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Utopian Studies, Volume 25, Number 1, 2014, pp. 1-22 (Article)

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DOI: 10.1353/utp.2014.0015

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 The Problematic of Architecture and Utopia

NathanielColeman

abstract
The job of recovering or recuperating Utopia for architecture is no easy task, consid-
ering how deeply entrenched suspicions about Utopia are in the discipline of archi-
tecture, as elsewhere. In an attempt to set the stage for the articles that follow, the
introduction to this special issue on architecture and Utopia is dedicated to explaining
just how and why Utopia has become so estranged from architecture that it requires
recuperation.

keywords: architecture, modern architecture, Utopia, ideal cities, visionary, dystopia

Architecture and the architect, threatened with disappearance,

capitulate before the property developer who spends the money.
Henri Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis

And best of all is finding a place to be in the early years of a better

civilisation.
Dennis Lee, Civil Elegies

Utopian Studies, Vol. 25, No. 1, 2014

Copyright 2014. The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA

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 Utopian Studies 25.1

The Perils of Transdisciplinarity: Utopian Studies and Architecture

As the articles in this special issue on the problematic of architecture and

Utopia attest, the final word on the influence of Utopia on architecture, and
of the veracity of claims that modern architecture in particular was utopian,
is a long way off. Definitions are elusive, as is any real sense of persistent or
consistent clarity about what exactly is intended by nominating this or that
architecture or city plan utopian. At the very least, the articles that follow
are testament to the significant difficulties of working cross- or transdiscipli-
narily. If the articles that follow are understood in this way, each can equally
be understood as making a significant contribution to developing our under-
standing of architecture and Utopia, from within the discipline of architec-
ture and the field of utopian studies simultaneously.
As a fundamentally transdisciplinary field of knowledge, utopian studies
places great demands on scholars who attempt to do justice to the body of
knowledge out of which the field is constructed, without doing violence to
whatever other fields of knowledge are placed in proximity to itin the instance
of the essays that follow, architecture and urbanism, including diverse consider-
ations of history, theory, and design. By the same token, as we all pretty much
play out our lives in designed and constructed environments, it can be all too
easy to presume a depth of understanding about architecture that is generally
premature, at least if the aim is to do justice to architecture and urbanism as
interrelated disciplines bound up with giving shape to the spaces of intimate and
social interaction, which simultaneously struggle with ethical and aesthetical
demands that can often appear to be at cross-purposes to one another, to such an
extent that a tug-of-war arguably exists between them. Resolving this struggle
and mastering architecture and Utopia simultaneously in the development of
the arguments that follow are surely revealed as an exceedingly taxing endeavor.
And yet, a partial resolution resides in the shared condition of all of us
having grown up in cultures where the denotative and connotative codes
of architecture are learned through the bodyeven if often repressed on
account of some obsession with novelty, perhaps, or because the built envi-
ronment has become increasingly impoverished during the past century
or moreand Utopia arguably describes something unique about human
longing and desire, for a better way of being and sociability alike, achieved
within settings suited to such accomplishment. Put as succinctly as possible:
Utopia and architecture are pervasive, contributing in equal measure to the

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 nathanielcoleman: The Problematic of Architecture and Utopia

very fabric out of which individual and collective lives are made. If this claim
were to be believed, then I would invite readers to consider the articles that
make up this special issue on the problematic of architecture and Utopia as
attempts to recover (or recuperate) Utopia for architecture and as attempts
to resituate architecture and the city at the center of utopian considerations.

Utopia Trouble

The job of recovering or recuperating Utopia for architecture is no easy task,

considering how deeply entrenched suspicions about Utopia are in the dis-
cipline of architecture, as elsewhere. In an attempt to set the stage for the
articles that follow, my introduction to this special issue on architecture and
Utopia is dedicated to explaining just how and why Utopia has become so
estranged from architecture that it requires recuperation.
Twentieth-century modern architecture, particularly in association with
city planning, has, at least since the 1950s, been derided for its utopian ambi-
tions. Postmodern architecture emerged in the mid-1960sboth as a new
style and as simply that architecture coming after modern architecture
ostensibly in response to revelations, writ in concrete, that the grand narra-
tives of modern architecture were exaggerated and untenable. In all of its
guises, postmodern architecture has mostly positioned itself as other than
modern architecture, largely through articulations of its negative relationship
to Utopia. More precisely, if modern architecture is conventionally character-
ized (no matter how questionably) as having been fundamentally utopian in its
aims and delusions, postmodern architecturein its many appearances, from
stylistic historicism to a sort of hypermodernismis normally self-consciously
characterized by adherents as being intrinsically anti-utopian. Following on
from this, postmodern practicesprocesses asmuch as resultsare asserted
as embodying wise resistance to the hazards of utopian dreaming. Having
learned from the apparent utopian failures of the past, architects today like
to imagine themselves as being immune to Utopia, ostensibly assuring that
their work will also have overcome the utopian fiasco of twentieth-century
architecture, particularly in its attempts to remake the city.
Extolling the virtues of wiser postmodernisms as a tonic for the failures
of modernism reveals how contemporary views on Utopia from within archi-
tecture remain decidedly negative. Although it is difficult to ascertain exactly
when modern architecture was first characterized as utopian, architectural

