Utopia Computer The New In Architecture

The critical concern of the book “Utopia Computer” is the euphoria, expectation and hope inspired by the introduction of computers within architecture in the early digital age. With the advent of the personal computer and the launch of the Internet in the 1990s, utopian ideals found in architectural discourse from the 1960s were revisited and adjusted to the specific characteristics of digital media. Taking the 1990s discourse on computation as a starting point, the contributions of this book grapple with the utopian promises associated with topics such as participation, self-organization, and non-standard architecture. By placing these topics in a historical framework, the book offers perspectives for the future role computation might play within architecture and society. Die Publikation „Utopie Computer“ thematisiert die Euphorie und die Erwartungen, die mit der Einführung des Computers in der Architektur im frühen digitalen Zeitalter verbunden sind. Mit dem Aufkommen des Personal Computers und der kommerziellen Nutzung des Internets in den 1990er Jahren werden utopische Ideen, die bereits den Architekturdiskurs der 1960er Jahre prägten, aufgegriffen und an die spezifischen Möglichkeiten der digitalen Medien angepasst. Ausgehend vom Diskurs eines computer-basierten Entwerfens der 1990er Jahre setzen sich die Beiträge dieses Buches mit Entwurfskonzepten der Nachkriegszeit auseinander. Es werden Themen wie Partizipation, Selbstorganisation oder Non-Standard-Architektur in einen historischen Kontext gesetzt und Perspektiven für die zukünftige Rolle des Computers in der Architektur und Gesellschaft entwickelt.

Utopian thought, though commonly characterized as projecting a future without a past, depends on golden models for re-invention of what is. Through a detailed and innovative re-assessment of the work of three architects who sought to represent a utopian content in their work, and a consideration of the thoughts of a range of leading writers, Coleman offers the reader a unique perspective of idealism in architectural design. With unparalleled depth and focus of vision on the work of Le Corbusier, Louis I Kahn and Aldo van Eyck, this book persuasively challenges predominant assumptions in current architectural discourse, forging a new approach to the invention of welcoming built environments and transcending the limitations of both the postmodern and hyper-modern stance and orthodox modernist architecture.

Architecture and Utopia leads the reader beyond architectural form into a broader understanding of the relation of architecture to society and the architect to the workforce and the marketplace. Written from a neo-Marxist point of view by a prominent Italian architectural historian, Architecture and Utopia leads the reader beyond architectural form into a broader understanding of the relation of architecture to society and the architect to the workforce and the marketplace. It discusses the Garden Cities movement and the suburban developments it generated, the German-Russian architectural experiments of the 1920s, the place of the avant-garde in the plastic arts, and the uses and pitfalls of seismological approaches to architecture, and assesses the prospects of socialist alternatives.

Bringing together ten utopian works that mark important points in the history and an evolution in social and political philosophies, this book not only reflects on the texts and their political philosophy and implications, but also, their architecture and how that architecture informs the political philosophy or social agenda that the author intended. Each of the ten authors expressed their theory through concepts of community and utopian architecture, but each featured an architectural solution at the centre of their social and political philosophy, as none of the cities were ever built, they have remained as utopian literature. Some of the works examined are very well-known, such as Tommaso Campanella’s Civitas Solis, while others such as Joseph Michael Gandy’s Designs for Cottages, are relatively obscure. However, even with the best known works, this volume offers new insights by focusing on the architecture of the cities and how that architecture represents the author’s political philosophy. It reconstructs the cities through a 3-D computer program, ArchiCAD, using Artlantis to render. Plans, sections, elevations and perspectives are presented for each of the cities. The ten cities are: Filarete - Sforzina; Albrecht Dürer - Fortified Utopia; Tommaso Campanella - The City of the Sun; Johann Valentin Andreae - Christianopolis; Joseph Michael Gandy - An Agricultural Village; Robert Owen - Villages of Unity and Cooperation; James Silk Buckingham - Victoria; Robert Pemberton - Queen Victoria Town; King Camp Gillette - Metropolis; and Bradford Peck - The World a Department Store. Each chapter considers the work in conjunction with contemporary thought, the political philosophy and the reconstruction of the city. Although these ten cities represent over 500 years of utopian and political thought, they are an interlinked thread that had been drawn from literature of the past and informed by contemporary thought and society. The book is structured in two parts:

The Architectural Imagination at the Digital Turn asks what it means to speak of a "digital turn" in architecture. It examines how architects at the time engaged with the digital and imagined future modes of practice, and looks at the technological, conceptual and economic phenomena behind this engagement. It argues that the adoption of digital technology in architecture was far from linear but depended on complex factors, from the operative logic of the technology itself to the context in which it was used and the people who interacted with it. Creating a mosaic-like account, the book presents debates, projects and publications that changed how architecture was visualized, fabricated and experienced using digital technology. Spanning the university, new media art institutes, ecologies, architectural bodies, fabrication and the city, it re-evaluates familiar narratives that emphasized formal explorations; instead, the book aims to complicate the "myth" of the digital by presenting a nuanced analysis of the material and social context behind each case study. During the 1990s, architects repurposed software and technological concepts from other disciplines and tested them in a design environment. Some architects were fascinated by its effects, others were more critical. Through its discussion on case studies, places and themes that fundamentally influenced discourse formation in the era, this book offers scholars, researchers and students fresh insights into how architecture can engage with the digital realm today.

“Utopia” is a word not often associated with the city of Bangkok, which is better known for its disorderly sprawl, overburdened roads, and stifling levels of pollution. Yet as early as 1782, when the city was officially founded on the banks of the Chao Phraya river as the home of the Chakri dynasty, its orientation was based on material and rhetorical considerations that alluded to ideal times and spaces. The construction of palaces, monastic complexes, walls, forts, and canals created a defensive network while symbolically locating the terrestrial realm of the king within the Theravada Buddhist cosmos. Into the twentieth century, pictorial, narrative, and built representations of utopia were critical to Bangkok’s transformation into a national capital and commercial entrepôt. But as older representations of the universe encountered modern architecture, building technologies, and urban planning, new images of an ideal society attempted to reconcile urban-based understandings of Buddhist liberation and felicitous states like nirvana with worldly models of political community like the nation-state. Bangkok Utopia outlines an alternative genealogy of both utopia and modernism in a part of the world that has often been overlooked by researchers of both. It examines representations of utopia that developed in the city—as expressed in built forms as well as architectural drawings, building manuals, novels, poetry, and ecclesiastical murals—from its first general strike of migrant laborers in 1910 to the overthrow of the military dictatorship in 1973. Using Thai- and Chinese-language archival sources, the book demonstrates how the new spaces of the city became arenas for modern subject formation, utopian desires, political hegemony, and social unrest, arguing that the modern city was a space of antinomy—one able not only to sustain heterogeneous temporalities, but also to support conflicting world views within the urban landscape. By underscoring the paradoxical character of utopias and their formal narrative expressions of both hope and hegemony, Bangkok Utopia provides an innovative way to conceptualize the uneven economic development and fractured political conditions of contemporary global cities.

From extraordinary houses and incredible towers, to fantasy cityscapes and inhabitable sculptures, this work showcases the radical and experimental architecture. Featuring seminal and influential works by some sixty architects, it provides a resource for contemporary architectural and urban development and innovation in the third millennium