After the catastrophes of the Second World War, it is Sigfried Giedion who, after a critical analysis why the Modern Movement in architecture and urbanism had lost the battle to more conservative and even reactionary forces in the nineteen thirties, makes a dramatic plea for an intensive collaboration between modern architects and modern artists. “Artists can more easily exist without the general public than the general public without artists. Why? Because mechanization runs amuck when there is no line of direction and when feeling cannot find a suitable outlet”. Even in the few countries where modern architecture had won he finds that ‘something’ is missing in the built environment. “’Something’ is an inspired architectural imagination to satisfy the demand for monumentality”. 2) According to Giedion, this should be a new monumentality that, in contrast to the classical monumentality that returned in the architecture and urbanism of the thirties, should be inspired by modern art, that by now had not only matured but was also understood by wide parts of the population. “What began as necessary structural abbreviations now emerges as symbols”. 3)
Similar lines of thought seem to be the origin of the question posed in this book by Zaha Hadid and Patrick Schumacher. “Every time needs its utopia(s). A society that does no longer reflect its development is uncanny, a monstrosity.” But somehow it seems that they particularly mean the current time. In a recent interview, Hadid remarks that we are living in “very uninspired times”, in which “the extravagant” has no place any more. 4)
However, Giedion’s new monumentality was embedded in the utopias of modern urbanism. How is that today? In the nineteen forties and fifties, there may indeed have been a more widespread consensus about the symbolic meaning of modern art. Modern art today takes very different forms that cannot so easily be characterized as symbols. So how could we think the reconnection of art, architecture, urbanism and utopia again?
From the first frontispiece of Thomas Mores Utopia from 1516 on, utopias have always been linked with architectural representations, even though they did not always correspond to the text. The first frontispieces of Mores utopia depicted medieval landscapes that were very different from the regular planning described by him. On the other hand, one might say all architectural projects have utopian aspects, because they all deal with improvements of life in a particular situation. Some architecture is even called utopian or visionary because it proposes, wants to trigger or can only be realized in a completely different society.
The question is however what utopia we would be talking about and what role architecture could play in the achievement of it. Alan Greenspan, the director of the American Federal Reserve Bank, is for example greatly influenced by the ideas of Ayn Rand as she expressed them in among others ‘The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism’ and ‘Anthem’. As such, these ideas largely influence every citizen on earth already. Indeed, Rand’s ideas find their architectural counterpart in her novel ‘The Fountainhead’. As the secret word in ‘Anthem’ is EGO one might argue that the recent phenomenon of ‘star architects’ is immediately related to Rand’s utopia as it is realized through recent political developments that are largely driven by the United States’ monetary politics. 5)
Over the last 25 years or so it has indeed become increasingly difficult to speak about utopia. Jean-François Lyotard proclaimed the end of the great narratives in his highly influential book ‘La condition postmoderne’ in 1979 and after the fall of the communist empire Francis Fukuyama even spoke of ‘The End of History and the Last Man’. 6) The ‘New Economy’ was supposed to make an end to the phenomenon of recessions. The architectural theoretician Manfredo Tafuri destroyed the belief that architecture could bring us a new and better society and that all attempts to do so would finally be absorbed by capitalism already in his book ‘Progetto e utopia’ from 1973. 7) Around this year almost all individual groups that produced radical architecture in the sixties, from Haus Rucker Co to Superstudio and from Constant Nieuwenhuys to Archigram, dissolved. In his essay ‘L’Architecture dans le boudoir’ from 1974 Tafuri furthermore speaks of the defeat of the avant-garde that leaves architects with no choice but to give up all architectural ideology, all dreams about its social functioning and to reduce all utopian residues to a zero degree and instead concentrate on the play with historical fragments of a language of which the code has been lost –all of this in the service of at least saving Architecture. 8) This is indeed what the official architectural debate has been focusing on ever since, notwithstanding the attempts to formulate new cosmologies as well, that were mainly inspired by philosophical and scientific sources like those of Gilles Deleuze, chaos theory, complexity and so on. Even the rise of new computer technologies was rather seen and applied in the light of these cosmologies than in the light of utopian speculations, which is remarkable as the rise of new technologies usually triggers whole series of utopias and dystopias. The only aspect of this line of thought that could be considered utopian in the Deleuzian tradition is the deconstruction of Benthams Panopticon in Deleuze’s interpretation of Michel Foucault: the striation of the panopticon, read as a diagram, is than replaced by other diagrams that try to produce smooth surfaces that allow for a freer inhabitation after a nomadic model. 9) This model is strongly based on buildings and depends on individual architects and clients, which largely hinders the utopian potential. But one could also criticize it on another level, as the philosopher Gillian Howie has recently done in her book ‘Deleuze and Spinoza’. In Howie’s analysis it is exactly the inspiration Deleuze’s takes from nature that is problematic, as it interprets the world from a mystical romantic perspective and thereby brings it under a fatalistic spell. She suggests that it is no coincidence that Deleuze’s thinking is so widely received in a particular historical context in which we speak of ‘the end of man’ and at the same time liberal individualism is booming. 10) Natural and organic metaphors that try to summarize the metaphysics as expressed by nature are of course part of the tradition of liberal individualism and are for example worked out in Adam Smith’s theory of the ‘Invisible Hand’ as it has been revitalized by authors like Kevin Kelly in his book ‘Out of Control, The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World. 11)