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 Utopian Studies 25.1

historian Tim Benton argues that utopia is most certainly a post modernist
term that wasnt used by modernists in the high period of modernism in
architecture (from the turn of the twentieth century until the late 1950s) and
that in using this term we are applying a current concept rather than one
that was active at the time.1 Surely, negative criticism of orthodox modern
architecture, which began emerging in the 1950s, mostly explains its failings
as a consequence of its transactions with Utopia.
Among all the critics of modern architecture and the utopianism that
is to have caused its downfall, Colin Rowe was perhaps the most influential,
especially by way of his book Collage City, written with Fred Koetter and first
published in 1978 (though large parts of it were informally circulated much
earlier). While there have been other architectural historians, theorists, and
critics who cast a sharper eye on architecture or made a deeper analysis of its
historical development, arguably none have been more influential in shaping
architectural practice in the North American context and the Anglosphere
more generally, either implicitly or explicitly (the reach of which has been
extended worldwide by way of globalization).
Rowe and Koetters book proposed a reading of twentieth-century mod-
ernist architecture and city planning that apparently revealed the fatal flaws that
poisoned it from the outset. According to the authors, the peculiar admixture
of blind faith in technoscience combined with a desire for a return to paradise
ensured that modern architecture would be the enemy of urban life. In short,
a species of technological utopianism was identified as the ultimate culprit.
Overcoming the influence of utopian thinking in architecture was advanced
as the only sure guarantee against repeating the failures of the modern move-
ment and for protecting us from its tyrannical tendencies more generally.
While the failures of modern architecture are by now as well rehearsed
as they are well documented and experienced, it is difficult to see how con-
temporary architectureunencumbered of its putative utopianism and
earlier aspirations to become an international style (akin to the classical
language of architecture that persisted from ancient Greece and Rome until
its final collapse at the end of the nineteenth century)has produced a built
environment superior to that established by modern architecture. Ultimately,
the limited success of the supposedly Utopia-free architecture following in
the wake of modernisms apparent demise encourages a rethinking of the
anti-utopianism promoted by Collage City. A good place to begin is with
the prospect that much of the modern architecture attracting the harshest

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 nathanielcoleman: The Problematic of Architecture and Utopia

criticism was actually dystopian rather than utopiancloser in tone to the

Fordism of Aldous Huxleys (18941963) dystopian novel Brave New World
(1932) and the Taylorism of Yevgeny Zamyatins (18841937) influential dysto-
pia We (1921) than to the utopianism, for example, of Thomas More (14781535),
Charles Fourier (17721837), or William Morris (18341896).2 The unimagined
consequence of this underexplored dimension of modern architecture is
that contemporary (postmodern) architectureno matter how much it may
lack a social dimension or be ideologically neutral, formalist, or collagist
remains confined by the same dystopian Fordist and Taylorist framework that
modern architecture originally succumbed to, largely because the conscious-
ness out of which it emerged is shared with its predecessors, with present-day
architecture even more decisively entrapped within the building industry.
The main criticism of modern architecture identifies the tendency of its
adherents to engage in a species of naive and ham-fisted social determinism
in the belief that form not only could influence behavior but could actually
shape it by transforming the individual and social life that came in contact with
it. Rowe certainly held this negative view of modern architecture as well, but
he went further. For him, the utopianism of modern architecture ensured that
it would forever be at odds with the dynamism of reality. The consequences
of utopianist attempts, as he called them, would be to still time, as a product
of moderns hostility toward history and culture, made manifest in the great
setting and expression of both: the city (especially in attempts to erase it).

Against the City

It is certain that modern architecture, in the guise of urban renewal, set

upon the traditional city with a degree of ferociousness equaled only by the
devastation of total war. There is something to this: if World War II was in
large part an assault on the silted-up inheritance of European civilization at
the hands of technology unhinged from any ethical restraint and organized
according to banal bureaucratic structures, the remaking of the city accord-
ing to the logic of traffic planning and ahistorical modernization has done a
shockingly good job of dismantling the physical forms of the traditional city
that once gave shape to the social life for which it had long been a stage.
The traditional city, wherever it may be found and in all of its manifesta-
tionsfrom antiquity to the nineteenth centuryreveals a trace linking civic life
in the present to its origins in the past and ongoing transformations through time.

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 Utopian Studies 25.1

Although modern architecture was often as brutal in its effect on the traditional
city as it was philistine and pigheadedly ahistorical in its thinking, a most valuable
component of the absolutist utopianism that arguably characterized too much
modern architecture was its earnest, albeit woefully naive, commitment to the
betterment of society, supposedly achievable by making a new, better-organized,
more hygienic, and often strangely parklike world over the traditional city. Rowe
was horrified by this species of supposedly utopian dreaming that demands to be
given shape over the tabula rasa made by clearing away the past.
The alternative espoused by Rowe required the making of forms without
Utopia, which would take flesh as a kind of architecture as free of ideology as it
would be of social dreaming. While Rowes horror at the destructive potential
wrought by the ravages of World War II and the erasure of the traditional city
in the name of renewal and progress was well founded, architects liberated
from any kind of ethical restraint and definitively awoken from their immemo-
rial social dreaming remain hard-pressed to reimagine a role for themselves
within society. Freed from a concern with social housing or the betterment of
societyno matter how often both ended in failurearchitects are now primar-
ily preoccupied with making images, serving developers, or beingfashionable.
Rowe was preoccupied with images too, so he encouraged raiding history
for good examples that could be decontextualized with methods borrowed
from collage, for reuse where and however. The imagined effect of this would
be improvement of the built environment by drawing upon superior historical
models while emptying them of any political or ideological content. By divest-
ing these ready-mades of their social, cultural, political, and historical baggage,
architects and the built environment would be inoculated against the dangerous
excesses of Utopia, what Rowe called the embarrassment of utopian politics.
Overcoming Utopia, for Rowe, would redeem architecture. In actuality,
it has succeeded only in making it even more the handmaiden of overorgani-
zation, commerce, and narcissistic self-indulgence than modern architecture
ever was. The modern neoliberal city divested of social dreaming, and thus
of utopian possibility, threatens to become an ever more dreary setting best
suited to passivity, transfixed by entertainment, consumption, management,
planning, and the banal and bureaucratic organization of human resources.
While this is not what Rowe hoped for, ethical restraint is arguably always ide-
ological in character, and social dreaming is fundamentally utopian. As such,
a built environment made with neither will be overburdened by a stultifying
realism ever out of step with the repressed aspirations of civic life.

