Reading Architectural Utopia(nism)s: A Proposal

Abstract

Utopia’s relationship with the production of space, implicit or explicit, has always been enduring and has generated channels of experiment. As utopia carved its path to the surface through these channels and gained materialized bodies, disappointments, and thus, criticisms were aroused. One immediate and strict response to such disappointments was to reject the utopian altogether and to seek ways to strip real-world practices of any remaining utopian garb. On the other hand, many and possibly most contemporary social theorists believe that this is a null attempt, if not, as put by Harvey, ‘impossible’. For this reason, theorists agreeing on this line put the blame on the social processes mobilized in the materialization of utopias, rather than on the utopias themselves.This shifts the stress from the concept towards the process. To this end, this text, based on this second line of thought, proposes an alternative way of collating architectural utopia(nism)s that intends to expose different dimensions and patterns of relationships between architectural utopianisms and architectural space.