Image galleries
On the Incomplete
The war-torn 20th century allowed, after each catastrophe anew, the clean slate of a utopian outset. Destruction thus embodied a Faustian promise: the destruction of the ‘old world’ becomes the condition for the construction of the new. Considering this Faustian moment of creation, this MA seeks to start at the moment of its abandonment, and tries to fashion it with a different future and potential life.
If the utopian projects of modern architecture have largely been left incomplete, what might be the potentiality embodied in this state of incompleteness?
A starting point for investigation might assume that the nature of most urban visions is that, given the time of construction, they have never had the chance to be completed, before the political realities around them have changed. Before we dismiss them as failures we have to investigate their state of incompleteness. Architectural and urban interventions could reveal the fragmentary nature of the given and develop new futures from this assumption.
The abandonment of any urban or architectural project registers a moment of historical, cultural, political, economical or personal interruption and change. As much as it implies transformations and disruptions, the ‘incomplete’ provides us with a potential to register social change in built form. Engaging the incomplete is to think of architecture as a way of voicing critique in matter. Rather than a fiction of a depicted reality in the future, the idea of an unrealised utopia will lure over our inquiry and design decisions. It should force us to critically discuss, diagnose and dissect the mechanisms of concrete circumstances, situations, and power struggles helping to develop a socio-political as well as an urban vision and program.
At an age when the most daring visions for a new world order are being formulated by neo-conservative think tanks and when the critical left has lost its conceptual lead, and indeed when it appears that we do not need – or possibly even cannot bring about new utopias – it is about time to return to and reconsider the social utopias of the past and the way they have been manifested in physical form and urban matter. Convinced that ideas do not die, but develop, this course aims to defy the current tendencies that rush to erase the relics of a doomed modernist past. The continuation, reinterpretation and re-inhabitation of the utopian projects of the past could re-ignite a defunct ‘social machine’ that has run out of ‘useful ideology’.
‘Circumscribing’ thus the myth of an incomplete utopia may open up a new field of possibilities for planning. For, in as much as there can never be – and should never be a single, finite architectural form of the city, there can never be a single architectural future for a building. The theoretical premise for this program is therefore to use the concept of the ‘incomplete’, especially in the context of post-communist cities, to ask more general questions about the city.
It will help us establish our relation to urban time and political change. How do we understand the modernist legacy in our cities? How do we cope with the dilemma of utopia? How does architecture represent, manifest and endorse the ruling power relations? How does architecture ‘behave’ at moments of political change? Does it merely register or could it be said to be partaking in these moments of change?
There are 5 images in this gallery
Last updated: Wed, 03/26/2008 - 10:05
Course Poster 2008/09
There is 1 image in this gallery
Last updated: Mon, 08/18/2008 - 22:34
Towards a new London - Snapshots of change
There are 2 images in this gallery
Last updated: Sat, 03/29/2008 - 15:36
Student work 2007/ 08
Student Work "On the Incomplete - Projects in London"
There are 12 images in this gallery
Last updated: Sat, 04/12/2008 - 16:59