However the last couple of years suddenly an almost desperate longing for new utopia’s in the sense of ideological constructs that might give direction to the development of society is more and more widely felt. This explains the largely enthusiastic reception of the book ‘Empire’ by Antonio Negri and Michel Hardt that Fredric Jameson characterizes admiringly as a “prophetic call for energies to come”. Slavoj Zizek even considers it as “a rewriting of the Communist Manifesto”.12) Parallel to this it is striking that almost forgotten architectural and urban utopias like Constant’s ‘New Babylon’ and Yona Friedman’s ‘Ville Spatiale’ are shown in this year’s Documenta in Kassel, while Paolo Soleri was already rehabilitated at the Biennale in Venice in 2000.
I share the desire for new utopias, but just like the curators of the Documenta and the last Biennale –exhibitions that usually focus on recent and contemporary work- today I don’t see them appear clearly yet as bold visions that could compete with the ones we know from for example the architects of the French revolution, the German expressionists or the Russian Constructivists yet. That is: I do not see them as aesthetical models. What I do see however is that people set up a climate, lay the foundations and produce the knowledge on which eventually utopias could blossom. I refer to the overwhelming amount of research that has been done over the last ten years or so. The 2002 Documenta showed many examples from the art world that try to investigate and question existing realities critically, sometimes even resulting in works that come closer to photojournalism and documentary filmmaking than to art. Research has become a key issue again in the debate on architecture and urbanism as well. Architects and architectural offices like Stefano Boeri and Multiplicity, Rem Koolhaas and OMA/AMO, Raoul Bunschoten and CHORA, Winy Maas and MVRDV; institutions like the Harvard Project on (what used to be called) the City, the Berlage Institute, the Bauhaus in Dessau and ETH Studio Basel; galleries like Arc en Rêve in Bordeaux and the Triennale in Milan; and traveling exhibitions like Cities on the Move set up ambitious projects that try to understand recent changes in the urban environment. All these projects focus on the broader social, economical and cultural context of architectural and urban design instead of on projects, although projects done by the architects that carry out the research are inevitably seen in the light of their research. This already seems an enormous change since a period in which architecture withdrew itself in the 'boudoir'. But what about utopia?
In an essay in the Documenta catalogue, Molly Nesbit gives a possible answer to that question when she refers to a discussion between Ernst Bloch, the philosopher of hope, and Theodor Adorno in 1964. “Adorno declared that there could be no picture of utopia cast in a positive manner, there could be no positive picture of it at all, nor could any picture be complete. He went far. Bloch would follow him part of the way, then stopped short. He summoned up a sentence from Brecht and said it contained the incentive for utopia. Brecht had written “Something’s missing”. “What is this ‘something’?” Bloch asked. “If it is not allowed to be cast in a picture, then I shall portray it as in the process of being. But one should not be allowed to eliminate it as if it really did not exist so that one could say the following about it: ‘It’s about the sausage.’ Therefore, if all is correct, I believe utopia cannot be removed from the world in spite of everything, and even the technological, that must definitely emerge and will be in the great realm of the utopian, will only form small sectors. That is a geometrical picture, which does not have any place here, but another picture can be found in the old peasant saying, there is no dance before the meal. People must first fill their stomachs, and then they can dance.” The sausage and the dance could be taken as an aphorism for Marxism, which he explained, is the only precondition for a life lived in freedom, happily, meaningfully. “Bloch and Adorno were taking utopia as the ground upon which to draw the line between life and death.” Nesbit continues. “As they tossed the questions back and forth, it is clear enough that the picture and the sausage-dance were secondary to the lines of metaphysics. But what of the picture and its vision? Is the utopian picture itself to be considered missing, or may we see utopia in a picture with something missing, a picture that comes with empty pockets?””13)
Maybe Tafuri started out from the wrong expectations. Maybe when we would step aside for a moment from the expectation that the Modern Movement’s main argument was to change things and try to perceive it as a collection of individuals that in the first place were facing the same or similar problems –the growth of metropolises, the rise of the masses, congestion, pollution etcetera- and had to find solutions for them, we could still learn a lot. Of course the solutions of Le Corbusier, Otto Neurath, Van Eesteren and Van Lohuizen, Hilberseimer and others were produced with very specific political forms of organization in mind –that were by the way very different from each other- but it seems as if, particularly in recent architectural history, only the visionary aspects of their work have been emphasized and criticized. And visionary projects always have to fail. That does not dismiss their necessity: they do indeed offer a perspective that can be debated and reflected upon. It is in the nature of their single perspective that they have to be compromised in order to take effect.
