Explore Utopia In The Beautiful World Of Architecture

We do desire to live in perfect homes and perfect worlds, even though we know it’s not a reality. But the idea of this kind of Utopia was, and still is, explored in architecture. Despite its idealistic nature, we as humans have always desired to be a part of something perfect. The idea of one’s Utopia is different for everyone, but we can all agree that for us, it’s perfect. Much like its human counterpart, Utopia has evolved. Yet, its impact on humanity is timeless. The meaning of Utopia is defined as an ideal, often imagined society for people. The meaning of architecture, however, is the art of building and creation. In the Spring/Summer 2011 issue of .Cent Magazine, two seniors in their architectural fields, Sarah Ichioka and Nigel Coates detail Utopia and its ties with architecture, as Utopian architecture. Coates follows Utopia through stages of time, whereas Ichioka takes a different approach—explaining the concept through a more anecdotal style.

Meaning of Utopia

Utopia is the shortened title of a book named ‘De optimo rei publicae statu deque nova insula Utopia’, or “Of a republic’s best state and of the new island Utopia” by Thomas More. The book was born out of the innate human desire to explore beyond America, and what was known at the time, the word has now expanded to be synonymous with Heaven, whatever Heaven means for you. But, Utopia is defined as an imagined safe haven for its residents, where life is perfect, it aims to fulfil our desires, who wouldn’t want to live in a Utopia? Since the beginning of time, Utopian pieces of architecture have been available all over the world for people to view, our guest editor and photographer Minnie Weisz eloquently describes her viewing of ‘Hylozoic Ground’ by Philip Beesley in the quote below:

‘I was almost left breathless by the architect Philip Beesley’s Hylozoic Ground, a very Utopian work for me. His installations are almost like pieces of art; I always think of them as art – even though they are actually based on architectural theory. Nigel Coates starts off this article by mapping out the ages of Utopian architecture. I’m so happy to have him involved because when I was a student, I used to attend his amazing lectures. Following on from this, this is an article by the director of the Architecture Foundation, Sarah Ichioka, who writes about a green future. She also introduces us to an amazing array of working drawings and illustrations from exciting architects and studios.’

– Guest editor and Photographer, Minnie Weisz

Image by Jean-Pierre Dalbéra

Nigel Coates and the 7 Ages of Utopia

Nigel Coates: Conceiving Utopia can be a perfect act of design, and an escape from the present towards a vision of society in which the political and the environmental work in harmony. When I was studying architecture at the Architectural Association during the 1970s, for many of us, Utopia stood out as a vital concept; it held up our hopes and dreams of what architecture was not but could be. Here are some of the most important Utopian moments, for me.

Thomas More and Utopia

Utopia circa 1516. Thomas More’s courageous and seminal Renaissance work, published during the domineering reign of Henry VIII, rides on the wave of the Discoveries.

The Italian Cristoforo Colombo had discovered America, and the Portuguese had landed in modern-day Brazil. Together, they unleashed the European imagination and unlocked any limits on what further wonders could be conceived.

More, who was a member of Parliament and a scholar, had a vision of an island 200 miles wide that had 56 cities, each of 6,000 inhabitants. It was based upon an imagined land ‘discovered, beyond America’ and he called the island ‘Utopia’. But, according to the map accompanying his book, it looks like an inflated Isle of Wight.

More’s original concept was a self-sustaining community working in perfect harmony and cut off from the outside world for the benefit of its society.

Milton Keynes

Image by Neil Cummings

Utopia 1840s to 1950s. Rather than a vision of a perfect society, as in More’s original Utopia, during the 19th century, it became as much an instrument of resistance as a slogan for change.

With the increasing power and prevalence of industrial society – and the capital that goes with it, Utopia was a rallying cry and an ideal and self-sufficient society, cut off from outside influences.

So was born the Garden City, Bourneville (and latterly, Milton Keynes).

Each blended town and country has a mix of social and economic intensity and nature.

Utopian communities abounded, many exhibiting a paranoid resistance to moral contamination from the emerging consumer society.