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 nathanielcoleman: The Problematic of Architecture and Utopia

Toward a Definition of Utopia in Architecture

Although modern architectures association with Utopia could seem

self-evident, considerations of architecture and Utopia from within the dis-
cipline and by utopian studies scholars are beset by a troubling lack of pre-
cision in defining the utopian dimensions of architecture and urbanism or
how either might actually benefit from encounters with Utopia. If this asser-
tion is accepted, any meaningful recuperation of Utopia for architecture must
begin with clarifying what this might actually offer. In most circles, including
architecture and utopian studies, visual representations of novel forms (and
on occasion their construction) have been enough to designate individual
works of architecture and city plans as utopian. Arguably, an unwillingness
to risk strong declarations as to what makes works of architecture utopian
beyond newnessensures that Utopia will remain an apparent irrelevance in
discussions of architecture. By the same token, in the absence of definition,
conventional readings of orthodox modern architecture as utopian, and as
having actually attempted to give form to Utopia in its heyday, will persist.
Because the preponderantly negative reading of modern architecture as uto-
pian largely derives from profound dissatisfaction with the real failures of
twentieth-century architecture to produce a humane city, Utopia has become
a damning myth for architects and the public alike, even though the overcon-
fident inventors of the modern city rarely if ever asserted Utopia as their aim.3
The association of the city of modern architecture with Utopia by crit-
ics, theorists, and architects, including Jane Jacobs, Colin Rowe, and Robert
Venturi (among others), has less to do with Utopias vocation for envisag-
ing alternatives than with something akin to a stylistic critique that is decid-
edly aesthetical, or formalist, rather than ethical.4 Understood in this way,
Utopia has come to equal impossibility or failure in modern architecture, if
not worse.5 Equally, confusion of visionary and technological utopianism
with a more convincingly utopian dimension in architecture prevails in archi-
tectural discourse and stymies identification of a more precise and thus useful
definition of Utopia in relation to architecture. As a corrective, the concep-
tion of architecture and Utopia introduced here is constructed with refer-
ence to the partial definitions of Utopia and architecture suggested by David
Harvey, Fredric Jameson, Ruth Levitas, Tom Moylan, Lyman Tower Sargent,
and Henri Lefebvre and inevitably draws upon my own earlier clarifications.6
If greater precision in defining the association of architecture and Utopia is

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 Utopian Studies 25.1

not achieved, persisting conceptual confusion risks fixing Utopia as at best no

more than a category of stylistic novelty in architecture.
I would argue that constructing a convincing association of Utopia and
architecture requires the following: social and political content; a significant
level of detail in the description of what is proposed; elaboration of a positive
transformation of social and political life as key to what is proposed or con-
structed; and, not least, a substantiveethical and aestheticalcritique of the
present informed by a critical-historical perspective. In short, a discernible uto-
pian dimension of architecture or urbanism (no matter how partial the claim to
Utopia may be) entails a sustained consideration of both social process and spa-
tial closure. It is also important to underline that clarifying an understanding of
architecture and Utopia is not about taste, indexing likes and dislikes relative
to specific examples of each, or about relative levels of novelty or strangeness.
Rather, a verifiably utopian dimension in architecture and urbanism is, in the
first instance, suggested by literary Utopias (including architectural treatises),
intentional communities, utopian studies, and specific works of architecture.7
While there is real value in considering the associations between archi-
tecture and Utopia, an argument for architecture as Utopia is less promising.
If architecture must embody the four elements introduced above to be called
a Utopia (which is the assertion here), then identifying any individual work of
architecture or larger urban ensemble as a Utopia would be all but impossible.
But shifting the scale somewhat, so that a requirement for total application
(as is associated with Utopia in its blueprint form) is surrendered, concep-
tualizing Utopia as ever unfinishedand acceptably sobecomes possible.
Thinking of architecture as having utopian potential, or a utopian dimension,
enables a more productive way to consider how Utopia could enrich architec-
ture. Rather than requiring an absolute embodiment of the four elements of
Utopia introduced above, some persuasive admixture of them that renders a
work convincingly utopian would be acceptable, even at the level of a single
building, as a partial Utopia. Even so, detailed description of the proposed
transformation, particularly its social dimension, and how this would ostensi-
bly improve conditions, is requisite.8

Untangling Utopia from Visionary

In consideration of the conception of Utopia introduced above, the first

task confronting any attempt to gain a more precise definition of Utopia for

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 nathanielcoleman: The Problematic of Architecture and Utopia

architecture is to untangle the terms visionary and Utopia from one another.
The necessity of doing so derives from the frequency with which they are con-
fused as synonyms in architectural discourse. For example, Neil Spillers recent
Visionary Architecture: Blueprints of the Modern Imagination (2006) and Jane Alison
and Marie-Ange Brayers Future City: Experiment and Utopia in Architecture (2007)
are revealing for the degree to which visionary and Utopia appear to be inter-
changeable when considered across both volumes. Other recent books that
encourage such confusion include Ruth Eatons Ideal Cities: Utopianism and the
(Un)Built Environment (2002) and Franco Borsis Architecture and Utopia (1997).
The first thing one notices in considering the books listed above is their
shared emphasis on image, on representations collected together that are pre-
sumed to indicate Utopia, apparently without the need of much argument to
explain why this might be so. Simply analyzing the book titles reveals other
aspects of how Utopia is commonly construed in concert with architecture.
For example, the title of Eatons book suggests that ideal cities are forms of
Utopia, which might be true, but not in all instances, including a number of
examples in the book that are dubiously so at best. More importantly, the
books title suggests that remaining unbuilt is a key criterion for identifying
Utopia in architecture and urbanism, whether ideal or utopian. Granted, the
titles of the other books listed are somewhat less forthcoming, but examina-
tion of their contents quickly reveals how entrenched the confusion of vision-
ary and Utopia is in considerations of architecture and cities. Among other
possible meanings, visionary suggests something inspired, imaginative, cre-
ative, inventive, ingenious, enterprising, innovative; insightful, perceptive,
intuitive, prescient, discerning, shrewd, wise, clever, resourceful; idealistic,
romantic, quixotic, dreamy; or starry-eyed.9
While Utopias may include all of the qualities associated with visionary,
visionary lacks those very crucial aspects of Utopia that suggest, despite its
association with failure and totalitarianism, how it remains a valuable term for
describing a constellation of possibility and concerns now normally absent from
architecture. The most significant point of distinction between the two terms is
that while visionary is bound up with unreality, Utopias vocation is to act upon
reality, at least when it is concrete rather than abstract (despite its association with
impossibility as often constituting the sum total of common understandings of
it). The term Utopia may appear to be too much of a b urden, for its bad name
and negative associations, to be of much use to the development of enriched
methods for inventing more comprehensive architecture and cities; however,