But maybe when we try to see the projects of the Modern Movement in a different way, not so much as visions but as a means to understand the reality the architects and urbanists were facing at the time and focus on their research, the tragic doom of failure that lays over these projects since the nineteen seventies disappears. When we see them as individual moments of synthesis in a collective process of modernization that could never be steered by one person or body, by one ideology or another, they appear differently. Not as words or syllables in a language that could just be repeated over and over again, but as essays, as landscape paintings, photographs, snapshots of a city at a particular moment in time, using the media of architecture: plan, section, elevation and perspective. What we would be interested in then is not the projective, visionary aspect of them, but the analytical side: the ‘sausage’, as Bloch would call it, the raw material they were made from and that the visions processed. We would be looking for cities that are hidden in these 'visionary' cities or that are even covered up by them. It is for example no coincidence that Le Corbusiers City for 3.000.000 inhabitants has exactly the same population size as Paris in that époque. Similarly, the calculations and designs of Van Eesteren and Van Lohuizen for the general extension plan for Amsterdam were based on an extrapolation and reshuffling of the data they found in that city. Maybe this analysis could help us doing research today, not only by taking their methods literally as it happens now, but by analyzing the analysis critically and comparing it to the problems we are facing today, that are so different and in sometimes even contradictory to the problems that people were facing one hundred years ago. That is necessary, because while the early modernists dealing with cities that were closed entities, with a clear distinction from each other and from the countryside, today we are dealing with urbanized regions that are globally interconnected and interdependent in complex relationships. Were the early modernist visions thought for nation states, today nation states are in a process of dissolving. Were the solutions of the modernists thought as solution for the masses, today we will somehow have to deal with the process of individualization. 14) These issues are not just important to set up a coherent research program that would define utopia implicitly as ‘something missing’, but they are also crucial to understand why it is so difficult to construct an explicit contemporary utopia. Remember that Thomas More’s original Utopia was an island and that most utopian visions depict a closed system or entity. It is also such an enormous task because, as Ulrich Beck writes, “any attempt to come up with a new concept that would provide social cohesion must depart from acknowledging that individualism, diversity and skepticism are deeply rooted in Western society”.” 15)
If we agree that new utopian models would have to find their points of departure in the given reality, that they would have to offer at least a general idea about a political organization, that they would have to deal with the forces of globalization and respect individualization, we can suddenly distinguish two contemporary architectural, or rather urbanistic utopias. One is a series of projects or ‘machines’ developed by Winy Maas and MVRDV, the other the work of Raoul Bunschoten and CHORA.
