Utopia Rediviva, 1960-1972 Anthony Vidler
Utopia and the idea of the city are inseparable Colin Rowe, 1959
Utopia 1960 In January of 1959, the Cambridge University student journal Granta published what it called a “Utopia Supplement” (fig. 1).1 Under its new editor, André Schiffrin, five articles considered the state of play evoked by the concept of utopia. The “Supplement” itself was put together by the young James Cornford, who had just gained his First in History at Trinity. Cornford, son of the idealist John Cornford who had died in the fight against fascism in Spain, and grandson of the classicist Francis Cornford, translator and commentator of Plato’s Republic and Timaeus was well schooled in the history and practice of utopian thought, Cornford and his fellow-contributors were adamant in their attempt to reclaim a form of utopian discourse, despite the fact that, as he admitted in his introduction, the word “Utopian” itself had become a pejorative: “It may be taken to mean ‘pleasant but impossible,’‘unpleasant but impossible,’ ‘quite inconceivable,’ and so on. It suggests that writing Utopias is dangerous, unprofitable of just plain silly,” he wrote, in marked opposition to the prevailing sense that the very notion of “utopia” historically (and in the present) was closely associated with totalitarianism, an anathema following the rise of Fascism and National Socialism in the 1930s. For, in the immediate aftermath of the traumas of World War II, utopia was decidedly out of favor, castigated from Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment to
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