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 Utopian Studies 25.1

no other term captures the dynamic relation between (architectural) form and
(social) process as well. Thus, despite its taint, the recuperation of Utopia remains
a worthwhile project, albeit an apparently quixotic one.
The key component in the definition of Utopia that distinguishes it from
visionary is the requirement that it take up the elaboration, or depiction, of
a perfect social, legal, and political system. A further definition locates
Utopia squarely within the province of architecture and urbanism in a way
that no definition of visionary does: a place, state, or condition ideally per-
fect in respect of politics, laws, customs, and conditions. Reference to an
ideally perfect place, state, condition, and customs and conditions
will call to mind architectural or urban settings.10 Instauration of a place and
conditions suited to the customs (or habits) of inhabitants persists as a pri-
mary aim of architecture, despite the popularity of more visionary, technical,
and commercial flourishes. The enduring burden of use that architectural
autonomists might like to be free of requires that architects at least attempt
to achieve ideally perfect settings for the habits buildings or urban settings
are intended to situate. Inclusion of ideal in definitions of Utopia, while neces-
sary, creates problems for it: Ideal inevitably suggests perfection, and because
perfection is impossible, aiming at it appears to implicate Utopia in the dubi-
ous belief that perfection might actually be achievable. In this way, Utopia
appears a species of hubris, or arrogance, so profound, or profoundly stu-
pid, in its assumptions and attempts at installation that it is beyond redemp-
tion, especially in the light of the political and architectural excesses of the
twentieth century frequently laid at its doorstep.
Quixotic as attempts to recuperate Utopia for architecture may be, doing
so can find no better ally than philosopher Paul Ricoeur (19132005), who
saw it as potentially generative, facilitating thought beyond the limits of the
given. In Ricoeurs terms, Utopia can be propitious, outlining possibility while
also taking the first steps toward its achievement. More valuable, perhaps, is
Ricoeurs assertion that Utopia has a dual character: It can be pathological, in
just the ways that suggest the term is beyond redemption, but its other side
is constitutive, making possible the articulation of ideals that also make it pos-
sible to imagine conditions better than they are. And while the visionary may
retreat into impossibility as a way of escaping the limitations of the present,
constitutive utopians have a method for thinking beyond those limitations and
for taking the first steps toward them, even if ultimate or total achievement
is never possible, or even the real aim. The constitutive Utopia is inevitably

10

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 nathanielcoleman: The Problematic of Architecture and Utopia

partial, built upon an as if condition to guide both the imagination of alterna-

tives and their partial achievement, as if they already existed, or could.11
Something akin to this reconceptualization of Utopia as method is latent in
philosopher Theodor Adornos challenge that architecture worthy of human
beings thinks better of men than they actually are.12 Implicit in this is the propo-
sition that worthy architecture is less a problem of style, or image, or even form
alone, than an issue of propriety, or appropriateness. However, in the current
climate, extreme experimentalism prevails, taking shape as visionary or novel
architecture, which seems more the product of the vagaries of fashion and the
media than it is shaped around the bodily events or habits of its intended inhab-
itants. Reasonable as it may be to wish it otherwise, doing so articulates such a
dissident position that the very otherness this asserts, in comparison to prevailing
conditions, arguably reveals a utopian stance, in the sense that for architecture
to change (for the better), everything that precedes it must change as well.13

Defining Utopia for Architecture

Most claims to Utopia for architecture are undertheorized at best, in the sense
that the association between Utopia and architecture is either presumed
assumed to require no explanation or argumentor imagined as inevitably
negativecharting impossibility or failure at best and absolutism and inhu-
manity at worst. Alternatively, Utopia is confused with other characteristics
described as visionary, for example, but also misconstrued with determinism
and technological utopianism. As suggested above, the most common pitfall
shared by treatments of Utopia coming from within architecture and urban-
ism is the conflation of visionary with revolutionary, technological optimism,
social ideals, futurism, and, of course, Utopia. While Utopia may encapsulate all
of these other terms, each could happily survive on its own without Utopia.
Because current usage is so confused and contradictory, each use of
Utopia begs for definition, not least to alert the reader to whether Utopia is
intended in its pathological sense of failure or totalitarianism, evident in archi-
tecture and urban projects as a requirement for total application all at once,
with no opportunities for rethinking proposals (or failing that, remaining
forever untested as paper palaces), or in its constitutional sense of taking the
first steps toward improved physical and social conditions while also allowing
for partial achievement and even significant changes to plans in the course
of their realization. Claims that a visionary architectural or urban project

11

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 Utopian Studies 25.1

constitutes a Utopia usually depend on descriptions woefully short of detail

on how the improved setting and society promised (if one is even anticipated)
might actually be achieved or function. The political navet and infeasibility
that characterize visionary architecture and urban projects, often erroneously
ascribed to Utopia, make it difficult to understand how most proposed new
conditions can be said to be realizable or even to suggest a Utopia.
One way to ensure a verifiable utopian dimension to works of architec-
ture and urbanism (in addition to keeping the four elements introduced ear-
lier in mind) would be to stay close to German sociologist Karl Mannheims
(18931947) definition of Utopia. Doing so provides claims to Utopia for archi-
tecture and urbanism with terms of criticism by which they could be analyzed
more closely and carefully. In this way, the incongruence of such claims with
Mannheims definition of Utopia (and those of others) might be more readily
ascertained: However, we should not regard utopia as every state of mind
which is incongruous with and transcends the immediate situation (and in this
sense, departs from reality). Only those orientations transcending reality will
be referred to by us as utopian which, when they pass over into conduct, tend
to shatter, either partially or wholly, the order which prevails at the time.14
Divergence from Mannheims definition is most explicitly observable in the
degree to which most so-called utopian movements in architecture and urban-
ism collapse under the burden of their own ideological hollowness, confirmed
by their inability, in Mannheims words, to shatter, either partially or wholly,
the order which [prevailed] at the time . . . as [they pass] into conduct.15 As
Manfredo Tafuri (19351994) observed, the reproduction function of archi-
tecture is all but inevitable, captured as it is within the cultural norms of the
building industry in particular but more generally within the prevailing socio-
political and economic conditions of capitalism, which led German philoso-
pher of hope Ernst Bloch (18851977) to believe that to be true, as he called
it, architecture would have to wait for radically transformed conditions to be
renewed. In fact, when considered in this way, the utopian prospect of modern
architecture was all but nonexistent; more so, it was rarely if ever the issue.
By mostly rehearsing the commonplaces that dominate considerations
of Utopia, treatments of it from within the discipline of architecture tend
to add little to our understanding of the concept of Utopia, or its impulse,
relative to the invention of architecture or the city. However, these generally
superficial treatments of Utopia reveal their own shadow realm: suggesting
that even though architects and urbanists have all but given up on thinking

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 nathanielcoleman: The Problematic of Architecture and Utopia

beyond the limits of the possible in the present, imagining a way toward
something we might call Utopia is still possible.

