Pragmatic Utopias: From Imagination to Reality in Architecture
Architecture would never have progressed if not for utopian, improbable, idealistic and unrealistic visions. But what happens when utopias become reality?
In the summer of 1914, Italian architect Antonio Sant’Elia published the Manifesto of Futurist Architecture, in which he emphatically condemned ‘the greatest absurdity of modern architecture’:
It is perpetuated by the greedy complicity of academies, internment camps for the intelligentsia, where the young are forced to recopy classical models onanistically instead of straining their imaginations to search for solutions to new and urgent problems: the Futurist house and city. A house and city spiritually and materially our own, in which our riotous activity can rage without seeming a grotesque anachronism. [source]
House with external elevators designed by Antonio Sant’Elia, 1914, photo: Sant’Elia family’s private collection / United States Copyright Office
Sant’Elia gained recognition thanks to his visionary conceptions of cities of the future, which he filled with gigantic edifices and souring concrete constructions all linked together with bridges. He planned these cities to be multilevel, criss-crossed with wide roadways placed at different heights – separate ones for cars, trains, buses and pedestrians. Obviously, none of these ideas were ever realised; in fact, few of Sant’Elia’s projects ended up being implemented. This, however, did not prevent him from becoming one of the key figures of the international Futurist movement whose ideas gave rise to many contemporary architectural trends. The Italian visionary’s career provides solid proof that one’s project need not necessarily be implemented to become a milestone in the development of architecture.
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Crystal Palace, Sydenham, London, Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, 1851, photo: English Heritage / Heritage Images / Getty Images
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The Great Exhibition (of the Works of Industry of All Nations, the progenitor of the today’s EXPO exhibitions) began in 1851 in London’s Hyde Park. Various countries showcased their achievements in a spectacular 33-metre-tall and over half a kilometre long building that was raised for this particular purpose. The Crystal Palace – the building in question – was designed by Joseph Paxton, a gardener, architect and engineer whose first architectural experiments began with the design of greenhouses. These garden experiences in constructing conservatories encouraged him to envision what seemed impossible at the time: the building of an enormous edifice based on a cast-iron frame and glass. Many were sceptical and predicted that Paxton would fail miserably; few had faith in the feasibility of the Crystal Palace project – after all, no one had attempted to construct such expansive buildings out of glass before. And yet, the building was raised, immediately turning into the symbol of the World Exhibition as well as into its most important ‘exhibit’: during the presentation of industrial civilizational achievements, it was the pavilion itself that turned out to be the most spectacular. And although it no longer exists (it burned down in 1936), it still constitutes a crucial symbol and point of reference, and its engineering structure greatly contributed to new developments in building technologies.
Where would we be now had Joseph Paxton believed the sceptics and given up on the implementation of his bold vision? Or had Sant’Elia’s appeals – for the young to break free of the shackles of classical architecture and the perpetual repetition of outdated models – remained without response? Is it not the visionaries, the utopians, the dreamers who contribute to progress, to the implementation of new solutions?
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Iron bridge over Słudwia River near Łowicz – crossing the bridge, designed by Professor Stefan Bryła, Doctor of Engineering, Lviv Polytechnic National University, photo: Lech Zielaskowski’s photographic archive / NAX / https://audiovis.nac.gov.pl
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The implementation of fanciful and seemingly unfeasible architectural conceptions was made possible by the industrial revolution. It was the inventions emerging between the late 18th and the entire 19th century that radically expanded the range of technologies at the disposal of architects and engineers, and, as a result, they made it possible to raise buildings which had hitherto been confined to the sphere of utopian visions. Such buildings included the now completely unexciting skyscrapers. In the 1930s, when Stefan Bryła, one of the most prominent engineers in the history of Polish architecture, designed almost 70-metre-tall edifices for Katowice and Warsaw, these were quite a sensation and made a huge impression by virtue of their height. In 1929, Stefan Bryła constructed the world’s first welded road bridge, which was extended over the waters of the Słudwia River in Maurzyce near Łowicz. It was one of the many experiences that enabled Bryła to construct steel frameworks for Poland’s first skyscrapers soon afterwards. ‘An engineer must be creative, he must create novel works, novel forms. He cannot be a slave to the thinking of others’ – he wrote in 1937. Polish postwar architects certainly subscribed to this theory, searching for methods of constructing increasingly more spectacular but above all more functional buildings.
