135 Sachlichkeit  113–14, 121, 132–3, 135 Behrens, Peter  113 Bellamy, Edward  309, 328, 333 Looking Backward  309, 328, 333, 335 Belluschi, Pietro  204 n Berlin, Germany  109, 113, 120, 237, 238, 289, 292 n, 324, 325, 338 Berlin Wall  200, 286, 288–92 Bloch, Ernst  3, 12, 17, 18, 20, 23, 132–5, 159, 161, 207, 223 n, 246, 255, 263, 279, 304, 317, 319–20, 323, 325, 326, 329, 330, 333 The Principle of  Hope  135, 161, 279, 304, 333 The Utopian Function of  Art and Literature  23, 132, 133, 135 “Not Yet”  246, 325 Boileau, Louis-Auguste  vii, xiii, 57–9, 64–9, 72, 74, 77, 78, 79 cathédrale synthétique  64–5, 67–9, 72, 74, 78, 79 nouvelle forme architecturale  xiii, 64–5, 67, 68, 69n, 78

342 Bonaparte, Napoleon  60, 61, 82, 105 Borsi, Franco  8, 23 Architecture and Utopia  8, 23 Brennan, William  277 Britain  6, 72, 193, 197, 198, 199, 200, 206, 207 n, 209, 210, 211 n, 213, 214, 313, 318, 326, 329 Buchez, Philippe  65–7, 69, 78 Budapest, Hungary  153 Buenos Aires, Argentina  148, 151, 204 Byzantine Architecture  67, 72 n, 73 n, 74, 115 Cabet, Étienne  144, 159, 188 n Voyage en Icarie  144, 159 Caddy, Eileen  xiv, 240 Caddy, Peter  240 Campanella, Tommaso  32, 143 Capitalism  9, 20, 188, 195, 200, 212, 215, 230, 231, 232, 234, 287, 325, 330, 331 Cerdà, Ildefons  viii, 15, 19, 141–60, 161, 162, 163, 323 Eixample  141, 143, 144, 148, 149, 153, 162, 163 General Theory of  Urbanization  150, 154, 163 Chenavard, Paul  vii, xiii, 59–64, 69–70, 77, 79 La Palingénésie sociale  xiii, 60–1, 63–4, 69–70, 78 Chevalier, Michel  58, 63, 68, 70, 74, 78 China  257 Choay, Françoise  29 n, 44 n, 54, 157–60, 161, 285 n, 297 Modern City  285, 297 The Rule and the Model  54, 161 Christchurch, New Zealand  310 Christianity  67 n, 240, 333 Civil Society  256, 263, 265, 266, 267, 276 Clousden Hill Colony  234–7 Cockaigne  40, 159 Cold War  286, 290

Index Coleman, Alice  6, 24, 189–91, 193–4, 197 n, 198–216, 217, 318, 331 Utopia on Trial  6, 24, 189, 193, 196, 197n, 198–201, 205, 209n, 210, 214–16, 217, 219, 318 Coleman, Nathaniel  vii, viii, ix, 4, 6, 7 n, 9 n, 19, 23, 24, 50–2, 54, 85, 90, 104, 108, 119, 135, 166, 179, 183, 184, 186, 196, 200, 203, 204, 205, 217, 224, 225, 228, 230, 246, 252, 254, 256, 279, 289 n, 297, 301, 302, 304, 306, 307, 310, 312, 313, 315, 316, 318, 320, 321, 325, 327, 329, 331, 332, 333, 337 “Building Dystopia”  6, 24, 184, 186, 203, 217 “The Limits of  Professional Architectural Education”  330, 333 Utopias and Architecture  4, 7n, 19, 23, 24, 54, 85, 104, 135, 179, 184, 196, 203, 304, 205, 217, 224, 246, 279, 289n, 297, 302, 325, 333, 337 Cologne, Germany  109, 112 Communism  144, 186, 201, 215, 231 Comte, Auguste  82–5, 87, 89–93, 101, 104, 105, 106, 168–9, 180 Catéchisme des industriels  89, 90, 91, 104 Cours de philosophie positive  91, 92, 104 Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM)  6, 142, 170, 181, 184, 218 Constructivism  200 n Copernicus  172 Couture, Lise Anne  255 Cuvier, Georges  170 Cyprus  250 Darwin, Charles  xiv, 32, 104, 167, 172, 173, 180, 208 On the Origin of  Species  172