Prospects for a Utopian Architecture: The Social and the Political

Another way to clarify what Utopia might be for architecture is to begin with
Saint (Sir) Thomas Mores (14781535) originary coinage of the term in 1516 and
the definition that extends from it. First, it is worth considering that U topia is
a much older word than dystopia. Nevertheless, because Mores Utopia depicts
an imaginary island enjoying a putatively perfect social, legal, and political sys-
tem, Utopia has primarily come to be associated with all such representations
of the same, literary, architectural, and political alike. Utopia, though, contains
within itself two senses that when taken together establish something of a
paradox: referring to the Greek ou (no) and eu (good) plus topos (place), Utopia
connotes both a good place and a no place. By being a good no place, Uto-
pia seems to inscribe within itself the most common criticism of it: impossibil-
ity (as a placeless place). Worse still, because no (actual) place can be (or even
approximate) an ideal state, the value of Utopia seems dubious at best. Even
more troubling, because the ideal state depicted in Utopia requires a degree of
coercion, as all social organizations do, Utopia has come to be associated with
tyranny and is rejected, which deprives the imagination of a concept for possi-
bilities. In the absence of a crucial habit for thinking about how to achieve the
possible-impossible, the culturally dominant conviction that there is no alter-
native has taken on the character of a natural law, leading Fredric Jameson to
observe: Someone once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world
than to imagine the end of capitalism. We can now revise that and witness the
attempt to imagine capitalism by way of imagining the end of the world.16
If capitalism is not only total in its reach but also terminal in itself, the
value of recollecting Utopiaas proposed, or defined, by Moreresides in
the degree to which doing so helps to untangle Utopia from dystopia, and from
visionary as well, and thus charts pathways toward substantive social dream-
ing. As commonly used in architectural discourses and elsewhere, Utopia
seems to always already suggest dystopia. However, as with visionary, the two
are not interchangeable; actually, they signify quite different things. In an
effort to clarify what these are, one might do well to begin with the Oxford
English Dictionary. But begin must remain the operative word. According to the
Oxford English Dictionary, dystopia is an imaginary place or condition in which

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 Utopian Studies 25.1

everything is as bad as possible, the opposite of Utopia. Thus, a dystopian [is]

one who advocates or describes a dystopia, but it also pertains to a dystopia,
whereas dystopianism [indicates] dystopian [qualities] or characteristics.17
Most interesting, perhaps, is that dystopia is a relatively young word, the first
recorded appearance of which in English is dated as 1868: It is, perhaps, too
complimentary to call them Utopians, they ought rather to be called dys-topi-
ans, or cacotopians. What is commonly called Utopian is something too good
to be practicable; but what they appear to favour is too bad to be practicable.18
John Stewart Mills coinage of dystopia actually sheds light on how it and
Utopia differ. The so-called Utopians Mill refers to hardly matter. What is
important is the distinction he makes between Utopia as aiming at something
good and dystopia as aiming at something bad. If this distinction is con-
sidered in the light of dystopian fiction, which reveals grandiose claims to the
good as all but inevitably resulting in the bad, the half-baked urban schemes of
twentieth-century modern architects, from SantElia to Yamasakis Pruitt-Igoe
to Archigram and Bernard Tschumi, as well as Rem Koolhaas, among others,
could in no way be construed as utopian or as having achieved a Utopia.
Setting aside for a moment the tendency of relativism (or extreme subjec-
tivity) to enervate leaps toward the possible-impossible (of Henri Lefebvres
Utopia in the positive), in contemporary social and political thought (identified
by David Harvey as leadingby way of its uncertaintyto a nonproductive
both/and cul-de-sac), Utopia and dystopia really cannot be interchangeable,
as their aims are diametrically opposed. Even when the sense that dystopia is
the opposite of Utopia persists in definitions of the two terms, common usage
tends to muddy the affair. In common parlance, the move is from difference
to a conception of dystopia as inverted Utopia and from there to a kind of
interchangeability between them: a strand of utopianism or dystopianism,
as one writer put it, suggesting their indivisibility.19 Conjoining the two terms
establishes a both/and condition and at best promises only confusion or
at worst presupposes failure. If the first drains Utopia of its oppositional (or
critical) dimension, the second asserts that Utopia is always already dysto-
pia, no matter how initially attractive its proposition. In contrast, it would be
more productive to maintain the either/or divide (arrived at dialectically)
argued for by Harvey in Spaces of Hope (2000). Only by making a deliberate
decision between alternatives, that is, only when one option is cut off, can life
be promised to the other. It is no wonder, then, that the verb to decide carries
within its very meaning a sense of necessary certainty, and judgment as well.

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 nathanielcoleman: The Problematic of Architecture and Utopia

Coming from the Latin decidere, to cut off, by giving the victory to
one side or the other in a choice or conflict, decide can have no truck with
both/and. In point of fact, ethical behavior requires that the ambivalence
of extreme relativism and radical subjectivity be overcome so that something
like provisional certainty can arise, such as utopian imagination requires and
projects. It does not matter that such certainty may be short-lived. The value
of Utopia for imagining superior conditions resides in its vocation for doing
so, even if time and necessity must always defeat attempts at total application:
life lived will always attempt to play itself out in the loosest conformity with
the prescriptions of any plan or social project (even in the face of violence).
If a utopian prospect for architecture and the city, which means for us as
citizens as well, continues to exist, its traces will be found in the already exist-
ing cityhistorical and modern alike and even in the depths of the apparent
dystopia of cities and citizenship deformed by capitalism, neoliberalism, and
speculation. Where to look for such traces is a most pressing question. The
answer is both obvious and obscure: Utopias trace resides in the everyday
life of the city and its inhabitants, especially in those mundane activities of
ordinary citizens that somehow manage to remain free of the dual cancers
of advertising and consumption, which deprive individuals and communities
of whatever lingering agency they may have, not least by transforming each
of us from citizens into shoppers. Lest the stultifying effects of the society of
the spectacle prevail, resistance, in the form of utopian longings and projects
for a more just city, must inevitably begin with the self, through a stubborn
conviction that we can continue to imagine substantive alternatives together.

