cindy moon_utopia

People always dream utopia. It usually means ideal and useful corrective positivism. However, the concept of utopia is not always happy because its actual meaning is no place or not existed place. (Mumford 3)

Lewis Mumford said utopia has been in Greek and Rome period. The base idea about utopia is from Plato and Aristotle. However, actually the word ‘utopia’ started using at. It means when philosopher thought about system of society, they didn’t define their dream as utopia.

As from Plato, utopia is always related with city because it has to be explained between the relationships between people. Community or hierarchy, everything is from society and it goes to the space of where people have been. At first, it was used for how people who have athuority control the society well for their will. Plato was to rationalize and perfect the institutions to make ideal pattern for creating structure. In contemporary societies, his concept is so far from utopia. However it was one way to achieve society’s ideal at that time.

After the system or structure of society has been changed because of mechanical progress, the concept of utopia became different. As St. Thomas More talked about, discussion about power in society moves to about system. In this example, we could see archigram for the plug-in city. They try to make continual circulation and blur the boundary but unified by continuous architecture (Sadler 57). Archigram dreamed about superimposing new society; however it is different from new Babylon. while new babylon was focused on view from exterior, plug-in city started from interior. Because of this difference, plug-in city could approach about conjectural and more legible and dynamic life in modern society.

However, archigram emphasized too much about mega structure of architecture, even though they want to connect the space. They ignored the changing flow and only concerned about hardware. They thought all the hardware could solve the problems and realize the utopia. Also after new Babylon which already was defined as failure disappeared, archigram lose their opponent subject to lead their topic. Even though many architect got influence on their works, there is no philosophical utopia right now. We just devote the phenomenon for the next good progress.