Architecture and Dystopia

A homage to the 1973 publication of Architecture and Utopia by Manfredo Tafuri, this book is devoted to the radical experiences of the 1960s and to their consequences for the most recent developments in contemporary architecture.

As a response to the profound crisis of Western culture that emerged in the 1960s, radical artists from Italy, Austria, England, and Japan called into question the foundations of modernist utopias. They transmuted the difficulties of capitalism into a repertory of startling images that revealed the disturbing realities of consumer society, even in those places still resistant to the penetration of modern architecture.

Their model, though exhausted in the space of experimentation, went on to inspire a generation of architects, from the High Tech movement to Rem Koolhaas, who sought to employ the paradigm of dystopia as both a visionary and a constructive method. This method could operate on the architecture of late capitalism and generate unexpected possibilities for urban planning.

The goal of Architecture and Dystopia is to explore these possibilities, thus initiating an open dialogue about the legitimacy of this critical category.