Maas’ utopias stand in the tradition of utopias that, in an answer to scarcity, believe they can calculate the tension in society between needs and resources. We find this already in More’s utopia, in which the inhabitants are consciously aware that the pleasures they enjoy do not get in the way of greater common interests. We also see the continuation of this tradition in Bentham’s panopticon that he saw as a machine that would function completely independent from the motives of the people involved but produce behavior ‘automatically’. 16)
MVRDV’s Datatown pushes the urban projects of Le Corbusier, the early Hilberseimer and notably Van Eesteren and Van Lohuizen one step further to the scale of a nation state. 17) It is a series of theoretical exercises on an autarchic citystate, Datatown, of 400 by 400 kilometers and 241 million inhabitants. Therefore, Datatown would be the densest place on earth. This density would force the inhabitants to come up with collective decisions about their behavior and the way they organize their country spatially to avoid ecological catastrophes. Datatown shows how collective behavior has an effect on the spatial organization of a country or city. Therefore it makes use of existing statistical data. The effects of these statistical data about collective decisions are translated into ‘stuff’ -buildings, streets, cities and landscape- that are projected as three-dimensional simulations on four sides of a cube. The visitor of this cube can experience the city and how it changes with changes in collective behavior. So he can see the effect on the city when all its inhabitants decide to become vegetarians, when they deal with waste in a particular way, when all energy is produced by the wind etcetera. In each case, several options are shown. The idea is of course that visitors of this cube are helped to bring out their vote on or in the national government. Datatown presupposes a representational democracy as we know it in the Western world in the most classical way. The major weakness of the project is of course that it can only operate if we would accept that nations are indeed autonomous units, whereas we know that the concept of the nation state is in crisis and that therefore the concept of a representational democracy is in crisis as well. The other weakness lies in the use of statistical data that are used in the classical way the early modernists and notably Van Eesteren and Van Lohuizen would use them. That means the model presupposes not only a society that largely consists of masses, but in turning this into a design method it also presupposes that everything is distributed equally based on a political consensus. It presupposes in other words a social democracy or a welfare state. In more recent and even more utopian ‘machines’ developed at the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam, like the ‘Region Mixer’, Maas takes the whole world as his territory, dealing with flows of migration, food and energy production. Again, the ideal would be a more or less equal distribution of resources, income and people. The Region Mixer, basically a piece of software, has therefore an ‘equalizer function’ like the ones we know from stereo sets. Of course, this model again presupposes some kind of very global representational democratic body like a more powerful version of the United Nations to operate it. Apart from that it is interesting that when Maas treats the whole world as if it were a modernist city, he finds the same problems of externalization as the modernists. Where in the completely planned version of the Netherlands Van Eesteren and Van Lohuizen in the end needed an artificial piece of land in the sea, the Maasvlakte, as a kind of safety valve to accommodate all undesired and unforeseen functions, Maas comes up with a satellite-like piece of land for food production that would circle around the earth. It will be developed in collaboration with NASA.
Bunschoten’s utopia starts out from very different premises. As his point of departure he takes Spinoza’s concept of politics, as it has also been revitalized recently by Gilles Deleuze and notably Antonio Negri. 18) In Negri’s interpretation, Spinoza refuses to see the political community as an order that is imposed on individual desires from outside or in the form of a social contract. Even different forms of representational democratic systems are considered as residues of the single transcendent power of the monarch. Instead, society is the quasi-mechanical (non-dialectic) result of interactions between individual forces that, by uniting themselves, form a collective power. As in nature, political relationships are nothing but the structures that the collective productive power appropriate and renews by unfolding itself. 19) For Spinoza, these relationships and structures are always ‘right’, without attributing any moral consequences or opinions to them. In his work Bunschoten traces the seeds of this productive power in reality by looking for individual initiatives and by introducing game structures he suggests or simulates possible liaisons between them to suggest the production of larger spatial organizations. To trace these initiatives Bunschoten developed a method in which beans are thrown on a map of a city after which individual participants go to the location to discover the forces that are at play there. They record these forces in the form of small narratives and develop possible scenarios for their further development in combination with others in a potentially endless process of folding and unfolding. The beans are of course a metaphor for the potential germination of these forces into a new organic whole. Bunschoten’s most recent projects take the form of websites on which a myriad of those germinations can be found and followed. Rather than relying on the traditional governmental planning organizations, he takes these individual initiatives or prefers NGO’s or ‘spontaneous’ organizations as caretakers of larger projects.20)
If we agree that the end of utopian thinking is largely connected to what Lyotard calls the end of the grand narrations, it is interesting to see that Bunschoten introduces new forms of narration, that we also see developing on the Internet and in new media. In this concept, the different case studies as we see them at the last Documenta, in Stefano Boeri’s research as he develops it with his group Multiplicity and the research I do myself at the Berlage Institute, that now appears so desperately fragmentary and often so frustratingly analytical and merely critical, this research in which there is always ‘something missing’ could potentially be connected to produce a new force. Could this become a new form of utopian architecture? But what about the architect than who traditionally finds his legitimation in exactly the kind of grand narratives Lyotard has dismissed?