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J. S. Dorton Arena, North Carolina State Fairgrounds, W. Hillsborough St., Raleigh, designed by Maciej Nowicki, photo: Leah Rucker / Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported
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In the 18th century, architects-utopians Étienne-Louis Boullée and Claude-Nicolas Ledoux sketched their visions of circular, suspended buildings on a huge scale and with abstract, minimalist forms. At that time, it was probably beyond their wildest dreams that such buildings could ever come to be. And we do not only mean the kind of spectacular constructions raised nowadays in China or in the Middle East: enormous balls containing museums and hotels or wavy, organic structures devoid not only of right angles but also of many other traditional architectural elements. Merely 150 years after Boullée’s and Ledoux’s drawings, Polish architect Maciej Nowicki successfully raised a giant sports arena in Raleigh, Northern California, whose roof is supported only by an external frame consisting of two criss-crossing, parabolic, ferroconcrete arches. The interior of the Dorton Arena in Raleigh is devoid of internal support, which consequently ensures high functionality and perfect visibility from the stands.
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Supersam store, Warsaw, 1963, photo: NAC
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Widok zewnętrzny elewacji od strony południowej. Na pierwszym planie widoczna część pawilonu, 1962, fot. NAC
A similar effect was achieved with the Supersam commercial pavilion in Warsaw (disassembled in 2006). A team of architects led by Maciej Krasiński, together with construction engineers Wacław Zalewski, Andrzej Żórawski and Stanisław Kuś, covered the expansive, flat building with a roof stretched out like a sail, supported by an innovative structure made using a prestressed concrete technology of spreader posts and tension ropes, thanks to which not only was the roof supported exclusively at the edges of the building, but also the store’s façades could be made largely of glass. Architects Maciej Gintowt and Maciej Krasiński together with civil engineers Wacław Zalewski, Andrzej Żórawski and Aleksander Włodarz went even further in their attempts to create a completely non-traditional, non-customary structure that doesn’t resemble anything familiar. In 1960, in an area damaged by mining in the centre of Katowice, they designed the futuristic, abstract structure of the Spodek sports and spectator arena complex. The raising of these now iconic structures would not have been possible without the inventions of the ‘age of steam and electricity’ and, above all, the generations of visionaries that proved it is worthwhile to try and transcend limitations, even if that means creating unrealistic, doomed-to-fail buildings.
Utopian architectural visions, however, have not been limited to construction-related solutions. In Utopia, the iconic 1516 work by British thinker and politician Thomas More, the citizens of a state based on an ideal social system inhabit fifty-four identical cities divided into meticulously organised parts, equipped only with indispensable functions that serve all. Although More’s text is usually analysed as a set of socio-political ideas, the spatial layout in which the conception was supposed to materialise should not be overlooked. It was within the field of urban studies that utopian visions had special significance and exerted great influence on the world.
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Post & Telegraph Office, no. 10 at 10 Lutego Street, designed by Julian Puterman-Sadłowski & Antoni Miszewski, Gdynia, 1929, photo: Henryk Poddębski / MMG
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What else was the building of the city of Gdynia if not an idealist vision? The practical necessity of creating a port city was only an excuse to create an entity with propaganda value, a city to become a symbol of modernity, independence and reclaimed statehood, one whose striking modernist architecture would not only serve as ‘packaging’ for utilitarian functions but also constitute a clear political message. Things were no different in the case of the construction of Nowa Huta. Despite the completely different political reality and aims, here, too, the urban model applied was an idealised one, with its own long history, one that treated the city as a space that ‘speaks’ and conveys more than just architectural meaning. Moreover, the spatial model used was intended to shape, in a way, the thinking of its inhabitants, influencing their views and attitudes (as we now know, this intention was not really fulfilled, which is probably for the better).