Index Deconstructivism  218 Deductivism  94, 90, 87, 88 Denmark  309 Dessau, Germany  xiv, 238 Determinism  193, 255 Diderot, Denis  88, 89, 104 Distanciation (Defamiliarization, Estrangement)  v, 3, 4, 119, 122 Dreyfus, Alfred  94, 103 Dubai  257 Durham, England  235 Durkheim, Émile  157 Dystopia  6, 24, 25, 33 n, 103, 168, 183–7, 189–90, 193–4, 198, 202, 203, 212, 214–15, 217, 218, 245, 285, 292, 302, 304, 313, 318–20, 323, 324, 325 École Polytechnique  82, 84, 87 Ecology  178, 240, 279 Ecovillage  xiv, 1, 239, 240, 241, 242, 245, 246 Eden Colony  237, 238 Edinburgh, Scotland  167, 169, 175, 176 Egypt  74, 250 Eisenmann, Peter  283 Empiricism  87, 91, 122, 266 n Engels, Friedrich  162 The Condition of  the Working Class in England in 1844  162 Engineer  vii, 2, 13, 57 n, 58, 81–7, 89, 91, 92, 94, 96, 97, 99, 101, 103, 104, 105, 113, 121, 125, 133, 146, 147, 155, 183, 184, 242, 254 England  162, 175, 196, 197, 201, 201, 202, 211, 234, 235, 245 Enlightenment  40, 64, 78, 88, 154, 157, 161, 212, 215, 275 Ethics  22, 24, 173, 282, 288, 297 Eutopia  2, 8, 11, 151, 165, 173, 176, 194, 195 n, 285, 302, 313, 318, 333

343 Fascism  159, 162, 186, 219 Feuerbach, Ludwig  143 Fictional Estrangment  122 Field of  Dreams Community  241 Findhorn  xiv, 239, 239–42, 245–6 Fischer, Leopold  238 Fischer, Theodor  115, 135 Flahault, Charles  170 Fordism  190 Foucault, Michel  87, 104, 256, 280, 285 Les mots et les choses  87, 104 Fourier, Charles  40, 60, 62 n, 142–4, 151, 159, 188, 191, 254, 308 Phalanstère  142, 191 Fourierism  60 Frampton, Kenneth  6, 7, 9 n, 16 n, 24, 82, 104 French Impressionism  115 French Revolution  82 French Second Empire  60, 92 French Second Republic  60, 61, 64, 79 Fuller, Buckminster  195 n, 217, 246 Utopia or Oblivion  217 Galileo  172 Gaudi, Antonio  145 Gautier, Théophile  vii, 57–65, 68–75, 77, 79, 323, 324, 339 L’Art moderne  58, 61–2, 63n, 70, 79 Mademoiselle de Maupin  59 “Paris futur”  58, 68, 72, 74–5, 77 Geddes, Patrick  viii, xiii, xiv, 15, 19, 151, 162, 165, 167–81, 188 n, 195 n, 217, 323, 331–2, 333, 340 Cities in Evolution  162, 175, 177, 180, 217 Outlook tower  xiv, 169, 174–5, 176n, 179 Gehry, Frank  255, 283, 288 Gilliam, Terry  214 Brazil  214