An Open Question

As has been argued throughout this introduction, the complex relation between
architecture and Utopia remains peculiarly undertheorized. In most conversa-
tions concerning the two, Utopia is, as has been suggested, shorthand for either
escape or failure. The possibility that Utopia might actually offer insights into the
prospect of a better world, by informing both theory and praxis, remains all but
invisible within the discipline of architecture, except when confused with vision-
ary fantasy projects destined to remain on paper or with audacious built works
generally absent of a concern for architectures fundamental social dimension.
Before Utopia can be recuperated for architecture, the commonly refer-
enced sources for the decline of utopian thought in architecture frequently

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 Utopian Studies 25.1

rehearsed in the historiography of twentieth-century modern architecture

and theory must be interrogated. In most stories, rejection of Utopia is
explained causally as a consequence of what amounts to architectural
hubris from the 18th century to the late 1960s. Accordingly, by the 1960s
the impossibility of deterministic architectural social science (misconstrued
as Utopia) to ever deliver on its promises of improvement (the project of
modern architecture) was revealed as not simply improbable but ultimately
impossiblea diversion away from the supposedly real problems of develop-
ment. As architectural historian and theorist Anthony Vidler observes: The
crisis of utopia/utopian thinking [in architecture] was brought about by the
architects vision that utopia could be designed and planned.20
Because architecture could never bring about Utopia, the failure of
this vision, according to Vidler, caused a decline and rejection of utopian
thought in architecture in favor of a pragmatic view of professional prac-
tice and its role in the development of neo-liberal capitalist society.21 Le
Corbusiers grand urban schemes, the failure of modernist planning more
generally, and the destruction of the Pruitt-Igoe public housing project in St.
Louis, Missouri, are brought to mind. Constructed between 1952 and 1955,
three of Pruitt-Igoes blocks were imploded in 1972. The spectacular failure of
Pruitt-Igoe and the equally spectacular manner of its demolition transformed
it into something of an emblem of the failure of Utopia and modernist archi-
tecture alike. Confirming this, Charles Jencks wrote: Modern Architecture
died in St. Louis, Missouri on July 15, 1972 at 3.32 pm (or thereabouts) when the
infamous Pruitt Igoe scheme, or rather several of its slab blocks, were given
the final coup de grce by dynamite.22
Vidlers representation of the rise of utopian thinking in architecture and
its subsequent decline and fall follows this conventional schema: the Utopias
of the eighteenth century, represented in particular for him by Claude-
Nicolas Ledouxs (17361806) ideal city of Chaux (1804) and constructed
Saltworks (177578), which was something of a fragment of the proposed city,
give wayall but teleologicallyto the more extravagant urban plans of Le
Corbusier, and perhaps to the Congrs International dArchitecture Moderne
(CIAM) urbanism more generally, from its founding in 1928 to its demise in
1959, followed by the rise of stylistic (or formalist) and more promising post-
modernisms in the 1960s, when the apparent spiritual bankruptcy of ortho-
dox modern architecture could no longer be denied. It is according to this
schema that the end of orthodox modern architecture, and by some loose

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 nathanielcoleman: The Problematic of Architecture and Utopia

association, Utopia in architecture as well, is identified, in particular, with the

demolition of Pruitt-Igoe.
But the emphasis on failure as a product of design, or as a consequence
of somehow having arrived at the wrong style, arguably forecloses on utopian
possibility in architecture. As K. G. Bristol observes, adoption of the demoli-
tion of Pruitt-Igoe as representative of the failings of modern architecture,
and as a marker of its demise, has at its core the idea that architectural design
was responsible for the demise of Pruitt-Igoe.23 Hiding in this insight is a con-
tribution to sharpening an understanding of just how Utopia might be alter-
natively construed in architecture, shedding light on how any understanding
of Utopia that begins and ends with form (with design), with representation
or spatial closure alone, really must be abandoned before Utopia can make
a meaningful contribution to imagining architecture and the city in all their
depth. As noted earlier, Harvey has conceptualized a first step in this direction
in his development of dialectical utopianism, which turns on the neces-
sity for spatial closure to be adjoined with the equal necessity of social
process in the proposition of any Utopia that might take a concrete form.
The identification of orthodox modern architecture with Utopia, and by
convenient extension with the presumed certain failure of both, is ultimately
self-serving for an architectural profession in need of justification for its move
toward any variety of stylistic postmodernisms in tandem with the disciplines
abnegation of social responsibility, addressed by Bristol in the following:

The two most central critiques of the design of Pruitt-Igoe have

come from successor movements to High Modernism: Postmodern-
ism, and environment and behavior. . . . Pruitt-Igoe provides a con-
venient embodiment of all the alleged failings of Modernism. . . .
Proponents of these new approaches attribute the problems of pub-
lic housing to architectural failure, and propose as a solution a new
approach to design. They do not in any significant way acknowledge
the political-economic and social context for the failure of Pruitt-
Igoe. . . . Pruitt-Igoe was shaped by . . . strategies . . . that did not
emanate from the architects, but rather from the system in which
they practice. The Pruitt-Igoe myth . . . not only inflates the power
of the architect to effect social change, . . . it masks the extent to
which the profession is implicated, inextricably, in structures and
practices that it is powerless to change.24

