Utopia

Architecture 209X, Spring 2007

Words and Cities: The rhetoric and meaning of statistically improbable phrases

Nicholas De Monchaux

Qing Wang

Utopia

Utopia, a word has been always associated with city context. It was born with city. The origin of city was the idea of centralized dwelling. It is the materialized will of kingdom. It is the idealized form of dwelling. The idea of Utopia is to realize the human commonwealth which never has been conceived. But the city becomes the perfect ground where Utopians test their thoughts. The interesting thing about Utopia is that Utopians care the human commonwealth but not the single person. It pursues the collective benefits and ignores the personal difference. That’s where Utopia fails. Each person is different and irrational. Utopia tries to uniform the condition of dystopia reality and gives the solution. In fact, Utopia is seen as irreal fiction as opposite of reality. It is always related with sci-fiction. Actually, the paradigm of modern Utopia – Archigram inherited this fiction quality. The cartoon like cover always implied the content of their projects belonging to the future not the present reality. Their project – plug in city also looks like the machine from sic-fi movie Star War. In Japan, Metabolism also shared some similarity with Archigram. In both of their projects, there are some mega structures with infrastructure connecting the city network. The living units can be added or subtracted by the change of the city. Paradoxically, Plato’s utopia was refused to change. It was conceived as a perfect stable system can be sustained forever. Metabolism and plug in city tries to adapt this dynamic quality of the city to make it sustained. The chaotic and changing reality is more complicated than this ideal single system can accommodate. That’s where reality and utopia differs.