344 Glass  vii, xiii, 18, 67, 107–12, 114, 117–24, 127–34, 135, 204 n, 234, 324, 338 Goodman, Paul  195, 196 n, 217, 254 Goodman, Percival  195, 196 n, 217, 254 Gothic  35, 64, 67, 73 n, 74, 115–19, 137 Architecture  116 Cathedral  58, 64, 65, 67, 69n, 72n, 73n, 115–19, 124, 127, 135, 296, 297, 324 Gropius, Walter  187 Hadid, Zaha  283 Harvey, David  5, 134, 135, 185, 218, 232–3 n, 246, 255, 259 n, 269, 280, 307, 320, 326, 333 A Brief  History of  Neoliberalism  259n, 280 The Limits to Capital  259n, 280 Spaces of  Hope  5n, 135, 218, 232n, 246, 255, 269, 280, 320, 326, 333 Haussmann, George-Eugène  148, 154, 156, 160 Haüy, René-Just  88 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich  61, 142 Heinersdorf f, Gottfried  109, 136 Hindu Architecture  67 Howard, Ebenezer  xiii, 55, 151, 162, 166, 188, 196, 214–15, 254, 255 Garden City  151, 166, 214–15, 254 Hume, David  86 n Huxley, Aldous  44, 168 Brave New World  44, 168 Huxley, Thomas  xiv, 167–8, 171–6, 180, 181 Physiography  xiv, 171, 180, 181 Ideology  v, 20, 75, 79, 83, 85, 92, 93, 105, 136, 202, 204 n, 207, 225, 230, 244, 246, 266, 287, 295, 297, 316, 318, 331, 332, 334, 335, 339 Inductivism  86–7, 90, 92, 98, 103

Index Industrial  40, 47, 48, 92, 96, 105, 108–11, 119–20, 127–8, 144–5, 152, 160, 212, 231, 234–7, 314 Industrial Revolution  47, 234 Infrastructure  57 n, 141, 145, 148, 227–8, 232, 238–9, 241–2, 262, 266, 269 Intentional Communities  2, 4, 14–15, 19, 21, 213, 223, 247, 306, 308, 323, 327, 329, 340 International Style  188, 197 n, 203–4 Islamic Architecture  67 Israel  249, 250, 264, 266, 273 n, 282, 294, 338 Jacobs, Jane  195 n, 218, 255, 260, 281 Death and Life of  Great American Cities  195n, 218, 281 Jameson, Fredric  3, 4, 24, 105, 278, 281, 283–4, 297, 298 Archaeologies of  the Future  4, 24 “Architecture and the Critique of  Ideology”  287, 297 The Ideologies of  Theory  105, 297 “The Politics of  Utopia”  278, 281 The Political Unconscious  284, 297 Seeds of  Time  81, 105, 284, 297 Jermyn Street Museum, London  174 Jerusalem  viii, 11, 249–52, 264–8, 270–8, 279, 316, 323, 337 Jewish Museum, Berlin  292, 324–5 Johnson, Philip  203–5, 217, 218, 219, 255 Jordan  250 Kahn, Louis I.  51 n Kapper, Frank  235–6 Koolhaas, Rem  viii, 13, 255, 256, 283–96, 297, 298, 311, 331–2 Delirious New York  283–4, 286–7, 293, 294, 298, 332 S,M,L,XL  viii, 283, 286–92, 295, 297, 298

Index Kremlin  295–6 Kropotkin, Peter  181, 235 Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris)  6, 51 n, 142, 152, 154–5, 160, 162, 165, 186, 187–8, 195 n, 196, 198, 203, 214–16, 217, 218, 254–5, 289, 315 Aircraft  154, 162 City of  Tomorrow  152, 154, 162 Radiant City (Ville Radieuse)  214, 215, 254 Lefebvre, Henri  159, 162, 183, 218, 227–8, 230, 232, 238, 246, 250–1, 255, 256, 260, 261, 264, 265, 278, 281, 317, 325, 330 Everyday Life in the Modern World  256, 281 Introduction to Modernity  162 The Production of  Space  162, 227, 246, 281 “Right to the City”  183, 218, 250, 251, 264, 265, 267, 278, 281 Writings on Cities  162, 218, 281 Lenin, Vladimir  288, 321 Leonardo da Vinci  319 Leroi-Gourhan, André  229, 330 Lethaby, William  177 Levi, Primo  159, 162 If  This Is a Man  162 Levitas, Ruth  ix, xi, 3–4, 5 n, 9, 10, 24, 31–2, 41 n, 55, 160, 162, 186, 218, 223 n, 246, 277, 281, 301–2, 304–7, 310, 315, 317, 319–20, 322–3, 326, 329, 332, 334, 339 The Concept of  Utopia  24, 55, 334, 339 “The Imaginary Reconstitution of  Society”  16, 162, 253, 277, 281, 305–7, 334 Libeskind, Daniel  292, 324–5 Berlin Jewish Museum  292, 324–5

