Max Bruinsma
Open Set 2012
Design yet When Thomas More wrote his Utopia, almost 500 years ago today, he addressed questions of his time. Like who was in charge: the King or God? The people’s representatives or God-given authorities? And how do you organize society, based on these premises? Thomas More is a paradoxical figure: philosophically, he is close to a protestant or even humanist idea of man’s responsibility for his own wellbeing, but he is also a catholic priest, a bishop defending religion’s independence of worldly powers. At the same time he is a law-abiding member of an authoritarian government – who refuses to recognize the King’s authority over the church. These paradoxes cost him his life; he was decapitated on behest of his king, Henry VIII, in 1535. Utopia is More’s vision of a perfect world – a perfectly orderly and reasonable social arrangement. How do we live together? For starters, by all being equal, by having no private property, and by sharing everything. Sounds socialist? Well, you could say that Thomas More’s Utopia is a very early example of communist thinking, if you leave out the fact that it was also 0.4
religiously inspired. Every Utopia is of its time – another paradox, considering the universal and timeless claims of all utopias. Utopia is mostly translated as ‘non-place’ – ‘u’ translating from the classic Greek as ‘negative’ –, but in English the pronunciation of the word is indistinguishable from that of ‘Eu-topia’, which would translate as ‘good place’. Thomas More, in short, already starts a complete discourse in the wordplay he hides in the title: the good place is a nonplace, in other words, the ideal world is an impossible, unreachable world. It is intended as a symbol of a place that reflects our best ideas of society – not as a blueprint for its realization. Much like religion and politics ages ago, design started as an ideological tool, as a tool to promote ideas of a better world in the hereand-now of the 1920s. This view of design has of course a great history in architecture, which since its early beginnings in Babylon, Egypt, China, India and Greece has been applied to materialize a vision of the ideal world. The ‘ideal city,’ the notion of which in the West goes