Many of their propositions hovered uncertainly (as did More himself) between the fanciful and the possible, the satirical and the aspirational, but all celebrated the metropolis – so often characterised (from Dürer’s contemplation of Babel to Murnau’s city of light) as a site of corruption, distress and disorderly delight in contrast to the arcadian rhythms of the countryside – as the imaginative field for envisioning, repositing and representing the patterns of an ideal world.Īrchitecture is always a form of social iconography, and the language of drawing that produces ideas for, of, or against it is one of the essential tongues we use to hold a conversation about the nature, state and possible futures of civilisation. And from the Situationists to Superstudio and the Independent Group, the mix of anxious and exuberant thinking about ways and habits of living that produced the radical reimagining of the short-lived Space Age all focused on the city. For the nearly two hundred years before, the monumental metropolis and town, wherever it lay, had taken its architectural vocabulary from the academies and models of Enlightenment Paris, constituting an ideal vision in which the city was conceived as a parade of well-regulated public life, in which each of the institutions of order, culture, measure and restraint would be separately, visibly and distinctively represented.

The functionalist city of the postwar era, with its focus on socially hygienic housing, transport flow, managed open space, and conspicuously accessible services, represented a near revolutionary ideal of modern comfort and convenience – a universalist, systematic and inclusive environment, though it was against the resulting willed neutrality that Constant and the visionary reformers of the ’60s rebelled. But in many ways the modern city and its monuments are more lively and enduring utopian constructs. We have long celebrated the many little utopias, isolated and often monastic, that have followed More – the towns Vasco de Quiroga organised to revive Tarascan culture in Michoacán Mother Lee’s Shaker communities the model villages of the 18th century Robert Owen’s New Harmony the Little Landers of Tujunga Drop City. This represents a wave of nostalgia – rightly felt in the face of a Mannerist design culture descending ever deeper into the egotistical formalism and vacuous dandyism of luxury construction – for a time when architects and artists, seeking paths forward from the functionalist, desacralised consensus of the postwar years, looked forward to an architecture of social, emotional, and even spiritual engagement.Ĭonstant Constant Anton Nieuwenhuys New Babylon Zehn Lithografien 1963 Drawing Matter CollectionsĬonstant (Constant Anton Nieuwenhuys), New Babylon – Zehn Lithografien, 1963. These include an intelligent redefinition of Hippie Modernism in an exhibition now travelling the United States a probing analysis of collaborative approaches to the architecture of urban experiment in Montreal that took its cues from such groups as the Urban Innovations Group a revisiting of the work of one signal group, AUA, dedicated to reinventing the scale and function of the urban landscape, in Paris and a thrilling re-examination of the origins and evolution of Constant’s labyrinthine framework for an open society in the imaginary city of New Babylon, at the Reina Sofia in Madrid. By happy and uncontrived coincidence, a number of serious and important architectural events reconsidering Utopian movements from the 1960s and 1970s have appeared at the same time. This anniversary has been used to clothe a host of dubious activities in utopian dress, from discussion of new programmes for adventure playgrounds to the contemplation of the habits of whales and the re-evaluation of urban graffiti. It is now 500 years since Thomas More reported the discovery of an ideal society on an island imagined in the Atlantic.

Sunrise murnau scaffolding design