In his introduction to the French translation of Antonio Negri’s book on Spinoza, ‘The Savage Anomaly’, A. Materon writes that he completely agrees with Negri, where he says that here we find the antipodes of the trinity Hobbes-Rousseau-Hegel: “And I recognize with him the immense revolutionary significance and the extraordinary actuality of this doctrine: the right, that is the power and nothing else; the right that the holders of political power possess, that is the power of the crowd and nothing else: that is the collective power that the crowd allows them to have and allows them again but that they can also withdraw from their disposition. When the people revolt, it has the right to do so by definition and, ipso facto, by definition the right of the sovereign disappears.” 21) A revolution or uprising is therefore legitimized when it succeeds. We could say the same about Bunschoten’s architectural utopia and we know therefore that that will take a while as for now the powers of the state –even if they are disintegrating- and the powers of capital –even if they soften up- are still quite dominant. Here I have to remind again of Gillian Howie’s difficulties with the actuality of Deleuze’s thinking and his interpretation of Spinoza. 22) In terms of utopian thinking relying on a metaphysical reading of nature is problematic because, as Colin Bird writes in ‘The Myth of Liberal Individualism’: “I can believe that the state is really an organism and yet deny that it has any moral significance whatsoever. In fact that a jellyfish is ‘organic’ does not elevate it to a moral status equivalent or beyond that of human beings. Similarly, I can deny that collectivities or states are in any sense organic or anthropomorphic and yet claim that they have a greater claim on our moral attention than mere human individuals.” 23)
1)See: Hans Achterhuis, De erfenis van de utopie, Ambo, Amsterdam, 1998
2)Sigfried Giedion, Architecture you and me, the diary of the development, Cambridge (Mass.), 1958
3)Idem
4)See: Wojciech Czaja, Adonis auf Krücken, Spectrum………
5)See note 1
6)Jean-François Lyotard, La condition postmoderne, Editions de Minuit, Paris, 1997; Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, Free Press, New York/Maxwell Mcmillan/Toronto, 1992
7)Manfredo Tafuri, Progetto e Utopia, Rome, 1973
8)Manfredo Tafuri, L'Architecture dans le boudoir, The language of criticism and the criticism of language, Oppositions, 3, 1974 pp.37-62
9)Bart Lootsma, The diagram debate, or the Schizoid Architect, in: Marie Ange Brayer, Béatrice Simonot (ed.), Archilab Orléans 2001, Mairie d’Orléans, Orléans, 2001
10)Gillian Howie, Deleuze and Spinoza, Aura of Expressionism, Palgrave, Basingstoke/New York, 2002
11)Kevin Kelly, Out Of Control, Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, New York, 1994
12)Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri, Empire, Harvard University Press, Cambridge (Mass.)/London, 2000. The quotes of Slavoj Zizek and Fredric Jameson appear on the back cover.
13)Molly Nesbit, The Port of Calls, in: Heike Ander, Nadja Rother (ed.), Documenta 11-Platform 5, Exhibition Catalogue, Hatje Cantz Publishers, Ostfildern, 2002
14)Bart Lootsma (ed.), Research for Research, Berlage Institute, Rotterdam, 2001
15)Ulrich Beck, Je eigen leven leiden in een op hol geslagen wereld, ARCHIS 2/2001
16)See note 1
17)MVRDV, Metacity/Datatown, 010 Publishers, Rotterdam, 1999
18)Spinoza, Tractatus politicus, in: Opera Posthuma, Jan Riewertz, Amsterdam, 1677, a selection of which was published in: Spinoza, Hoofdstukken uit de politieke verhandeling, Boom, Meppel/Amsterdam, 1985; Gilles Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, Zone Books, New York, 1992; Antonio Negri, The Savage Anomaly, The Power of Spinoza’s Metaphysics and Politics, University of Minnesota Press, Mineapolis/Oxford, 1991; See also note 10
19)A. Matheron in his introduction to the French translation of Antonio Negri’s ‘The Savage Anomaly’ in the introduction by W.N.A. Klever to ‘Hoofdstukken uit de politieke verhandeling’, see note 16.
20)Raoul Bunschoten and CHORA, Urban Flotsam, 010 Publishers, Rotterdam, 2001
21)See note 17
22)See note 8
23)Colin Bird, The Myth of Liberal Individualism, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge/New York/Melbourne, 1999
