Abstract
New Utopian plans for liberated urban spaces emerged during the post-war era with the work of the Lettrist (LI), Situationist International (SI), and specifically Constant Nieuwenhuys, a Dutch painter turned architect and sculptor who understood urban planning as intimately linked to nomadism, play and creativity. Influenced by the bombed detritus of European capitals and the possibilities of new technology, Constant’s plans for a future society were post-revolutionary, with unseen automated factory production and spaces for innovation that were elevated on stilts. Constant’s conflicting ideas are referenced and emulated in Black Rock City – a short-term encampment erected every year for the Burning Man festival in the desert of Nevada. These multileveled zones would allow for the blurring of public and private space as well as zones of work and leisure.
Highlights
New Utopian plans for liberated urban spaces emerged during the post-war era with the work of the Lettrist (LI), Situationist International (SI), and Constant Nieuwenhuys, a Dutch painter turned architect and sculptor who understood urban planning as intimately linked to nomadism, play and creativity
The basic premise of New Babylon is the creation of new mega structures that would be erected above the common, bourgeois world
As a loosely affiliated group they drifted across the city as “regular explorers of San Francisco’s stranger and more out-of-the-way abandoned buildings, stores and bridges and provided a ready support group of friends and helpers for any artistic endeavors any one of them might be planning.”12 Their ideas about staging and performing events, like those of many other Utopians, were based on literary and cinematic references which they envisioned coming to life
Summary
Inspired by Constant’s New Babylon and the Situationist International, the Cacophony Society anti-consumer neo-anarchists formed a later version of a club at San Francisco’s Communiversity – a free, alternative school that began in 1969 at San Francisco State University. As a loosely affiliated group they drifted across the city as “regular explorers of San Francisco’s stranger and more out-of-the-way abandoned buildings, stores and bridges and provided a ready support group of friends and helpers for any artistic endeavors any one of them might be planning.” Their ideas about staging and performing events, like those of many other Utopians, were based on literary and cinematic references which they envisioned coming to life
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