Still-existing utopian pedagogy: Architecture, curriculum, and the revolutionary imaginary

Abstract

While the manifestation of a revival of a collective revolutionary imaginary is more pronounced in social movements, we see it evidenced in a renewed interested in utopian curriculum and pedagogy. This article advances this trend by following José Esteban Muñoz’s methodology, returning an early Paulo Freire formulation of utopian pedagogy as a dialectic of denouncing and announcing, and building on Darren Webb’s project of reasserting the centrality of direction in utopian imaginations. Contending that our inability to imagine a radically different world results from the dominant temporality in our conjuncture, we mine cartographic processes as both archaeological and architectural to disrupt the perceptual and ideological restraints that muzzle our ability to not only image and sense alternative possibilities but to organize for the power required for their actualization. We thread this through a concrete example of an architectural utopian curriculum that demonstrates how archaeology and architecture can be blocked together or held in dialectical tension, which entails emphasizing that utopian pedagogy emerges from and as part of concrete struggles. We look at the Warsaw Palace, a still-existing socialist utopian architectural project, that can serve as a cartographic node in combining the openings of utopian longings with the political direction needed for their realization.