Archinect - News

Elon Musk is planning a utopian Hoovertown outside of Austin

2023-03-10T11:36:00-05:00

In meetings with landowners and real-estate agents, Musk has reportedly described his idea for the estate — which he envisions building on thousands of acres of property he purchased on the Colorado River — as a utopia, so that his employees can live, work, and play without ever leaving.

The community, named “Snailbrook” after the Boring Company mascot, would be the first new town in Texas since Ellinger was incorporated in 2020. Pre-fab homes are the most likely housing option, with rents as low as $800 and a Montessori school campus to serve employees' children, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Musk, who owns some 3,500 acres in Bastrop County, reportedly gave disgraced antisemite Kanye West and his new architect beau a tour of the site last year as part of a ramp-up that included internal employee discussions as to who among them should be elected mayor. The entrepreneur had previously mentioned his desire to build a “starbase city” in the area.

If it ever gets up and running, it would join the new BIG-planned Telosa in an alarming trend of new billionaire-funded Utopian cities in the American west.

This is just the beginning. America's new oligarchs are focussing on "cities." And are actively seeking to create alternatives to cities which they provide ser...

California's hippie architecture is disappearing

2021-09-13T13:46:00-04:00

The movement wasn't about living in isolation. Residents of these communes didn't seek an escape from society so much as the chance to create it anew: a generous, civic-minded, highly social culture with regular potlucks and solstice blowouts.

Unfortunately, society went the other way to greed and ignorance.

"Constructing a home with next to no money demands feats of creative resourcefulness. Back in the 1970s, free building materials were everywhere—if you knew where to look. Jon Turner's house, a two-story, gable-roofed structure in Mendocino County, is fabricated from 2,000-year-old redwood logs he pulled out of the Albion River. His ceiling is the height of a gymnasium because he couldn't bring himself to trim the ancient logs, he explains. He never put a single architectural sketch on paper."

To sum it up, these are "architecture without architects" grade.

Syracuse University's Lawrence Chua named among 34 Getty Scholar grantees

2020-06-08T18:16:00-04:00

Lawrence Chua, an assistant professor at the Syracuse University School of Architecture, has been awarded a 2020-21 Getty Scholar Grant from the Getty Research Institute (GRI) to study "transregional histories of utopia and the architecture and urban culture of southeast Asia."

According to the Syracuse University News, this year's research cohort is focused on pursuing investigations that seek to deepen scholarly efforts around the topic of "the fragment" and are set to focus on objects of study that remain in less-than-whole forms. The research also considers intact art and cultural objects as "fragments" of the larger cultures that generated these items. The Syracuse website states, "Incoming Getty Scholars are invited to address both the creation and reception of fragments, their mutability and mobility, and their valuation and consequence throughout history."

Previously on Archinect: "Lebbeus Woods drawing collections are acquired by the Getty Research Institute."Selection from...

Whatever happened to Liberland?

2019-08-22T18:38:00-04:00

Liberland’s earthly domain is a constellation of locations and events that gravitate around the unoccupied Gornja Siga. These props, in various stages of construction, share a fundamental quality of ephemerality and mobility, as if recalling their origins as a dream spawned on the internet.

The self-declared libertarian micronation of Liberland has vanished somewhat from the media's spotlight since its founder and current President, Vít Jedlička, planted the utopia's state flag on Gornja Siga, an unoccupied Danube island between Serbia and Croatia, in 2015. Liberland instantly found an early and vocal supporter in Patrik Schumacher, director of Zaha Hadid Architects and outspoken evangelist for free market capitalism, but what has really been happening since then?

Hans Larsson's recent Volume piece brings us up to speed and talks about the Schumacher-juried Liberland master plan design competition, decentralized autonomous blockchain governance, and neo-metabolist-inspired off-grid floating settlements.

"When seen from the right angle, the elements coalesce into an image of a new country being born," Larsson writes. "Shift your position slightly and you see a banal hoax. But if enough people buy into it, does this even matter?"

Cristiano Toraldo di Francia, co-founder of Superstudio, has passed away

2019-08-01T13:51:00-04:00

Cristiano Toraldo di Francia, co-founder of the radical Italian architecture group Superstudio, has passed away at age 78.

Di Francia, born in 1941, started Superstudio in 1966 with Adolfo Natalini; Eventually, the group grew to include Piero Frassinelli, and Alessandro and Roberto Magris. As one of several influential groups of the Radical Architecture era, Superstudio’s critical, utopian architectural visions helped to reshape the way architects were taught to consider their role in the construction of the world’s built environment. Their experiments using illustrations, collages, and other popular forms of reproducible media to communicate architectural ideas allowed the designers to help explode antiquated notions of what architecture should look like, how it should be consumed, and who, ultimately, was included in the audience architects spoke to.

View of Superstudio’s iconic “Continuous Monument” proposal. Image courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art, Howard Gilman Foundation....

