A Spectacle of Speculative Architecture

Abstract

125 BOOKS IN REVIEW monographs—Fantascienza italiana (2014), and Distopie, viaggi spaziali, allucinazioni, [Dystopias, Space Travels, Hallucinations, 2015], both reviewed in SFS—is accessible to sf scholars who cannot read Italian. Some occasional mistakes (such as saying that World War I ended in 1917 [186]) and a few inaccurate descriptions (such as that of H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds [164]) can be forgiven, because this is a groundbreaking book that names the right names and mirrors in its discontinuous structure the discontinuity of Italian sf itself, a literature (in its widest sense) whose history must necessarily be non-linear and fractured.—Umberto Rossi, Rome, Italy A Spectacle of Speculative Architecture. Paul Dobraszczyk. Future Cities: Architecture and the Imagination. London, UK: Reaktion, 2019. 272 pp.£18.00/$25 hc. For centuries, the field of architecture and urban design has nourished speculative tendencies. These range from innovations in material and structural technologies, to cities ordered though utopian regimes, all the way to schemes to reshape the planet. Paul Dobraszczyk’s Future Cities: Architecture and the Imagination is one of only a smattering of studies since the 1960s that have begun to think about how this speculative tendency overlaps with science fiction. This question has largely been ignored in the architectural academy where, with a few notable exceptions, the potentials of sf scholarship for architectural speculation are generally unexplored. In this work for a popular audience, Dobraszczyk surveys a range of sf across diverse media—literature, film, comics, and games—and discusses the relationships of these to both built and speculative works of architecture. In placing these two disciplinary domains together, Dobraszczyk is arguing that they both participate in and actively promulgate a culturally shared understanding of the city through the feedback loop of imagination and built work—what he describes as, borrowing from Félix Guattari, an ecology of imagination. The object of Dobraszczyk’s study is to illuminate this shared imagination, which can suggest how architects, planners, and the public engage with the city in the present and imagine new possibilities for the city in the future. Dobraszczyk aims to contrast this imagination of the city with the instrumental or “science-based” speculations that he argues often dominate architectural futurism, speculations usually dictated within the dominant logics of late capitalism: economic forces, resource flows, and market trends. Dobraszczyk wants to demonstrate how a broader imagination opens up alternative possibilities in the face of the many challenges facing the future of the city. His book is organized into 3 sections, each containing 2 or 3 chapters: “Unmoored Cities” examines cities as they are affected by climate change, “Vertical Cities” addresses social division, and “Unmade Cities” discusses the ruination of cities through conflict or decay. While representing only a few of the challenges facing the city of the future, each section surveys speculative works addressing these crises as they are represented through diverse media, as sites to “incubate radical responses” (48) to such future scenarios. The first chapter, for example, discusses cities flooded as the result of climate change, outlining how diverse sources represent the spatial or material adaptations, 126 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 47 (2020) speculative technologies, or aesthetic opportunities that such a crisis offers. These range from the aesthetic space of a flooded, tropical London in J.G Ballard’s The Drowned World (1962) to the new technologies suggested by Wolf Hilbertz and Newton Fallis’s Autopia Ampere (1970) project, an underwater electrified wire mesh accumulating minerals in the water to grow a city from the sea. Rather than undertake a systematic or critical comparison of these adaptations, however, Dobraszczyk prefers to open up the works he has described as a domain of possible avenues that urban adaptation may take. Perhaps Dobraszczyk’s largest contribution is to develop the intermingling of the future urban imaginary as shared cultural resonance between imagined and real practices. In collapsing these disciplinary distinctions, Dobraszczyk begins to validate the experience of both imaginary and real spaces as vehicles for thinking about futures that exceed the disciplinary conceits of the architect, thus opening the discussion of architecture and urban futures to a general audience. Dobraszczyk does not really examine how this collapsed disciplinary...