345 Lipps, Theodor  115 Liverpool, England  324 Locke, John  80 London, England  142, 153, 156, 167, 168, 174, 176, 189, 245 n, 289, 312, 313, 314, 325 Loos, Adolf  238 Lukács, Georg  291, 298 Luxfer Prism Glass Syndicate  117–18, 135, 136 Madrid, Spain  146, 147 Manhattan, New York  7, 151, 283–6, 292, 295 Mannheim, Karl  119, 136, 225–6, 245, 246, 330, 334 Ideology and Utopia  136, 225, 246, 334 Marketplace  12, 22, 277 Marseille, France  12, 22, 277 Marx, Karl  315 Massachusetts Institute of  Technology (MIT)  250, 264, 265 n, 269, 337, 338 Mass-production  109 n, 158, 234, 235, 237, 240 Mclean, Dorothy  240 Mediterranean  xv, 250, 251, 252 Mexico  168 Michelangelo  17 Middle Ages  53 n, 123 Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig  204 n, 283 Migge, Leberecht  238–9, 246, 338 Milan, Italy  33, 54 Milizia, Francesco  151 Principles of  Civil Architecture  151 Miró, Joan  144 Modern Architecture  6–8, 14, 17, 66, 133, 183, 185–90, 195–8, 203, 205, 215–16, 287, 302, 329 Modernity  21–2, 71, 112, 135, 149, 158, 161, 162, 184 n, 217, 279, 280, 298, 340

346 Modern Movement (in Architecture)  24, 188, 189, 197 n, 200 n, 204, 217 More, Thomas  v, xiii, 21, 29–30, 31 n, 32, 40, 44, 55, 143, 165, 166, 177, 181, 201 n, 212, 214, 252, 305, 309, 334 Utopia  xiii, 4, 21, 29–30, 31n, 32, 40, 44, 55, 166, 181, 252, 309, 334 Morris, William  21, 116, 185, 212, 321, 325–6, 329, 339 News from Nowhere  21 Moses, Robert  256, 279 Moylan, Tom  xi, xii, 3, 4, 9–11, 24, 25, 86, 105, 134, 136, 162, 246, 281, 320, 334 Demand the Impossible  3, 25, 320, 334 Scraps of  the Untainted Sky  10, 25, 105, 320, 334 Mumford, Lewis  44, 181, 254 Munich, Germany  115 Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyons  64 Museum of  Modern Art, New York  204 Napoleon, Louis  64 Negri, Antonio  283, 289, 296, 298 Marx beyond Marx  283, 298 Newcastle upon Tyne, England  xi, 235, 247, 337 New Lanark  143, 144 Nîmes, France  146, 153 Northumberland, England  235 Nouvel, Jean  283 Of fice for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA)  286–90, 293 Olympic Games  145 Orientalism  63, 72, 73 Orwell, George  285 Owen, Robert  142–3, 158, 162, 188, 254, 308, 336, see also New Lanark Palestine  249, 266, 272, 282 Paris Commune  143