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 Utopian Studies 25.1

Bristols observation that it was self-serving of architects and critics to pin the
cause of building failure on those aspects of modernist design they disliked
is indeed valuable. However, it also reveals how the genuine social agenda
of twentieth-century modern architecture was rejected on the basis of taste,
arguably justified by associating modernist architecture with Utopia and
Utopia with failure. Emphasis on this helps to highlight how typical recollec-
tions of the crisis of Utopia in architecture and its causes (as told by Vidler,
for example) conform to convention above all else. But such stories actually
raise a more important question: How utopianin generalwas twentieth-
century modern architecture anyway?
It is also worth noting that Bristols assertion that architects are relatively
powerless in determining the outcome, or consequences, of their works unfor-
tunately encourages the view that architects thus need not take any respon-
sibility for what they do. Such resignation would also seem to confirm the
pointlessness of Utopia: if architecture is impotent in effecting social change
because architects are implicated in the structures and practices of the
system within which they operate, then their ability to plan a Utopia must be
null. As bleakly attractive as this proposition might be, accepting it ignores the
persisting existence of possibilities for subverting systems from within, even by
architects entrapped by the forces of speculation that define the building indus-
try. Unfortunately, it appears that this prospect is alien to Vidler, for example,
who believes that the fall of the Berlin Wall, the proclaimed death of commu-
nism and Marx, finished utopian thought very quickly. Perhaps one might say
that utopian thought killed the possibility of utopian thought?25
For Vidler, dissolution of the Soviet Empire, especially the ritualized raz-
ing of the Berlin Wall, amounted to a requiem for Marx and communism,
and with them, Utopiaapparent confirmation that there really is no alter-
native to capitalism, just as neoliberals have long believed. Arguably, this
self-serving conviction does not so much bespeak a crisis of Utopia as it is
a failure of imagination (which makes envisioning subversion from within
all but impossible). While Vidlers association of the fall of the Berlin Wall
with the proclaimed death of communism and Marx may seem reasonable
enough, interpreting this as ensuring the end of Utopia disregards the perma-
nence of desire. In this regard, Zygmunt Bauman observes, Imagining a better
life than the existing one, a life that does not yet exist but one that could and
should existthe eternal source of utopian thinking that never runs dryis
as rich, and possibly even richer than at the time of Sir Thomas More.26

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 nathanielcoleman: The Problematic of Architecture and Utopia

If Utopia is as permanent as is desire, its survival does not depend on

either Marx or communism. Nonetheless, Utopia may be just what Marx
needs now, lending to Marxism a preoccupation with space and the city and
dreams that it lacksa significant enhancement that Harvey in Spaces of Hope
and, earlier, Lefebvre have articulated. More to the point, the much celebrated
failure of communism and Marxismto datemakes Utopia even more rel-
evant now. While Vidler recognizes a correspondence between his own think-
ing and Jamesons, he believes that Utopia is all but impossible outside of
already transformed conditions: an impossible situation that would inevitably
negate any value for Utopia, confirming Vidlers proposition that utopian
thought killed the possibility of utopian thought, because of its hubris, com-
bined with its very impossibility. In this regard, according to Vidler: Fredric
Jameson has proposed that utopian thought whether in prose or design can
offer alternatives in a time of lock-down and melt down. . . . [B]ut for this
to happen, architects have to regain their sense of social responsibility, and
their political sanity, vote for a world ruled by communitarian and socialist
ethics and practices, and not for a world ruled by the myth that the next
technological discovery will provide a solution.27
While there can be no doubt that for architecture to have a credibly uto-
pian dimension architects would have to regain their sense of social respon-
sibility, and their political sanity, is voting en masse for a world ruled by
communitarian and socialist ethics and practices, and against a world ruled
by the myth that the next technological discovery will provide a solution, a
prerequisite for Utopia? Or might the incremental, or piecemeal, achievement
of Utopia be a real possibility? Is it inconceivable that Utopia could be achiev-
able, even partially, on a building-by-building basis, to produce a condition of
numerous Utopias in among the banal products of mainstream architecture
and urban design practices? Might this not reasonably herald the possibility
of alternatives amid more generally unpromising conditions (by making the
first steps toward the realization of other possibilities)? Interestingly, Vidlers
comments above almost paraphrase Frederick Engelss position in Socialism:
Utopian and Scientific (1880), that because Utopia is out of step with history,
it is impossible to imagine and realize until everything preceding has already
changed (which would make it redundant anyway), not least our conceptu-
alization of technology as panacea. Nevertheless, Vidler does offer a glimpse
of an alternative condition: In William Morriss News from Nowhere the
society is served by technology that stays well in the background; technology

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 Utopian Studies 25.1

ruled by community and not by investment and profit.28 Although Morris is

offered, Vidler does so absent of any pronounced conviction that the society
described might be a real possibility, rather than little more than one tentative
possible reality among so many others.
The crossroads of the end of Utopia (apparently ensured by the fall of
the Berlin Wall and Soviet Russia), the end of the world (apparently easier
to imagine than an alternative to capitalism), and capitalism itself (which is
apparently eternal) seems an apt place to turn toward the problem of degen-
erate Utopia and the city, which, after all, pretty much amount to the same
thing in our time. Louis Marins proposition is that a degenerate utopia is
ideology changed into the form of a myth.29 Arguably, one such myth is
capitalism. Another might be modernity or modernism, and a third could be
the inevitability of the contemporary city as the concretization of capitalist
realism. However, the cities that most of us inhabit could conceivably be con-
strued as Utopias by neoliberals, as constituting the best of all possible worlds
for the spread of free markets, or equally so by anti-utopians, who might
see in the modern city Utopia realized, that is, dystopia. In any event, and
whatever ones preconceived notion of Utopia might be, the contemporary
city stands primarily as confirmation of the impotence of corporate capital
to generate a socially cohesive environment.30 As such, it is also arguably no
Utopia, which persists as an open project to be imagined and realized, some-
time and somewhere in the future, in the footsteps of present efforts to define
Utopia for architecture and the city and to establish its spaces.
It is in this sense that Utopia can be understood as lying before usin
both senses of this confounding double phrase. Utopia resides in the past
(before in this instance means behind us) inasmuch as any reconsideration of
Utopia in the present must inevitably begin with the past. But if the sources
of Utopia in the present reside in the past, realization is in the future (before
in this instance means ahead of us). It is this double valence that links the
articles that make up this special issue. Some deal with historical figures, liter-
ature, or places, while others take up analogous considerations that are closer
to us now. However, in each case, the future is what is at issue: What shape
will it take? How might the circumstances of its emergence be as propitious
as possible? These key questions suffuse all of the articles that follow and are
of the greatest urgency to all disciplines but in particular for architecture and
urbanism, which are burdened with providing the stage upon which we play
out the drama of our lives, individually and collectively.

