Learning from utopia: Contemporary architecture and the quest for political and social relevance

Journal of Architectural Education

Volumn 67, Issue 1, 2013, Pages 17-23

  Picon, Antoine ^a  

^a HARVARD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84888231814     PISSN: 10464883     EISSN: 1531314X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/10464883.2013.767120     Document Type: Article

References (39)

1. Rem Koolhaas, "The Generic City," in S, M, L, XL (New York: The Monacelli Press, 1996).
2. Rem Koolhaas et al., Mutations (Bordeaux: Arc en Rêve, 2001).
3. Let us mention for instance the exhibition "Utopia's Ghost: Postmodernism Reconsidered," organized in February-May 2008 by the Canadian Centre for Architecture, or Felicity Scott's book Architecture or Techno-Utopia: Politics after Modernism (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007).
4. On Archigram and radical architecture, see, e.g., Archigram (Paris: Editions du Centre Georges Pompidou, 1994);
5. Dominique Rouillard, Superarchitecture: Le Futur de l'Architecture 1950-1970 (Paris: Editions de La Villette, 2004).
6. The English historian of architecture Reyner Banham had already foreseen this dimension in his pioneering book Megastructures: Urban Futures of the Recent Past (London: Thames and Hudson, 1976).
7. On the influence of radical architecture on Koolhaas or Tschumi, see for instance Dominique Rouillard, "'Radical' Architettura," in Tschumi une Architecture en Projet: Le Fresnoy (Paris: Editions du Centre Georges Pompidou, 1993), 89-112.
8. See Michèle Riot-Sarcey, Le Réel de l'Utopie: Essai sur le Politique au XIXe Siècle (Paris: Albin Michel, 1998);
9. Michèle Riot-Sarcey, Thomas Bouchet, and Antoine Picon, eds., Dictionnaire des Utopies (Paris: Larousse, 2002).
10. See on that theme Lyman Tower Sargent and Roland Schaer, eds., Utopie: La Quête de la Société Idéale en Occident (Paris: Fayard, 2000).
11. Cf. Ruth Eaton, Cités Idéales: L'Utopisme et l'Environnement (non) Bâti (Antwerp: Bibliothèque des Amis du Fonds Mercator, 2001);
12. Lorette Coen, A la Recherche de la Cité Idéale (Arc et Senans: Institut Claude- Nicolas Ledoux, 2000).
13. On Concorcet, see Keith Michael Baker, Condorcet: From Natural Philosophy to Social Mathematics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975).
14. Cf. Jacques Rancière, La Nuit des Prolétaires: Archives du Rêve Ouvrier (Paris: Fayard, 1981);
15. Antoine Picon, Les Saint-Simoniens: Raison, Imaginaire et Utopie (Paris: Belin, 2002).
16. On the impact of Fourierism in America, see Carl J. Guarneri, The Utopian Alternative: Fourierism in Nineteenth-Century America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991).
17. This is the title of the influential essay of German theorist and architect Heinrich Hübsch. Cf. Wolfgang Herrmann, ed., In What Style Should We Build? The German Debate on Architectural Style (Los Angeles: The Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1992), 63-101.
18. César Daly, "Tableau de l'Evolution des Styles d'Architecture en Regard de l'Evolution des Civilisations Correspondantes," in La Semaine des Constructeurs, 20 July 1889.
19. On Daly's theory, see Marc Saboya, Presse et Architecture au XIXe siècle: César Daly et la Revue Générale de l'Architecture et des Travaux Publics (Paris: Picard, 1991).
20. See for instance Martin Bressani, "Science, histoire et archéologie: Sources et généalogie de la pensée organiciste de Viollet-le-Duc." Ph.D. dissertation, Université de Paris IV-Sorbonne, 1997.
21. Cf. Paul Meier, La Pensée Utopique de William Morris (Paris: Editions Sociales, 1972).
22. Ludwig Hilbersheimer, The Nature of Cities: Origin, Growth, and Decline: Pattern and Form: Planning Problems (Chicago: Paul Theobald, 1955).
23. On this project, see Rouillard, Superarchitecture (note 4).
24. The expression was coined by the Saint-Simonian engineer and philosopher Jean Reynaud. See Jean Reynaud, Prédication sur la Constitution de la Propriété (Paris: Everat, 1831), 23.
25. Cf. Joachim Krausse and Claude Lichtenstein, eds., Your Private Sky: R. Buckminster Fuller, The Art of Design Science (Baden: Lars Müller, 1999).
26. William J. Mitchell, City of Bits: Space, Place and the Infobahn (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995).
27. Cf. Antoine Picon, "L'Invention du Toit-Terrasse: Imaginaire Architectural, Usages et Techniques," in François Leclerc and Philippe Simon, eds., De Toits en Toits: Les Toits de Paris (Paris: Les Éditions du Pavillon de l'Arsenal, Hazan, 1994), 35-44.
28. On the Centre Pompidou's ambition, see Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, Du Plateau Beaubourg au Centre Pompidou, a conversation with Antoine Picon (Paris: Editions du Centre Georges Pompidou, 1987).
29. See, e.g., Horst Berger, Light Structures, Structures of Light (Basel: Birkhäuser, 1996).
30. Michael W. Brooks, John Ruskin and Victorian Architecture (London: Thames and Hudson, 1989).
31. Eve Blau, Ruskinian Gothic: The Architecture of Deane and Woodward, 1845-1861 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982).
32. Victor Considérant, Description du Phalanstère et Considération Sociales sur l'Architectonique (Paris: G. Durier, 1979 [1848]).
33. This is especially clear with the unité d'habitation of Marseilles. See Jacques Sbriglio, L'Unité d'Habitation de Marseille (Marseilles: Parenthèses, 1992).
34. Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia (Bonn: 1929, English trans. New York: Harvest/HBJ, 1985);
35. Paul Ricoeur, L'Idéologie et l'Utopie (New York: 1986, French trans. Paris: Le Seuil, 1997).
36. Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986[1959]).
37. Bruno Latour, Politiques de la Nature (Paris: La Découverte, 2000).
38. Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital (New York: Knopf, 1995).
39. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992).