Avant-garde architectural group Archigram sells archive to Hong Kong museum for £1.8 million

2019-01-25T16:07:00-05:00

Archigram, the architectural studio known for its avant-garde theoretical projects, has sold their archive for £1.8 million to the soon-to-open M+ museum in Hong Kong. Set to open later this year, the museum designed by Herzog & de Meuron will focus on 20th and 21st century design and architecture, moving image, and visual art from Hong Kong, Asia, and beyond.

Despite attempts to obstruct the sale, Britain's new cultural secretary Jeremy Wright has allowed the deal to move forward. This follows a decade long search on behalf of Archigram to find a buyer for their colossal archive of drawings and models.

How far off were the radical architects of the 1960s?

2018-12-31T12:53:00-05:00

The 1960s, a time when possibilities and technologies in many areas — artistic, political, scientific — seemed broader than ever, remain a seductive decade. Fifty years on from the first moon landing we need to remember that the most striking image from space (and the one that had the most real impact) were not those of the dusty, dead surface of the moon but those of our own planet, glimpsed as something delicate, whole and beautiful.

The future used to look brighter.

This may be the feeling gained when looking back at some of the most radical visions from familiar names in architecture. Archigram, Superstudio, Archizoom and Cedric Price each took their shot at a future based on post-war rhetoric, and we continue to marvel at the gap between their expectations and our reality.

Walking City, by Archigram

But this gap may be wider and more troublesome than anyone could have imaged at the time of these images of the imagined future were produced, according to Financial Times writer Edwin Heathcote. Looking back at the future of the 1960's from the 2010's might, in fact, be our way of coping with our precarious future, Heathcote argues. "All this is an escapist fantasy," he writes, "a way of sublimating our awareness of catastrophic climate change and our guilt at participating in the economies that fuel it."

No Stop City, by Archizoom

Heathcote ends his compelling article with a warning against the provocation of ...

What's new with the promise of the floating city?

2018-05-01T16:13:00-04:00

A plan to build a platform in a tropical lagoon caught heat from locals, and a campaign stoked by opposition politician Valentina Cross swept away their proposals for an inaugural colony. In February, the Tahitian government stated publicly that an agreement with the Seasteading Institute in 2017 was now outdated and non-binding. [...] That leaves the Institute, and their movement, once again at sea, shopping for a new host nation willing to take on a partnership.

In her article for CityLab, writer Hettie O'Brien looks into the Seasteading Institute's promise of a libertarian offshore utopia in Polynesia and the challenges the movement has been facing recently.

Unbuilt highway schemes — and the traces they left behind

2018-01-08T15:00:00-05:00

The postwar passion for highway construction saw cities around the world carved up in the name of progress. But as communities fought back many schemes were abandoned – their half-built traces showing what might have been

Documentary seeks funding to finish tour of UK-engineered social utopias

2016-09-01T13:03:00-04:00

What are dreams made of? More importantly, how are these dreams executed, and how do we live in the corresponding gap between vision and reality? For the residents of the U.K. towns Basildon and Essex, who dwell in post-World War II "New Towns" designed to be social utopias, their struggles to thrive in a globalized reality are being chronicled in the documentary "New Town Utopias." The filmmakers, who have shot over 100 hours of footage, are currently seeking funding via Kickstarter to help them complete the film.

While the film centers around the creative community, it also investigates the larger historical questions of place and belonging. As the Kickstarter description notes, "It is a meditation on British social history that asks the question: do people make the place… or does a place make the people?"

For more on innovative architectural documentaries:

The Wish Machine by Autoban, part of the London Design Biennale, invites visitors to walk through a tunnel made of transparent hexagonal tubes

2016-08-18T11:38:00-04:00

This September the first ever London Design Biennale will take place at Somerset House with featured projects from over thirty countries. The inaugural show is themed 'Utopia by Design' and celebrates the 500th anniversary of the publication of Sir Thomas More's classic, Utopia (1516).

Turkey's contribution to the biennale is 'The Wish Machine' designed by Istanbul-based multidisciplinary design studio, Autoban. The installation is inspired by the cultural tradition of threading a note or memento to the branch of a tree as an act of hope born out of hopelessness.

' The installation located in West Wing G1A at Somerset House appears as an interactive pneumatic system operating in a mirrored space. Visitors will be invited to walk through a tunnel that is made of transparent hexagonal tubes. They will share their hopes and wishes, vision of utopias, and aspiration for the future, by writing them on paper, and feeding them to the Wish Machine through a lid at the dead end. Notes will the...

Alissa Walker imagines a "utopian" Los Angeles in 2056

2016-07-06T15:12:00-04:00

Sorry, I’m not able to send this directly through SnapFace since your iPhone 6 doesn’t support neural chat. Old-fashioned text pixels will have to do. Remember the movie “Her”? That’s what Los Angeles is like in 2056. L.A. is the densest city in the U.S., with a population that’s about a third larger than it was in 2016. Taller buildings are everywhere, including New DTLA — a corridor of super-talls that runs the length of Wilshire all the way to Santa Monica.

