Utopia

Definition

Utopia is the imagined or projected place of ideal social and spatial organization — literally "no-place" (ou-topos) but also "good-place" (eu-topos). In architecture, utopia has a vexed status. Benjamin treats modern architecture as driven by "collective wish-images" — utopian longings materialized in glass, steel, and new forms of dwelling — that are the embryonic figures of a future social order. But Tafuri famously declared the end of utopia for architecture: the avant-garde's freedom was "freedom for techniques" absorbed by capital and the state, leaving "form without utopia." The Situationists split utopia into formal (Constant's New Babylon, a spatial utopia of play, dismissed by the SI as "technocratic") and material (Debord's revolutionary détournement, the transformation of everyday life itself). The tension between utopia as spatial blueprint and utopia as revolutionary practice is the legacy this wiki inherits.

Key Thinkers

• Walter Benjamin — wish-images; the utopian charge of modern architecture.
• Manfredo Tafuri — the end of utopia: "form without utopia."
• Guy Debord — material vs. formal utopianism in the Situationist International.
• Jean Baudrillard — the radicality of utopia against revolution-as-finality: utopia "wants only the spoken word" and "would have nothing to do with the concept of alienation," since every man and every society is "already totally there, at each social moment, in its symbolic exigency" (1973/1975). See revolution-as-finality.

Related Concepts

• Unitary Urbanism — the Situationist utopian project.
• New Babylon — Constant's spatial utopia for nomadic play.
• Cooperative Housekeeping — the domestic-reform utopia: the commoned laundry at settlement scale.
• The Christian House — the utopia's unit: the house as moral instrument.
• Ideology — the critical dismissal of utopia as ideological projection.
• Modernism — the movement that carried utopian wish-images.
• Revolution as Finality — the deferral Baudrillard's utopia refuses: "The Revolution as 'end' is in fact equivalent to the autonomization of the means."
• Cultural Revolution — the revolution made against the economic-political revolution, with which the present-tense utopia is paired.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Tower Block (Glendinning & Muthesius 1994) — the Welfare State Utopia and the 'Utopia on Trial' frame: the postwar consensus in which "the strength of the spirit of universal renewal… seemed to bring all kinds of Utopia within reach" (p. 96), with 'community' as the Utopian concept's "more diffuse and more down to earth" synonym (ch. 12); the title-question "'Utopia' on Trial?" (ch. 33) and the diagnosis that "Utopia has in recent years had a very confused and unhappy history… identifying the word exclusively with the most recently rejected Utopia: that of Modern housing" (p. 327); and the conclusion's verdict — "the major 'culprit' must be the polarisation of Utopia itself" (p. 327), with the historian's charge to "reassess the 'Dystopia' of the seventies and eighties — Modern Housing" rather than fuel "a further extension of cumulative 'Heritage'" (p. 327). The register extends Benjamin/Tafuri's utopia problem from doctrine into administration: utopia as the values of providers, "propagated… to persuade recipients of the desirability of the kinds of solutions provided" (p. 325).
• Benjamin for Architects — wish-images and the utopian charge.
• Unitary Urbanism — utopianism in the Situationist International.
• A Christian House (Beecher & Stowe 1869/2006) — the Christian-reform utopia, a lineage outside the avant-garde/situationist frame: "Let us suppose a colony of cultivated and Christian people… emigrating to some of the beautiful Southern uplands" with "a central church and schoolroom, library, hall for sports, and a common laundry, (taking the most trying part of domestic labor from each house)" (p. 48) — a planned community whose spatial program (shared facilities, privatized family houses, free labor in a mild climate) is justified by economy and piety, its surplus "laid up in heaven" through diffusion "among the poor." The domestic-reform utopia arrives the same year as the first cooperative-housekeeping proposals — spatial utopia as housework reform. See cooperative-housekeeping.
• The Classical Language of Architecture — Ledoux's unpublished ideal city (1805) as "a dream city for a dream society," the Enlightenment ancestor of Le Corbusier's Ville Radieuse; Summerson notes the analogy (drawn by 1920s scholarship) "is not to say that Le Corbusier was influenced by Ledoux."
• 'Decorators May be Compared to Doctors' (Ferry 2003/2006) — the domestic-utopian form and its technique (1876): the Garretts' 'Houses As They Might Be' returns to the imaginary ordinary London house of 'Houses As They Are' "to redecorate it, creating a Utopian vision of the 'Queen Anne' – style home" (Ferry, p. 112), with Ferry's note that "The inversion is a classic technique of Utopian fiction" (note 11, p. 112) — the utopia built not by projecting elsewhere (no colony, no ideal city, no New Babylon) but by inverting the existing room: the same house, the same dining room, redecorated against the Paterfamilias's resistance. The utopia's content is modest and material — neutral tones, soft velvets, well-constructed eighteenth-century-model furniture, an "affordably" transformed Drawing Room (p. 113) — making this the wiki's smallest-scale and most achievable utopia: the everyday interior as utopia's unit. See queen-anne-style, separate-spheres, domestic-interior.
• The Mirror of Production (Baudrillard 1975) — the radicality of utopia against revolution-as-finality: utopia is not a future state but the refusal of the deferral that separates present from future — "Each man is totally there at each instant. Society also is totally there at each instant" (ch. V, "The Radicality of Utopia," p. 166) — and the enclosure of the exploited within the single historical possibility of taking power is named the revolution's worst diversion: "To enclose the 'exploited' within the single historical possibility of taking power has been the worst diversion the revolution has ever taken" (ch. V, "The Radicality of Utopia," pp. 166–167). Utopia's form of time "must be abolished" because the deferral itself is repression. See revolution-as-finality, cultural-revolution.
• Jean Baudrillard: The Defence of the Real (Butler 1999) — the book-length secondary study that reads Baudrillard "in his own terms": the paradox of the sign (paradox-of-the-sign), simulation as the realization rather than the loss of the real (simulation-hyperreality), seduction as the limit to simulation, and the doubling power of theory (doubling, the-real, double-strategy).
• source-notes/baudrillard-1983-fatal-strategies