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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Nathaniel ColemanORCiD
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In this chapter, Utopia is understood as a method or process — rather than as a blueprint for desired futures, or their physical settings. Conceptualized in this way, Utopia reveals how architecture could escape the hollow space of capitalist production enforced by the building industry — a predicament Mafredo Tafuri, Fredric Jameson, and Ernst Bloch have considered. Accordingly, their views are central to the argument developed in what follows, as are Henri Lefebvre’s ideas on space.Utopia construed as method shifts architecture’s emphasis from concerns with exchange (real estate investment and development; building as product; object; or image) to considerations of use and inhabitation (beyond reductive techno-scientific conceptions of functionalism). As method, Utopia structures modes of research that investigate which places are best for the real people who will use them. By emphasizing bodily experience(s) at individual and social levels, questions of use are the core of utopian methodologies. Exchange focuses on consumable images, making representation dominant and emphasizing the eyes. Utopia as method helps architects to shift their horizons enough to reveal the seemingly impossible as possible. Cultivating utopian capacities provides architects with tools to subvert the deforming economic and commercial limitations imposed on the built environment by developers and planners.Examination of architecture alienated from social concerns undergirds the formulation of the tentative propositions developed in this chapter for what might constitute political buildings. The sense of the “political” developed in this chapter refers to political architecture (individual structures and complexes) that contributes to intensifying tensions, or contradictions, between the empirical and the revolutionary, to reveal prospects for reconciling the two, suggested by desires for better ways of being that utopian imaginaries articulate. Jameson outlines the two key senses of the political as the “empirical” and the “revolutionary.” According to him, the dominant conception of “politics” is empirical, made up of specialized local activity identified with government and elections, and with “people in power and their techniques [for carrying out] specific tasks.” His second sense of “political” is revolutionary: “politics in the global sense, of the founding and transformation, the conservation and revolutionizing, of society as a whole, of the collective, of what organizes human relationships generally and enables or sponsors, or limits and maims, human possibilities.” Jameson’s second sense of the political is the one primarily considered in this chapter.
Author(s): Coleman N
Editor(s): Duncan Bell and Bernardo Zacka
Publication type: Book Chapter
Publication status: Published
Book Title: Political Theory and Architecture
Year: 2020
Pages: 217-234
Print publication date: 20/02/2020
Acceptance date: 31/01/2018
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Place Published: London
URL: https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/political-theory-and-architecture-9781350096592/
Library holdings: Search Newcastle University Library for this item
ISBN: 9781350096592