The speculative fiction details a "utopian" city primarily characterized by efficient, far-reaching public transport and fewer cars. There's no longer a drought, and buildings are wrapped in "solar skins" designed by Elon Musk.

For more speculative visions of a future California, check out these links from last summer's Dry Futures competition:

Flashback: Floyd McKissick's unfinished “Soul City” suburb in NC

2016-05-13T13:13:00-04:00

There would be homes and industry surrounded by trees, hills and lakes. Above all, there would be no prejudice, poverty or slums, according to a Soul City brochure...Despite its name, Soul City was never intended to be an all-black town, but rather, a multi-racial community built and managed by black people. [But] Portions of the area resemble a ghost town, rotting – or perhaps waiting. Could Soul City ever be resurrected?

Read up on the rise and halt of Soul City, a suburb that attorney and civil rights activist Floyd McKissick envisioned for North Carolina's Warren County in the late 1960s-70s.

"Latin America is where modernist Utopia went to die." – A closer look at the changing urban landscape of Caracas

2015-11-25T17:24:00-05:00

‘El mejor anuncio de la historia’, or ‘the best ad in history’ is a picture taken in February 2008, which neatly encapsulates several aspects of the city’s urban landscape: the formal, the informal and the promotional. '[...]Around and in between the super bloques a carpet of slums has grown, an organism that now seems to bind the blocks together in some symbiotic relationship. These are the kind of hybrid forms that are developing in Latin American cities [...]’

Related in the Archinect news:

Floating City Project advances to Phase II

2015-07-04T14:37:00-04:00

We closed 2014 by taking a delegation of architects and engineers to an undisclosed location where we hope to locate the first floating city in the sea nearby. We believe there could be a market on our floating city for residences, tourism, aquaculture, a business park, a research institute, and a powerplant to sell energy and clean water back to the host nation.

The Seasteading Institute continues to work towards their goal of establishing the first floating city with significant political autonomy by 2020. Currently they are focusing on - enhancing novel seastead designs, which includes wave tank testing and acquiring more detailed financial calculations; deepening our diplomatic negotiations with several potential host nations; collecting potential resident feedback; and prospecting investors.

To learn more details about progress on Phase II, read a report from the Fact-finding & Diplomatic Floating City Project Mission by Executive Director Randolph Hencken.

Previously on Archinect here, here and here

10 Failed Utopian Cities That Influenced the Future

2015-03-24T22:51:00-04:00

Bonus: BoozeTown, the Crazy-Ass Town of Drunks

It is still up for debate, but I will say real estate ownership might be abolished and become irrelevant.

Paradise lost? The enduring legacy of a Soviet-era utopian workers’ district

2014-12-04T14:36:00-05:00

Architecture critic Owen Hatherley travelled to Nizhny Novgorod to visit Avtozavod, a purpose-built “workers’ paradise”. The idealism may have gone, but its legacy remains strong

For Libertarian Utopia, Float Away on ‘Startup’ Nation

2014-06-04T15:22:00-04:00

As dawn breaks over the Gulf of Fonseca, southeast of El Salvador, Patri Friedman sets out for a jog. He trots past domed hothouses filled with fruit trees and feels the sidewalk sway gently underfoot as a tugboat chugs by with a floating apartment building in tow. The year is 2024, and Friedman lives on a so-called seastead, a waterbound city of some 1,000 people who produce their own food, their own energy and -- most important -- their own laws.

Previously:

Jacque Fresco's and the Venus Project

2013-08-26T09:08:00-04:00

Instead of having parks, the whole city is a park...Like aluminum extrusions the whole building is extruded and then it is cut by laser beams, then inserted into a structure by machine. - Jacque Fresco

Paul Kerley explores the 97-year old architect's vision of the future. For the Venus Project, the goal is a radically different society. One replete with monorails and retro-Modernist architecture à la Disney's Epcot, where everything from nations to jobs are no longer necessary.

Call for contributions zawia#01:Utopia

2012-12-17T13:20:00-05:00

"... If history has taught us that the realization of a utopia is necessarily its destruction, Can we regard this process as a continuously failing attempt of architectural hallucinations? Or is it a way to promote escapism from an inevitable dystopic reality? ..."

The call for contributions for the upcoming volume zawia#01:Utopia is out now. We are expecting abstracts until the 28th of January. Please download the document by visiting our website www.zawia.co or by simply clicking here http://www.zawia.co/issuedownload/zawia_01_Utopia_Call_for_Contributions.pdf

[Zawia is an English & Arabic publication & collaborative events on architecture, design & Urbanism]

Glen Small's Detroit Trilogy

2011-07-03T18:05:01-04:00

Glen Small's visionary urban projects of Detroit 1966-69:

KERN BLOCK
VERTICAL ROAD MASS TRANSIT DETROIT
THE GREAT STADIUM