Index Paris, France  58, 68, 72, 73, 74, 75, 77, 96, 143, 144, 148, 153, 154, 156, 159, 313 Patrizi da Cherso, Francesco  34, 55 La cittá felice  34, 55 Pérez-Gómez, Alberto  9 n, 25, 82, 105, 132, 136 Architecture and the Crisis of  Modern Science  9n, 25, 82, 105, 132, 136 Phalanstère  142, 191 Picasso, Pablo  145 Piercy, Marge  309, 334 Woman on the Edge of  Time  309, 334 Planner  6, 14, 19, 144, 155, 165, 172, 179, 187, 188, 192, 198, 256, 258, 259, 260, 261, 264, 266, 268, 274, 276, 279, 310–11, 315, 326–8, 330, 332 Planning  176, 177, 179, 180, 190, 195–6 n, 206, 210, 212, 217, 237, 238, 239, 245, 251–63, 264–7, 270, 271–6, 278–82, 288, 292, 297, 303, 308, 313–15, 325–6, 332, 335, 337, 338 City- 126, 177, 179, 195–6n, 297, 314, 326, 328 Master- 155, 256, 258, 261, 266 Participatory- 257, 258, 262, 265 Spatial- 238 Town- 162, 176, 177, 180, 217, 165, 172, 179 Urban- 217, 254, 258, 259, 264, 265, 273, 276, 282, 292, 335 Plato  31, 37, 45–6, 47, 52, 53, 55, 61, 170, 254, 305 Laws  45 Republic  31, 45, 52, 55, 170, 254, 305 Statesman  45 Poincaré, Henri  87, 92–3, 94, 102, 105 Popper, Karl  86, 89–90, 105, 183–4, 218, 254 Conjectures and Refutations  86n, 105 The Logic of  Scientific Discovery  86n, 89, 105 The Poverty of  Historicism  183–4, 218

Index Positivism  81–3, 86, 87, 89, 90, 92, 94, 98, 100, 101, 102, 103, 180 Postmodernity  186 n, 187, 196 n, 200, 205, 216, 218, 255, 278, 284, 285, 288, 289, 290, 292, 294, 321, 327, 329 Progress, see also Technological Progress  xii, 52, 61, 65 n, 66 n, 82, 84, 91, 92, 95, 98, 101–3, 122 n, 154, 155, 212, 213, 278 Public Housing  15, 188, 190, 191–3, 197, 199, 201–3, 206–8, 211, 213–14, 216, 312–14, 318, 326–7, 329–30 Pugin, Augustus Northmore  116 Rabelais, François  40 Pantagruel  40 Rashid, Hani  255 Rationalism  95, 99, 101, 102 Rawls, John  266 n Reagan, Ronald  200, 205, 218 Renaissance  11, 16, 30 n, 33, 34, 35, 38, 39, 42, 53 n, 54, 55, 56, 74, 107, 115, 308 Republicanism  145 Ricœur, Paul  v, 4, 74, 79, 85, 105, 107, 110, 122, 136, 207, 316, 317, 335 Interpretation Theory  122, 136 Lectures on Ideology and Utopia  79, 85, 105, 110, 136, 335 Time and Narrative  107, 136 Rogers, Richard  325, 335 Cities for a Small Planet  325, 335 Roman Architecture  35, 49, 67, 73 Roman Catholic Church  57, 60, 99, 149, 296 Rowe, Colin  39, 40, 41, 43, 55, 166, 195–6 n, 254, 302 “The Architecture of  Utopia”  39, 55, 189

