For this week’s Read DCG instead of structuring the discussion around the selected readings, we will use them as entry points to the vast theme of the Space of Utopia.
Group participants will propose a text, image, or film which problematizes one aspect of this theme. The vision is to construct an exquisite corpse of utopian fragments, which bring together the group’s preoccupations on architecture, imagination, technology, representation and reality.
Once you have made your selection — post it here.
Examples of questions accompanying the participant selections could be:
How does one design or/and represent a Utopia?
What are the technics of Utopia?
What is the difference between Utopia and Science Fiction?
How does Utopian Space inform the architectural imaginary?
Attached to this discussion is Frederic Jameson’s ”Archaeologies of the Future: the Desire called Utopia and Other Science Fictions”.
Although the entire book is very interesting, this week we will be reading two parts which focus on time and representation:
- “Barrier of Time” pp. 90-106
- “Alien Body” p.p. 119-131
A nice article on a “utopian” experiment by John B. Calhoun in Cabinet Magazine, Volume 42: http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/42/wiles.php
Excerpt from the article:
How do you design a utopia? In 1972, John B. Calhoun detailed the specifications of his Mortality-Inhibiting Environment for Mice: a practical utopia built in the laboratory. Every aspect of Universe 25—as this particular model was called—was pitched to cater for the well-being of its rodent residents and increase their lifespan. The Universe took the form of a tank, 101 inches square, enclosed by walls 54 inches high. The first 37 inches of wall was structured so the mice could climb up, but they were prevented from escaping by 17 inches of bare wall above. Each wall had sixteen vertical mesh tunnels—call them stairwells—soldered to it. Four horizontal corridors opened off each stairwell, each leading to four nesting boxes. That means 256 boxes in total, each capable of housing fifteen mice. There was abundant clean food, water, and nesting material. The Universe was cleaned every four to eight weeks. There were no predators, the temperature was kept at a steady 68°F, and the mice were a disease-free elite selected from the National Institutes of Health’s breeding colony. Heaven.
Above a grounded reality, obedient to the laws of gravity, expands an endless space which carries the fantasies of the eternal dream of flight.
Flying architectures float above reality providing a landscape for another city, another society, another way of being in the world, overlooking the decaying structures of the past.
What are the architectures of the cosmic space of utopia? What are their formative forces and discursive values?
There is a great Cabinet article on this theme touching upon a vast repertoire of such projects, from Krutikov to Friedman: Jealousy: Modern Architecture and Flight. As an addition I propose the also fascinating: “Une theorie pour l’ occupation de l’espace” by Eckhard Schulze Fielitz. Unfortunately I have only found it in French but I can attempt to give a summary in class.
Also, on a different note, the wonderfully poetic Calvino’s Baucis:
Cities and eyes 3, from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, 1972
After a seven days’ march through woodland, the traveller directed towards Baucis cannot see the city and yet he has arrived. The slender stilts that rise from the ground at a great distance from one another and are lost above the clouds support the city. You climb them with ladders. On the ground the inhabitants rarely show themselves: having already everything they need up there, they prefer not to come down. Nothing of the city touches the earth except those long flamingo legs on which it rests and, when the days are sunny, a pierced, angular shadow that falls on the foliage.
There are three hypotheses about the inhabitants of Baucis: that they hate the earth; that they respect it so much they avoid all contact; that they love it as it was before they existed and with spyglasses and telescopes aimed downwards they never tire of examining it, leaf by leaf, stone by stone, ant by ant, contemplating with fascination their own absence.
I have some excerpts of Sci-Fi film for us to watch this week. Sorry it’s last minute. They can’t be youtubed, so I had to put them on my MIT server and embed them in a webpage. You can go see them, along with some brief contextual observations of mine here: http://web.mit.edu/clostrit/www/utopia/
also: Space Colony Art from the 1970s