#archispeak

Not an April Fools post

Residential building called Ycone, at center right, by Jean Nouvel, in Lyons, France. (Nouvel) A few days ago a correspondent asked me whether I’d seen modernist architect Jean Nouvel’s latest building in Lyon, France’s third largest city. Finished in 2019, it is an apartment building called Ycone, and looks like a work in pickup-sticks. The instigator of our online conversation about Ycone…

ARCHISPEAK : SYNCHRONIC 

The word that began everything

Architectural jargon is something the lay man seems not to understand. They think we are throwing around words just to sound smart (yes, we do that sometimes). Often these words we use to describe architecture are words that most people have come across before. It is just that they have been adapted to describe architecture as well.

My word: UTOPIA

I couldn’t have randomly picked a better word to delve in to .

This word is where all thoughts begin. It begins in our imaginations.  Utopia is a place therefore our mind could also be a utopia. Everyone’s utopia is different; no two utopias can be alike. Everyone wishes this fantasy place could exist in reality. Many have tried to make it a reality but none have succeeded…yet.

Architects and architecture have a big role in creating utopias. Architects design spaces for places. Obviously they would be the first to attempt to make utopia a reality. I’ve looked at the many “failed” utopias that architects have designed over the years like Le Corbusier’s Radiant City, Wright’s Broadacre City and Howard’s Garden City. They are all good attempts and they have elemets we can learn from but they all have downfalls where the architect has overlooked certain problems or have create new problems entirely. You can’t make everybody happy, someone or something is bound to be disadvantaged by a new design and we as architects know that but we try our best to make sure no one is disadvantaged but in reality we can’t always achieve that. And that is why “One man’s utopia is another man’s dystopia”

Who said Utopias MUST be “cities”? Oh, it’s Thomas More, the guy who coined the word Utopia. In his book he mentions a fictional island called Utopia where there is a perfect economic and political system. Island was then translated to city over the years. I think that’s where the other problem comes in. they are designing utopian cities to be islands and in reality a city can never be an island because there are intertwined networks within the city itself and these networks extend beyond the city “boundaries” and an island is isolated and functions solely on its own with barely any links beyond its boundaries.

I still stick with my guns in saying utopias might never be created because people are so different, cities are large and contain thousands, if not millions of people. The best that can happen is to design small scale utopias that are linked to others just by one strand, and that would also require compromise. But another problem might arise in creating smaller utopias. People will end up being grouped according to their utopia similarities and that will create closed off very segregated communities.