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Nowa Huta, photo: Piotr Tomaszewski / wikimedia.org
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Such ideas have a much longer history. In the second half of the 16th century, when Jan Zamoyski was building his private city, he, too, opted for a particular urban layout. After all, Zamość was planned according to the Renaissance model of an ideal city not because it fit the area of land that was to be developed but rather so that it would symbolise the might of its founder. It constituted a reference to the universal form of settlement that was at the time considered the most appropriate and had the proper intellectual underpinning.
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Model of Plan Voisin for Paris designed by Le Corbusier, exhibited in l’Esprit Nouveau pavilion, 1925, photo: SiefkinDR / (CC BY-SA 4.0)
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The forms of modernist housing estates, too, were nothing if not utopian. When drafting Ville Contemporaine in 1922 and Plan Voisin three years later, Le Corbusier did not intend for them to be built. Both of these visionary conceptions of cities of the future with enormous skyscrapers placed along wide streets were meant to contribute to the discussion, to indicate where thinking about urban development should be directed in the face of all the problems being faced at the time. The idea of an urban layout drawn up with straight lines and filled with the simple geometry of similar buildings was a novelty back then – it seemed that it would make possible a higher quality of life in the inefficient, overpopulated and polluted cities in which the 18th and 19th century buildings could not keep up with the development of industry, the influx of people, and the new model of society. Le Corbusier’s rescaled visions materialised, as we know, after World War Two in the form of housing estates, which, in the eastern part of Europe, were raised on such a scale that they could be considered quite close to the utopian visions of the Swiss modernist.
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Bird’s eye view of Marymont-Ruda housing estate, 1980, photo: Lech Zielaskowski’s photographic archive / NAC / https://audiovis.nac.gov.pl
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Oskar Hansen was someone who understood the difference between a utopia and reality, as well as the point of creating visions that may be controversial at times yet idealistic. In an interview for the monthly magazine Architektura (Architecture) in 1977, the architect said of his own utopian global urban-spatial concept of the Linear Continuous System, drawn up in such a way that it encompassed the entire country:
[…] one must be an enfant terrible, create so-called utopian designs, in order to raise and build public awareness so that the projects could someday become reality. What we consider our success is that the LCS is being written about, that we’re having the conversation, that there’s something to argue about. That’s how pragmatic utopias work.
The term ‘pragmatic utopias’, while seemingly an oxymoron, perfectly conveys the point of thinking up visionary concepts. Not only are they supposed to offer potential future scenarios for consideration, scenarios for how one could live and inhabit space, but above all their purpose is to spark a debate, which can only then give rise to much more feasible and practical solutions.
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Przyczółek Grochowski housing estate in Warsaw designed by Oskar Hansen, mock-up seen from above, (LCS) design, 1963, photo: Museum of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw
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Oskar Hansen, makieta z góry, osiedle w Warszawie "Przyczółek Grochowski", (LSC) projekt, 1963, fot. Muzeum ASP w Warszawie
‘Not everyone realises how much responsibility they take on when they reach for the architect’s ruler and compasses. […] the architect’s profession isn’t a craft, it’s a mission’ – wrote Lech Niemojewski in 1948 in the book Uczniowie Cieśli (Carpenter’s Apprentices), which constitutes a commentary on the meaning of architecture as a profession. Their responsibility lies not only in the proper raising of buildings or the endowment of various necessary spaces with a safe and convenient form. Architects also hold the tools for shaping the future, for drafting its different variants and proposing solutions for them. This includes those that are utopian – these, after all, frequently become very real.
Translated from Polish by Anna Potoczny
