Dystopia: A Positive Narrative for Architecture Dominique Rouillard
Dystopia, as experienced during the radical trends of the 1960s, reveals the narrative nature of the architectural project. The dissonance created by the sharp contradiction between the terms “project” and “dystopic” sets counter-utopia as the locus of narration, holding no plausible content for the project, eliminating the fiction of utopia (or counter-utopia).1 What remains, then, is just the narrative itself—the uncovered truth of the architectural project. This essay will trace the advent of the dystopic project, from the transient introduction of negative motifs to the point when mad fiction prevailed over reasonable function to became the project’s true driver. A rediscovery of the counter-utopic and dystopic nature of the architectural project emerged during the preparation stage of the exhibition La Ville, Art et architecture en Europe 1870–1993, which opened at Beaubourg in 1993.2 The exhibition showed for the first time, and in a spectacular manner, what architects had been pondering for almost a century and a half: a means to control the development of the city and the urban future of humanity. Its mind-blowing iconography upset a few architects and critics, but at the same time ensured the event’s massive success.3 Among the heroes who had lapsed into oblivion were Superstudio and Archizoom—along with their fiction-projects; their incomprehensible texts; and their iconoclastic vocabulary, concepts, and formulae. These were surprisingly akin to those associated with two architects who, nearly two decades later, were in the limelight of the architectural and intellectual scene: Bernard Tschumi and Rem Koolhaas (also the two frontrunners of the 1982 Parc de la Villette competition). Studying the movement in parallel with these two architects initiated my understanding of the period, forming the basis for my conclusion to Superarchitecture.4
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