347 Rowe, Colin, and Fred Koetter  55, 181, 183, 196 n, 219, 254 n, 255, 282 Collage City  40, 55, 181, 183, 195–6n, 219, 282, 335 Ruskin, John  116, 234, 235, 325, 329 Russia  69, 235, 296, 298 Rykwert, Joseph  9 n, 18, 25, 132, 136, 187, 219, 337 The First Moderns  9n, 25, 136 Saint-Simon, Henri de  61 n, 90, 104 Saint-Simonian Movement  57, 84 Sargent, Lyman Tower  ix, xi, 2–4, 5 n, 7–8, 25, 31–2, 55, 185, 193–4, 219, 223, 226, 247, 285, 298, 301–2, 306, 308, 310–13, 318–19, 327, 330–1, 340 “In Defense of  Utopia”  2–4, 8, 25, 31, 55, 194, 219 “The Three Faces of  Utopianism Revisited”  194, 219, 298 “Utopia – The Problem of  Definition”  2, 5n, 7, 25, 31, 55, 185, 193–4, 219 Scamozzi, Vincenzo  39, 43 Scheerbart, Paul  vii, 13, 18, 107, 108–11, 113, 117–25, 127–8, 131–4, 136 Das graue Tuch und zehn Prozent Weiß: Ein Damenroman  109 Glasarchitektur  xiii, 109, 119–21, 136 Lesabéndio: Ein AsteroïdenRoman  108, 121, 122, 124–5, 126, 136 Schinkel, Karl F.  126 Schopenhauer, Arthur  108 Scriabin, Alexander Nikolayevich  324, 335 Self-Suf ficiency  232, 235, 236, 238, 240, 241, 244 Semper, Gottfried  16–18, 21, 25 The Four Elements of  Architecture  25

348 Sieben Linden  239, 242–5, 247 Simmel, Georg  157 Sistine Chapel  17 Social Darwinism  208 Socialism  127, 186, 188, 201, 202 n, 203, 219, 287, 333 Social Justice  202, 211, 256, 257, 264, 266, 276, 281, 318 Sociology  5 n, 41, 82, 84, 91, 136, 157, 160, 165, 173, 180, 181, 225, 227, 259, 268 n, 302, 305, 306, 332, 334, 337, 339 Soloman, Meynard  323, 355 Souf f lot, Jacques-Germain  60, 64 Stalin, Joseph  296 St George’s Farm  234 Stiegler, Bernard  229–31, 247 Street, the  74 n, 141, 145, 148, 150, 151, 153, 157, 208, 219, 281, 284, 321 Symbolism  64, 99, 115, 116, 123, 214, 275 Tafuri, Manfredo  20, 25, 188, 189, 219, 254 n, 255, 285, 298, 325, 329–30, 335 Architecture and Utopia  25, 219, 282, 285n, 298, 335 Taut, Bruno  vii, xiii, 107–19, 121, 126–34, 135, 136, 137 Glashaus  xiii, 109, 127–31, 134, 135, 136, 137, 324 Das Monument des Eisens  xiii, 114 Taylorism  190 Technique  33, 46, 48, 60, 107, 116, 203, 234, 235, 243, 311 Technology  112–13, 120–2, 133, 145, 146, 152, 183, 224, 228, 229–30, 333, 334–6, 337–8, 256, 284 Technological Progress (Industrial Progress)  22, 92, 110, 112, 154, 188, 212, 239, 240 Thatcher, Margaret  201, 202, 205, 206, 219

Index Totalitarianism  186, 194, 255, 285, 302, 316 Transcendence  102, 108, 125, 239, 245 Turkey  250, 338 United Kingdom  xi, 188, 191, 200, 202, 245, 313, 314, 337, 338, 339, 340 United States  188, 200, 204, 205, 219, 239, 277, 294, 313, 314, 340 Utopia Absolutist Utopia  184, 216, 234 Abstract Utopia  207, 223n, 246, 320 Concrete Utopia  viii, 19, 207, 223–4, 225–40, 243–6, 263, 317, 320 Constitutive Utopia  v, 85, 90, 103, 110, 207, 319 Dialectical Utopia  5, 24, 233n Degenerate Utopia  202, 207, 213 Pathological Utopia  110, 319, 85, 90, 103, 202, 207, 213, 316, 319 Relative Utopia  225–6, 228–9, 233, 244, 245–6 Techno (Technological) Utopia  7n, 25, 224, 228, 234, 239, 244, 246, 335, 195n, 230 Utopianism  2, 5, 8, 22, 24,54, 58, 85, 90, 110, 141, 144, 157, 158, 186, 188, 194, 195, 219, 223, 253, 255, 256, 265, 268, 269, 270, 275, 285, 294, 298, 301–2, 306, 308, 314, 317, 328, 331–2, 333, 340 Anti- 6, 256, 285, 302, 328 Utopian Socialism  188, 202 n Utopian Studies  xi, 2, 8, 10, 12, 31, 41 n, 51, 185 n, 219, 297, 298, 301, 303–5, 316, 318, 321–3, 333, 334, 336, 339, 340 Valencia, Spain  148 van Eyck, Aldo  51 n, 184, 200 van Lieshout, Joep  244, 246

