Human Utopias

In both the Soleri and Sadler articles, a definition of Utopia seems to find negative definition. Everyday living is described as ‘The week veneer of life ridden with blight and stillness, which megalopolis and suburbia are…’ (Soleri, 9) and Sadler relates the sentiment that ‘technology could life the passions of humanity from the quagmire of the street into the city of the sky.’ (Sadler, 58) Ignoring the obviously begged question of why the elevation of a street prevents it from being a quagmire, we can begin to see a difference between these two articles and the Soleri article, which accepts the limits of our human condition, this quagmire, and posits a historical instance of Utopia in the form of the ancient nascent city.

Mumford proposes that ‘every utopia is, almost by definition, a sterile desert, unfit for human occupation.’ (Mumford, 10) In the very next paragraph, he posits his thesis that this Utopia existed, like a child without Mortal Sin, but quickly lost its innocence, leaving, ‘as it were an after-image of its “ideal” form on the human mind.’ (Mumford, 11) The human collective is introduced as an ideal most utopias seek. Later in the text, this ideals most current form, that of the Invisible Machine, is vehemently warned against as an illusion. The idea of the city as home for God has been supplanted by scientific progress as god, and it’s heretics, the avant-garde artists, championed as ‘the only group that has understood the dehumanizing threats of the Invisible Machine’. (Mumford 23) The siren seduction of utopia is then contrasted to these avant-garde artists’ dystopic vision and Mumford concludes that neither rdystopia nor utopia hold human salvation. If this is the case, what good is a utopia.

Wittgenstein likened an ideal to a flat plane of ice; beautiful to behold, impossible to walk on. (I’m sorry I can’t find the reference.) And yet our formal explorations as architects often engage the flat stillness of water as an ideal surface. Most every building engages the flat, found only in ice and water outside the manmade world. So whether salvation is to be found or not, lessons are to be learned. Hence the importance of the lessons (some of them) found in Arcology; ‘They are not real, they are utopian’ (Sadler, 10). Arcology specifically deals with the ecology of the city and its future. #4, Arcology and Dimension, recognizes the need to humanize our architectural intentions. In #17, we see lessons in common with Archigrams vision of the individual. ‘Care for oneself will tend to be care for the whole.’ (Sadler, 11) Again in 34. ‘the individual user is always eccentric to the whole; symmetry in the whole, singularity in the parts.’ (ibid, 16) Above all, it seems Arcology is not a utopia that appeals to progress of the invisible machine of technology, but of human potential. ‘The creation of truly lovable cities is the only lasting solution for land conservations.’ (ibid 10) This appeal to emotion as a metric for city building is a refreshing break from the technological positivism that haunts architectural utopias.