Topologies: The Urban Utopia in France, 1960 1970

by Larry Busbea

Amid the cultural and political ferment of 1960s France, a group of avant-garde architects, artists, writers, theorists, and critics known as "spatial urbanists" envisioned a series of urban utopias--phantom cities of a possible future. The utopian "spatial" city most often took the form of a massive grid or mesh suspended above the ground, all of its parts (and inhabitants) circulating in a smooth, synchronous rhythm, its streets and buildings constituting a gigantic work of plastic art or interactive machine. In this new urban world, technology and automation were positive forces, providing for material needs as well as time and space for leisure. In this first study of the French avant-garde tendency known as spatial urbanism, Larry Busbea analyzes projects by artists and architects (including the most famous spatial practitioner, Yona Friedman) and explores texts (many of which have never before been translated from the French) by Michel Ragon, the influential founder of the Groupe International d'Architecture Prospective (GIAP), Victor Vasarely, and others. Even at its most fanciful, Busbea argues, the French urban utopia provided an image for social transformations that were only beginning to be described by cultural theorists and sociologists.

Genres: Architecture, Urbanism, Art

229 pages, Hardcover

First published August 31, 2007

Reviews

[Owen Hatherley · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is bafflingly little on post-war architecture in France in English, meaning we tend to take the 68ers and the new right's denunciations uncritically. So is useful to have this sceptical but rich and dense account of the philosophy and ideology of certain cybernetic urbanists of the 60s, and their remarkably swift failure.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

Topologies is a very well written and researched book about a group of thinkers whose ideas I disagree with thoroughly. I'm finding that the more architectural theory I read, the more I come to appreciate the engineers who make physically possible such a collection of concepts so often wholly detached from reality.

My biggest issue with the spatial urbanists is their obsession with a one-sided view of linguistics: so much is made of the signifier, and so little to the signified. When reading dense academia, a healthy dose of abstraction is to be expected, but the manifestos and polemics covered in the text are so extravagantly conceptual that the language becomes almost arbitrary. The persistent infatuation with illustrating concepts through borrowed terms from semiotics, cybernetics, information theory, syntax, and post-structuralism becomes both tiresome and increasingly irrelevant. Not to say say that the above disciplines are in all cases mutually exclusive to architecture and urban design, but sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

Perhaps my two least favorite excerpts from the text are two Nicholas Schöffer quotes:

"The role of the artist-creator is no longer to make works, but to make ideas to make works, to make a meta-creation, to propose new arts and to experiment on them."

"The essential part of artistic creation is the provocation of the effect of the idea, even if it passes via the object. One should avoid conferring this ability of the production of the effect exclusively, or even partially, on the object. It is the idea that must produce the effect. When it is the object of creation that produces the effect, there is no viable artistic creation."

The outlook postulated in the above quotes might perhaps be very alluring if the weren't for the simple fact that they are explicitly referring to physical structures themselves. In completely dismissing the importance of the object at the very center of discourse, Shöffer effectively admits what every project manager already knows: that the megastructures posited exist only in theory and are never intended to be a reality. So much effort is dedicated to semantics that practical considerations are ignored altogether, and for all that the spatialists wrote about themselves, there is not a single plan for possible implementation. It's almost as if the raison d'être for each underdeveloped model is to upstage rival avant-garde groups for grant money at international exhibitions.

The self-described integration and synthesis of the arts sought by the movement's leaders is sophomoric at best, and for all of the posturing and prospectivism, a fair share of spatialist ideas are purely reactionary. Firmly rooted in the contemporary problems of the first half of the twentieth century, many proposals can be almost laughably dismissed now. The idea was to create a system that could accommodate for almost anything, but their dogmatic insistence on reinventing the wheel is nearsighted and largely unnecessary. In almost all cases, spatial urbanists called for an increase in the bandwidth for the systems that propel society, when what was really needed (and what has been learned in the second half of the twentieth century) was simply a management of that bandwidth. The reason for spatial urbanism's failure wasn't because the necessary technology didn't exist, but rather that culture would have entirely collapsed had its aims been adopted in full.

All this said, the author deserves a tremendous amount of praise for narrating the subject matter in a neutral manner. Busbea smartly presents the theories of curious and short lived movement and leaves the reader to come to their own conclusions. Recommended, if only to challenge your own convictions on how urban environments should adapt to change within society.