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 nathanielcoleman: The Problematic of Architecture and Utopia

Notes
1. Tim Benton, Session 5: Le Corbusier, in Utopias and Avant-Gardes Study Day
Part 3, Tate Modern and Open University, London, March 25, 2006, Tate Channel,
accessed July 25, 2012, http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/video/utopias-and-
avant-gardes-study-day-part-3.
2. For unintentional support of this reading, see Mauro F. Guilln, The Taylorized
Beauty of the Mechanical: Scientific Management and the Rise of Modernist Architecture
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).
3. For two attempts to domesticate Utopia, see Antoine Picon, Contemporary
Architecture and the Quest for Political and Social Meaning, Satroniana 21 (2008): 17188;
and Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter, Collage City (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1978).
4. See Jane Jacob, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961; New York: Vintage
Books, 1992), 2123; Colin Rowe, The Architecture of Utopia (1959) and Addendum
(1973), in The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa and Other Essays (Cambridge: MIT Press,
1976), 20523, especially 21112; Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour,
Learning from Las Vegas, rev. ed. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1977), 129.
5. For a succinct overview of this conception of Utopia and architecture, see Hilde
Heynen, Engaging Modernism, in Back from Utopia: The Challenge of the Modern
Movements, ed. Hubert-Jan Henket and Hilde Heynen (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2002),
37899, especially 382.
6. For David Harvey, see Spaces of Hope (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
2000). For Fredric Jameson, see Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and
Other Science Fictions (London: Verso, 2005). For Ruth Levitas, see The Concept of Utopia
(Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1990); For Utopia the (Limits of the) Utopian
Function in Late Capitalist Society, Critical Review of International Social and Political
Philosophy 3, no. 2 (2000): 2543; On Dialectical Utopianism, History of the Human
Sciences 16, no. 1 (2003): 13750; and The Imaginary Reconstitution of Society: Utopia
as Method, in Utopia Method Vision: The Use Value of Social Dreaming, ed. Tom Moylan
and Raffaella Baccolini (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007), 4768. For Tom Moylan, see Demand
the Impossible (New York: Methuen, 1986); and Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science
Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia (Oxford: Westview Press, 2000). For Lyman Tower Sargent,
see In Defense of Utopia, Diogenes 53, no. 1 (2006): 1117; Three Faces of Utopianism
Revisited, Utopian Studies 5, no. 1 (1994): 137; Utopia, in New Dictionary of the History of
Ideas, 2005, Encyclopedia.com, accessed July 26, 2012, http://www.encyclopedia
.com/doc/1G2-3424300799.html; and UtopiaThe Problem of Definition, Extrapolation
16, no. 2 (Spring 1975): 13748. See also Nathaniel Coleman, Utopias and Architecture
(Abingdon, England: Routledge, 2005); and N. Coleman, ed., Imagining and Making the
World: Reconsidering Architecture and Utopia (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2011).
7. See Coleman, Utopias and Architecture; and Coleman, Imagining and Making theWorld.
8. For more on the problem of detailed description in relation to Utopia and
architecture, see Nathaniel Coleman, Utopia on Trial, in Coleman, Imagining and
Making the World, 183219.

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 Utopian Studies 25.1

9. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. visionary, adj. and n., accessed July 20, 2012,
http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/223948.
10. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. utopia, n., accessed July 26, 2012, http://www.oed
.com/view/Entry/220784.
11. For a discussion of Ricoeurs encounter with Utopia, see Coleman, Utopias and
Architecture, 5662; see also Paul Ricoeur, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, ed. G. H. Taylor
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1986).
12. Theodor Adorno, Functionalism Today (1965), in Rethinking Architecture, ed. Neil
Leach (London: Routledge, 1997), 15.
13. David Leatherbarrows elaboration on architectures vocation in his talks and
publications is an example of this.
14. Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia (1936; Orlando: Harvest, 1985), 192.
15. Ibid.
16. Fredric Jameson, Future City, New Left Review 21 (MayJune 2003), accessed July
28, 2012, http://newleftreview.org/II/21/fredric-jameson-future-city.
17. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. dystopia, n., accessed July 28, 2012, http://www.oed
.com/view/Entry/58909.
18. John Stuart Mill, Hansard Commons (1868), accessed July 28, 2012, http://hansard
.millbanksystems.com/commons/1868/mar/12/adjourned-debate#column_1517.
19. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. dystopia, n., accessed July 28, 2012, http://www.oed
.com/view/Entry/58909.
20. Anthony Vidler, response to Crisis of Utopia? Editorial Questionnaire, Autoportret,
New York, April 29, 2011, accessed July 29, 2012, http://autoportret.pl/wp-content/
uploads/2011/09/A34_01_Questionnaire.pdf.
21. Ibid.
22. Charles Jencks, The Language of Post-modern Architecture (New York: Rizzoli, 1977), 9.
23. Katherine G. Bristol, The Pruitt-Igoe Myth, Journal of Architectural Education 44,
no. 3 (1991): 16371, at 163.
24. Ibid., 170. For a detailed examination of the multiple causes of failure at Pruitt-Igoe,
see The Pruitt-Igoe Myth, dir. Chad Freidrichs (First Run Feature, 2012).
25. Vidler, response to Crisis of Utopia?.
26. Zygmunt Bauman, response to Crisis of Utopia? Editorial Questionnaire,
Autoportret, New York, May 29, 2011, accessed July 29, 2012, http://autoportret.pl/
wp-content/uploads/2011/09/A34_01_Questionnaire.pdf.
27. Vidler, response to Crisis of Utopia?
28. Ibid.
29. Louis Marin, Utopic Degeneration: Disneyland, in Utopics: The Semiological Play of
Textual Spaces (New York: Humanity Books, 1984), 239.
30. Joseph Rykwert, The Seduction of Place: The History and Future of Cities
(Oxford:Oxford University Press, 2000), 227.

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