Index Venice, Italy  116 n, 288 Vespucci, Amerigo  29 Vienna, Austria  153 Viollet-le-Duc, Eugène  68, 79 von Humboldt, Alexander  170 Weber, Max  285 Weimar Republic  225 Wells, H. G.  32, 167 Whorf, Benjamin Lee  321 Wilde, Oscar  195, 219 “The Soul of  Man under Socialism”  195, 219 World Bank  257

349 World War I  131, 196, 205 n World War II  6, 7 n, 25, 165, 170, 181, 184, 196, 202, 206 n, 215, 239, 240, 313, 318, 142, 155, 210, 213, 240, 288 Worringer, Wilhelm  115–16 Wright, Frank Lloyd  254, 255 Ziebigk Settlement  xiv, 237–9 Žižek, Slavoj  292 Zola, Émile  81, 83–7, 94–6, 99, 101–3, 106, 323 Le Travail  81, 83, 85, 87, 94–5, 97, 99–100, 102, 103, 106

Figure 1  Antonio di Pietro Averlino (Filarete). Plan view of  Sforzinda with schematic city center, from Trattato de Architettura, 1465.

Figure 2  Paul Chenavard, La Palingénésie sociale (esquisse).

Figure 3  Louis-Auguste Boileau, Nouvelle forme architecturale.

Figure 4  Bruno Taut’s Monument of  Iron at Leipzig, 1913.

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 “Der Gotische Dom ist das Präludium der Glasarchitektur” was placed below Taut’s drawing.

Figure 7  The Glashaus: interior view of  the glass cupola.

Figure 8  Thomas More. Frontispiece to Utopia, 1516.

Figure 9  Francesco Colonna. “Cythera” from Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, 1499.

Figure 10  Ebenezer Howard. “Slumless Smokeless Cities” from To-morrow: A Peaceful 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  Patrick Geddes. “Social Notation”, 1902.

Figure 13  Patrick Geddes. “Thinking Machine”, undated.

Figure 14  Patrick Geddes. “Valley Section”, 1909.

Figure 15  Patrick Geddes. “Geography of  Education”, undated.

Figure 16  Thomas Huxley. Illustration from Physiography: An Introduction to the Study of  Nature, 1877.

Figure 17  Thomas Huxley. Illustration from Physiography: An Introduction to the Study of  Nature, 1877.

Figure 18  Charles Darwin. “Tree of  Life”, 1837.

Figure 19  Patrick Geddes. “Social Notation”, 1902.

Figure 20  Patrick Geddes. “Social Notation”, 1902.

Figure 21  Patrick Geddes. “Social Notation”, 1902.

Figure 22  Patrick Geddes. “Toys! Games!”, 1902.

Figure 23  Detail of 22.

Figure 24  Patrick Geddes. “Outlook Tower”, 1904.

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  Original mobile home (caravan) of  the Caddys at Findhorn, current condition.

Figure 29  The “Living Machine” at Findhorn.

Figure 30  Pond/biotope at Sieben Linden Ecovillage.

Figure 31  Gardener with horses at Sieben Linden Ecovillage.

Figure 32  HUMMUS: East Mediterranean City Belt 2050.

Figure 33  HUMMUS: East Mediterranean City Belt 2050.

Figure 34  HUMMUS: East Mediterranean City Belt 2050.