Arcosanti

Image by Robbi Baba

Utopia 1960s to 1970s. The perfect community is a recurring theme in the counterculture of the 1960s; hippy communities of various shades and ideologies increased in numbers, with many a manifesto written to reinforce the inventive structures that housed them.

Arcosanti – the ideal city conceived and propelled by the visionary architect Paolo Soleri – is still being built by volunteers in the Arizona desert today.

In a typically Utopian schism, the gap between the original vision and the resources to build has steadily widened.

Radical architects often shaped their ideas at extremes of scale, from the global to the domestic.

These experiments culminated in the package assembled by various Italian architecture groups with the show The New Domestic Landscape at the Museum of Modern Art in 1972.

It framed an exciting, escapist and artistic way of thinking about an impossible human future in which people become free, enlightened beings living in harmony with design.

Westfield, London

Image by brokenadmiral_

Nutopia circa 2007. By 2007, there now seems to be no gap between the desire and the desired.

Pictures of very fit young men in underwear are sprawled across billboards; if you buy into this Utopia, you can be one of them – and be one of the super-satisfied because you wear the right pants.

For many people, Bond Street and Via Montenapoleone are as close as we get to Utopia.

The frenzy of the new finds its perfect paradigm in fashion, although some critics identify the search for the new as a sign that society has become addicted to ideals of youth and beauty.

Westfield in West London packages up the shopper’s paradise: blank walls on the outside and clogged up arteries of desire on the inside.

Alessandro Mendini

Image by Rob Oo

Retropia circa 2010. Alessandro Mendini, now an elder statesman in the Italian design world, took on a one-year stint as editor of the Italian architecture and design magazine Domus.

He adopted the arching theme La Nuova Utopia (The New Utopia) and featured some of his heroes with painted portraits on the cover and, in doing so, reawakened the interests of architectural idealists in the monthly magazine.

These are the people whose once revolutionary ideas are now the norm.

Computer-generated techniques are able to visualise buildings with such fluidity and agility that the conventional restraints of architecture no longer apply.

Austerity

Image by Wayne Jackson

Dystopia circa 2011. Conservative attempts to kick-start a Big Society have achieved the opposite – a fragmented society and a new Darwinian survival of the fittest.

The UK continues to attract non-domiciled residents who keep the economic machinery turning, but living standards for the masses fall.

Spam (not the electronic kind) is back on the menu, not deep-fried this time but served with rocket that grows in window boxes you buy ready-seeded off the Internet.

Gated Communities London

Image by Sarah O’Shea 

Notopia circa 2015. The inner city will become the preserve of the rich living in defended zones that overturn old principles of public space

Central London, like Sao Paulo, will become a mosaic of gated communities, many of these compounds will be owned or managed by big brands such as Chelsea Football Club and X Factor.

Architecture will become a purely theoretical activity practised by ‘poets’ of the subject.

Rather than build their work, they will refuse to do so, preferring to make short movies that can be streamed online…

While Nigel Coates’ expertly crafted timeline of Utopian architecture comes to an end, Sarah Ichioka echoes similar sentiments as well as her own perspective in the second half of this article.

Part 2: The Future is Green

‘You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.’

Legendary American architect Richard Buckminster Fuller

Sarah Ichioka Flourish

For the last couple of years, I have kept this quote from American engineer, author and inventor, Buckminster Fuller, as a sticky note on my desktop.

On alternating days, I re-read it and find it either bracingly inspirational or frustratingly quixotic: Will an accumulation of well-intentioned acts of human ingenuity save us from the damage that previous (often well-intentioned) acts of human ingenuity have incurred?

‘Bucky’ certainly hoped this would be the case and was confident of the architect’s contribution to solving social and environmental problems.

If one of our era’s dominant menaces is human-caused climate change – nature unbalanced, unbridled and unpredictable – then the Utopian visions currently in vogue are ones in which humanity works with nature.

This can be through a return to basics (much like the agriculture-based society of Thomas More’s original Utopia) or through a technology-led approach that successfully replicates nature’s miraculous designs.

Exploration Architecture director Michael Pawlyn’s enthusiasm for, and faith in, the power of technology – particularly when inspired by nature – to alter the destructive course of human development and set us on a path towards constructive coexistence with nature, is compelling.

