‘Building in Empty Spaces’: <italic>is</italic> Architecture a ‘Degenerate Utopia’?: Fid-Bau Portal

‘Building in Empty Spaces’: is Architecture a ‘Degenerate Utopia’?

Coleman, Nathaniel

The philosopher of Utopia Ernst Bloch observed that ‘Architecture cannot at all flourish in the late capitalist hollow space’ because ‘it is, far more than the other fine arts, a social creation.’ For him, ‘Only the beginnings of a different society will make true architecture possible again.’1 So long as it remains captured within the world system of capitalism, architecture's utopian vocation will be obscured. Echoing Bloch's account of architecture's fatal constraint by the given, Manfredo Tafuri pessimistically asserted that ‘hopes in design’ are anachronistic myths.2 And yet, the right to just cities and amenable architecture persists. While Bloch identified the inextricable bond between Utopia and hope almost everywhere but in architecture, Tafuri sought to disabuse modern architecture of its naïve utopianism. But what if, as Fredric Jameson suggests, a non-hegemonic architecture is impossible without Utopia? Reconciling Bloch's doubts about architecture's utopian potential, Tafuri's pessimism and Jameson's ambivalence toward both architecture and Utopia, with a more hopeful outlook entails rethinking Utopia's banishment from architecture (because of the failures of the modern movement). In fact, imagining alternatives without Utopia is all but impossible. Louis Marin's ideas on ‘Degenerate Utopias’ and David Harvey's conception of a ‘dialectical utopianism’ of ‘process’ and ‘form’ are also considered to make the argument that remaining within the ambit of Utopia assures the prospect of a ‘flourishing’ and ‘true’ architecture, even today.