Architecture

Abstract

Architecture and utopia have been intimately linked for millennia, not least because human communities depend upon architectural spaces to serve as the physical infrastructure of social and political life. In the private and public places provided by architecture, people interact, flourish, and perform what Lyman Tower Sargent labeled “social dreaming.” If one is to dwell in a utopia, therefore, one must first gather with likeminded fellow human beings and build it. Many societies around the world have tried to imagine ideal architectures for the best possible life, and one of the most common themes to arise is a philosophical and religious tension between gardens and cities—from the Garden of Eden to Ancient China, Mesoamerica, and the Middle East, as well as modern, mechanized Garden Cities proposed in the planning profession, humans have struggled to imagine an architectural balance between their longing for unchanging intimacy with divinity and nature and their hopes for a happy and virtuous community with the power to shape history. This historic debate continued into the modern period, as utopian suburbs were designed to leverage transport technology to claim the best of both worlds, while actually threatening to completely destroy them, even as skepticism about urban life and utopia itself was powerfully articulated in the blighted dystopian cityscapes of books and films such as Bladerunner and A Clockwork Orange Contemporary utopian spaces are still imaginable, however, as Black Panther’s Wakanda offers an example of a vision that, unlike suburban utopias of the twentieth century, achieves a modern, dense, technological urbanity while also incorporating the ancient blessings of the garden and incorporating traditional architectural forms and details.