Unit 10
Redefining Utopia Bernd Felsinger, CJ Lim
Year 4 Chang Cui, Chun Ting (Sam) Ki, Ka Man Leung, Yolanda Leung, Michael Quach, James Smith, Eric Wong Year 5 Ran (Julia) Chen, Marcin Chmura, Lauren Fresle, Alfie Hope, Ashwin Patel
The Bartlett School of Architecture 2015
Unit 10 would like to thank Simon Dickens for his teaching of the Design Realisation module
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Utopia: an imagined place or state of things in which everything is perfect. The word was first used in the book Utopia (1516) by Sir Thomas More. By definition an unreachable destination, broadsides on utopia have been launched since its very inception. The word ‘utopian’ is more often than not used in the pejorative, pertaining to proposals featuring alternate realities rather than dealing with society’s real and pressing ills. Such criticism misses the point and dismisses the potency of the utopic vision. Plato’s Republic (400 B.C.), Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) and Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1627) were intended as neither fantasies nor blueprints for reification, but reflections on the societies in which they were written. Ebenezer Howard’s garden city, for example, was inspired by the utopian tract, Looking Backward: 2000-1887, by the American lawyer, Edward Bellamy. The third largest bestseller of its time when it was published in 1888, Bellamy’s novel immediately spawned a political mass movement and several communities living according to its ideals. Letchworth Garden City and Welwyn Garden City in the UK are founded on Howard’s concentric plan of open space, parkland and radial boulevards. Housing, agriculture and industry are carefully integrated, and the developments remain two of the few recognised realisations of utopia in existence. The cost of utopia is what lies outside of utopia, the forgotten communities and infrastructure is required to support it, a counterpoint that is sharply observed in the Peter Weir film The Truman Show, depicting the new urbanist town of Seaside in Florida. The urban condition raises recurring as well as fresh challenges for every generation. In the past, architects have not been slow to offer forth their vision of utopia or ideal city, ranging from the polemic (Ron Herron’s ‘Walking City’, 1964) to the serious (Le Corbusier’s ‘Radiant City’, 1935), the futuristic (Paolo Soleri’s arcologies) to the Arcadian (Frank Lloyd Wright’s ‘Broadacre City’, 1932). Utopian visions, whether or not they are accepted, are reflections of society in which they are imagined and have a powerful influence on the public consciousness. This year, students were required to establish an intellectual critical position on the interpretation of ‘Utopia’ and redefine the utopian city through narratives. JG Ballard has written that the psychological realm of fiction is most valuable in its predictive function, projecting emotion into the future. We encouraged expressions of personal ideology, scale and working methods in search of visionary architecture and urban utopian speculations.