Abstract

Recent transformations of utopia as a form can be followed from modernist totalizing grand narratives that depicted new socio-spatial orderings to its fragmentation, pluralization, and critical turn in the second half of the 20th century. But if we think about utopia as a critical form in our contemporary context, we often encounter it being perceived either as a pejorative term for a concept too outlandish and impossible to even be considered, or as a term used in conjunction with large-scale ideological projects which hold little regard for their socio-spatial context. Refusing to concede that utopia as a critical form has lost its relevance within the architectural discipline, the paper asks how contemporary utopian production could be identified, mapped, and interpreted after the fragmentation of modernist grand narratives. To that aim, the paper develops a three-axis analytical framework which observes contemporary forms of utopian architectural production. Viewing utopia not as a prescriptive image of an ideal future, but as a critical apparatus aimed at projection and inquiry, the framework maps utopian production according to its position between the possible and the impossible, the critical and the affirmative, and the uncovering and the projective. Building on the positions and relationships revealed through the structured three-axis framework, the paper constructs a typology of four ideal-typical protagonists: the Critical Thinker, the Speculative Designer, the Architect, and the Developer, demonstrating that contemporary utopian thought has not disappeared, but has dispersed across different forms of theory, speculative design, practice, and spatial production. Identifying through the four protagonists the potential of utopia not as a representational or prescriptive form, but rather as an operative strategy and a method of inquiry, the paper offers both a conceptual tool for analyzing architecture’s contemporary engagement with utopia as a critical method, and demonstrates how utopian thinking operates as critique, intervention, ideological projection, and a speculative scenario building within our fragmented and individualized contemporary condition.

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