Another possibility is the creation of hybrids that combine machines and organisms, such as EcoLogic Studio’s prototypes.

Architects are also continuing their romance with vertical farms (large-scale urban farming in tower blocks).

Pig City MVRDV

Image by Forgemind ArchiMedia

MVRDV’s Pig City concept from 2001 is still widely referenced, and Sou Fujimoto’s scheme for a tower of stacked gardens was shortlisted last year for an Architecture Foundation competition for a new landmark on the edge of the City of London – an area currently associated more readily with hard-nosed deals than pastoral repose.

These architectural visions draw energy from public sentiment and are complemented in everyday life by the increase of urban agriculture schemes, from the farms that are reclaiming Detroit’s abandoned lots to Something & Sons’ FarmShop, which reanimates a vacant Dalston shop unit in which vegetables are grown in mineral-enriched water with no soil, there are fish cultivation tanks and a chicken coop on the roof.

In my mind, the most convincing solutions to human-made problems are those in which we can see humanity, with its complex cocktail of flaws and potentials, reflected.

Following the recent failure of climate negotiations in Copenhagen (and, at the time of writing, the likelihood that this will also be the case in Cancun), some green activists are suggesting that we should be looking at influencing behaviour by appealing to individuals’ local interests, rather than trying to convince them of the science of climate change.

Some policymakers have also suggested shifting the ‘pitch’ to one of ‘livability’ and ‘quality of life and away from ‘sustainability’ per se.

Sustainable development

Image by Marsden Abucheri

Sustainability, as an approach, is arguably akin to a religion, commanding that a believer must change their behaviour (sacrifice, atonement and virtue all being resonant themes in the sustainability debate) to meet moral obligations

In their depictions of fictional eco-enclaves, think tank provocateurs Tomorrow’s Thoughts Today have bitingly identified the dangers of the behaviour-restriction and social control elements of sustainability.

The ‘quality of life’ agenda seeks to re-focus the argument directly on the needs, comforts and pleasures of the individual.

The most seductive Utopian visions are ones that avoid conversations about scarcity and instead suggest productive, integrated, abundant systems.

Terraform 1, who recently won the Zumtobel Group Award for their conceptual masterplan for New York City’s ecological future, creates work that is jolly and appealingly cartoonish (Google ‘soft car lamb’ and you’ll see what I mean), yet earnestly ambitious.

One of the architects approached for this piece expressed discomfort at being featured in my article about ‘Utopian’ architecture.

Kate Orff Scape

Scape principal Kate Orff argued (with reason) that her team’s proposal for the creation of a new oyster-stabilised and purified coastline for New York’s Gowanus Canal and Buttermilk Channel, part of the Museum of Modern Art’s workshops to generate design responses to rising sea levels, was wholly realistic and hence not ‘Utopian’, which can suggest that something is not achievable.

Equally, I suspect that Michael Pawlyn would argue that his designs to create arable land in desert conditions are deliverable, if only the right client and context come together.

I am enchanted, heartened and excited by these proposals; I would be delighted to be proven wrong in labelling some of them ‘Utopian’ and look forward to being fully convinced when they are delivered. And replicated. At scale.

Rendering existing models obsolete, as the sticky note on my desktop says.

For most architects, Utopia is more than a concept; it’s something that carves the reason out as to why the buildings that surround us look the way they do, feel the way they feel. As described by Nigel Coates and Sarah Ichioka, Utopian architecture has evolved from an unrealistic idea to something we in the 21st century are constantly surrounded by, which is probably why without always realising why we subconsciously want to be in them.

Nigel is an architect, designer and author. He is also a Professor and Head of the Department of Architecture at the Royal College of Ark – nigelcoates.com

Sarah is Director of The Architecture Foundation, London – architecture/foundation.org.uk

Minnie Weisz is a photographer as well as guest editor of this piece – https://www.minnieweisz.net

If you enjoyed reading: Explore Utopia in the world of beautiful architecture, perhaps try; Where Utopia, Soul and Humanity Converge in a Building

.Cent Magazine London. Luxury Mindset