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Summary: Dreams and Visions
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| Maurizio Vitta |
Sogni e visioni Dreams and Visions
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| Gruppo Ghigos |
Gruppo Ghigos
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| Mikhail Kudryashov, Simon Rastorguev |
Bio-City
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| Makoto Sei Watanabe |
Makoto Sei Watanabe-Fluid City
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| (EEA) Erick van Egeraat associated architects |
(EEA) Erick van Egeraat
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| Elastik |
Elastik
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Urban Environments
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| IaN+ |
IaN+
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| Blinda Tato, Josè Luis Vallejo, Diego García-Setién |
Tato, Vallejo, García-Setién
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| Andreas Angelidakis |
Andreas Angelidakis
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Introduction: Dreams and Visions
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The visionary, dream-like nature of creativity is generally most easily associated (by definition) with art, but there is certainly no lack of examples of dreams and visions in other fields ranging from philosophy to politics. Indeed Voltaire noted sarcastically that "whichever system you opt for....you have to admit that all your ideas come to you while your are asleep, without your contribution, indeed despite yourself". Architecture is no exception in this respect. And, after all, why should it be? It can boast indisputable rights to dream: any plan implicitly involves projecting your imagination into a future which can only be imagined, although the present can give us an idea of what it will be like, how it will be structured and configured.
Nevertheless, we need to make certain distinctions. The artist`s dreams are purely aesthetic in nature, while the philosopher`s and politician`s are basically ethical. Forms dominate the former, whereas social relations are to the fore in the latter. It remains to be seen what the architect`s dreams are like, since his work wavers constantly between these two contiguous and correlated yet separate realms.
Rather than looking at motivations, first of all we ought to study the basic traits characterising an architectural dream. Roughly speaking there are four. The first is the absolute guarantee that the visionary project will never actually be built. The very idea that a dream-like work of architecture might actually take the shape of a real structure subject to the laws governing matter and the arid rules of building science, the functional purposes of ordinary usage and the service provided by structures and spaces, would blow away the multicoloured haze enshrouding its design and wipe out all its purposeful energy. In order to truly express all its striking force, the imagination must remain such.
The second trait is the opposing characteristic of absolute coherence. Coherence is a constitutive part of dreaming. However paradoxical it might seem to the clear-sighted reason of wakefulness, dreaming has its own cast-iron logic. It sheds light on latent, unexpressed desires, symbolically represents perfectly structured realities and disseminates its own pathway of clues from which anybody capable of reading them properly will draw the right conclusions. This coherence manifests itself in more or less the same ways in an architectural dream. What matters is not so much assessing whether the solutions are feasible as establishing how they meet either implicit or openly avowed needs. It is more the backdrop to the design plan that counts or, in other words, the contexts it fits into. Visionary architecture must come up with solutions not to its own needs, but to the ethical demands that called for it in the first place.
The third trait is more subtle but it is also what makes architectural daydreaming most like dreaming proper. It derives from a question: to what extent are the stylistic solutions and structural typologies brought into play in the visionary design of architecture actually the product of computation (however delirious), reasoning (however logical) and technology (however random)? The "dreamer", so Freud reminded us, "has a form of symbolic expression at their disposal that they are not aware of and do not recognise when they are awake". Does not the same apply to the dreamer-architect? He presents extreme and highly imaginative options for handling real issues – housing, the city – pushing himself not only beyond all possible measure and knowledge, but also beyond what he himself understands and knows.
The fourth trait sums up all the others in the sense that it encompasses and justifies them through an overall synthesis. It defines architecture as a part of a more general discourse, a constitutive part of a narrative that engulfs it in a web of meanings, an order of argumentation tending to actually move beyond it. A much more extensive vision lingers against a backdrop of oneiric planning, which gives architectural design a social, political or ethical dimension. Openly avowed or potential utopia is basically the fertile terrain in which the architect`s dream and vision must sink their roots if he intends to draw a deep sense of truth from this ungraspable matter.
Based on these roughly outlined traits, we can return to our original question and ask ourselves what the visionary architect`s stance is in relation to the artist`s dream and philosopher`s or politician`s utopia. At first sight it might be seen as an intermediate position, midway between the two but in no way reconciling them: the architectural dream gives substance to a social project and, however rough-and-ready this formula might appear, it does establish its deepest meaning. More precisely it might be said that it gives forms to a project for new community structures, new ways of group life, new systems of relations and more advanced cultural dynamics: in some sense it gives concrete shape to this project in the form of spaces, structures and constructions without altering its dream-like quality, which remains purely inspirational and directly unrealisable. Like the artist`s and philosopher`s dream, it opens up much broader and more distant horizons, but only in order to point towards new paths to be followed.
To clarify these aspects we need only trace back through last century`s history of architecture, perhaps the period offering most utopian designs, visionary projects and an entire compendium of imaginative design. So full of ideas that some even need to be excluded: it would in fact be difficult to include in this visionary architecture the works of Tony Garnier, Buckminster Fuller or Kiyonori Kikutake, too close to the industrial, technological or social reality of their own age to be described as genuine dreamers. Taking architectural imagination to its extremes to produce bold technical solutions and refined stylistic innovation are necessary aspects of utopia but not sufficient for grounding it. For a dream to be a dream it must feed off itself.
