Modern Architecture: Utopia or Dystopia?

 After diving into L'Architecture dans le Boudoir: The Language of Criticism and the Criticism of Language by Manfredo Tafuri, I was immediately brought back to my History and Theory III project about Utopia, where Johanna and Aaron and I learned that Utopia dates back to the 1500s when the word “utopia” was coined by Thomas More. Inspired by the discovery of the new world, it comes from the Greek “ou” and “topos.” It referred to the negation and to the place;utopia was literally nowhere. Utopian concepts typically envisioned ideal cities in the same architectural style that was popular at their time to make them believable as real places. Many utopian texts described ideal cities very closely to how prevailing architects and engineers imagined them at the time. We specifically researched The Plug-In City by Archigram, a British group of avant-garde architects that created conceptual, rather than tangible designs. Existing throughout the 1960s and 70s in a post-World War II society, Archigram’s designs dealt with “the energy of consumerism and technology. The Plug-In City was a utopian city within a crane system, with prefabricated elements that could be moved and changed for different uses. The intent of the Plug-in City was not to construct, but to imagine prefabrication in a more fun and interesting way.

Tafuri mentions Archigram in this text: “It is not by chance that a great many of such celebrations of formlessness take place under the banner of a technological utopia. The ironic and irritating metaphors of the Archigram and Archizoom groups, or Johansen’s and Gehry’s notion of architecture as an explosion of fragments, have their roots in the technological myth.” (Tafuri, 163). I agree that Archigram’s designs were overly celebrated because they were “technologically advanced” for their time, and especially because Archigram never designed a tangible building.

Tafuri’s critique of modern utopian architecture also made me think of the buildings that I saw while studying in Spain this past semester, specifically Torres Blancas in Madrid, an apartment building designed by Spanish architect Francisco Javier Sáenz de Oiza. This building was designed as a “utopia” with patrons living, eating, and socializing together in one vertical building with different housing layouts, shops, kindergartens, restaurant, and chapel. However, today it is hardly an impressive building. Its location is far from the city, its cold concrete exterior is more terrifying than welcoming, and many dreamed programmatic elements never came to be, such as the restaurant and kindergarten. Today, this “utopian” apartment complex has a tough time attracting residents and is more of a dystopia.