But there is certainly a visionary side to the cold reflections of Paul Scheerbart`s Glasarchitektur or Bruno Taut`s Alpine achitektur, which make glass the sign of new social ethics more than just a new sensibility; it emerges in all its force in the dry and imposing designs of Antonio Sant`Elia and Mario Chiattone, which do not just express architecture but also a firm commitment to a social plan, a new notion of man waiting to be discovered; it is contemplated in Frederick Fiedler`s laborious Endless house projects of which there are very few traces remaining, but enough to give us a sense of the grandeur of the scenarios they evoked through the sheer overpowering force of their fragmentary nature. Vice-versa, there is no point in looking for visionary dreaming in the architectural monuments of modernity and the works constituting its history: the worship of functionality, the absolute principle of reason and a desire to be immersed in the world`s warm embrace, completely cut it off from the self-effacing ramifications of dreaming. If anything it was a revolt against modernity`s excessive ties with economics, technology and the kind of society built up around them that opened up the way for imagination ready to invert the rigid rules of this hegemonic structure on the wings of unbridled creativity.
All the radical architecture of the latter half of the 20th century – starting with Archigram, whose Walking City has now become a paradigm for a new designscape, although even greater force could be drawn from Instant City – repeatedly tries to latch onto the changes already under way (although still confused and indecipherable) by incorporating hybrid means of representation, convulsive narrative and wildly allusive graphic forms. The catastrophism of Site, the subversiveness of Coop Himmelblau (as it was written back then), the urban delirious-ness of Rem Koolhaas, the "posti-historicist contaminations" of UFO, and the re-writing of the world by Hans Hollein, all attempt in some way or other to change the "design" viewpoint, subverting its goals and channelling its creative energy along broken, dishevelled paths only made homogenous and coherent by the call for a dissolving of the order of modernism in the name of a 360-degree openness to the endless possibilities of intelligence.
But this period was already flagging as a legacy of "imagination" that still saw "power" as a truly revolutionary goal. In actual fact the social foundations of utopia were already collapsing under the weight of alien forces unconnected to old critical schemes but still capable of reducing all opposition to nothing but a mere formal option. It is no coincidence that the academic side of dream-like architecture flowed into the cold ravines of design with the occasional drift towards some sort of Arcadia that was anything but subversive, just a maternal guarantee of peace and quiet obtained at the price of abandoning all objectives apart from form. Manfredi Tafuri was right to note that "in designed architecture – the destination and prison of anybody hoping to cry out "I, too, am Piranesi" – there was a mass of narcissistic practices, as well as calls for a gathering together of otherwise unattainable values. The Kafka-like atmospheres of these at times refined graphic realms have something coherent (too coherent) about them: they make words ring around the empty space and speak of superfluous laws". Utopia had by now lost its social referent and could only rely on unproductive and self-evaluating exercises in style. In the end visionary dreaming was confined to a worshipping of a film like Blade runner, which sanctioned its demise into pure set design (the results of which are still evident today).
Nevertheless, even the twilight of modernity witnessed the emerging of an architectural dream, perhaps rather more disenchanted than its 20th-century counterpart, but a dream nonetheless of restoring visionary dreaming to architectural design. Just take, for instance, John Johansen`s experimentation, in which perfectly controlled and gauged technology takes on the nature of dream-like paradox.
At this point we cannot help wondering what has happened to architectural dreaming in our age? Are the traits underscoring it, which we have set out above, still there and potentially a part of modern-day research? It is, in fact, hard to forget that while people were beating their brains out trying to come up with convoluted aesthetic solutions, the real world was progressing to the point where new means of imagination were becoming available, despite lacking any real ideological motivation. These were mainly technical tools of pure representation, which caused design to grow out of itself, branching off in non-Euclidean directions capable of defying hyperspace and introducing the fourth dimension into design itself, upturning all perceptual and directional coordinates.
But there has been no lack of pressing ethical issues – or, at least, what is passed off as such -, ranging from those raised by relations between history and nature, complete with its own ecological implications, to the present question of the city. In any case, however, a taste for the new has prevailed, no longer taken as the angst to go further (characteristic of modernity), just seen in the sporting sense of setting new records as a measure of its worth. The central idea is generally that of providing new living spaces, which however have turned out to be lacking in any sense of life. The fetishes of the "web", "interfacing", "relational systems", "new ecology" and "bio-organism" are now to the fore: metaphors, rhetorical devices, mechanical translations into images of concepts structured according to the norms of what is now a classical logos.
Would the modern-day architectural dream still be a dream without utopia? The limits of present-day research would appear to be: a constant perfecting of dazzlingly more progressive technical possibilities, accompanied by a gradual drifting away from the social purposes of architecture: we design the form of a world whose contents we ignore. Only at this point it is the world itself and not architecture that we should be addressing – or, in the final analysis, ourselves.
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