Key writings and projects from the group of architects, sociologists,
and urbanists known as Utopie.
"When the imagination reaches and oversteps the boundaries authorized by
the institution of culture, we speak of poetry, of utopia.... When the
event reaches and oversteps the boundaries authorized by judicial law
and by the anomic rules, we speak of revolution."--René Lourau
The short-lived grouping of architects, sociologists, and urbanists
known as Utopie, active in Paris from 1967 to 1978, was the product of
several factors: the student protests for the reform of architectural
education, the unprecedented expansion and replanning of the Parisian
urban fabric carried out by the government of Charles de Gaulle, and the
domestication of military and industrial technologies by an emerging
consumer society. The group's collaborative publications included the
work of Jean Aubert, Isabelle Auricoste, Jean Baudrillard, Catherine
Cot, Charles Goldblum, Jean-Paul Jungmann, Henri Lefebvre, René Lourau,
Antoine Stinco, and Hubert Tonka. Offering a militant alternative to
professional urban planning journals, these writers not only formulated
a critique of the technocratic and administrative rule over a disabled
and alienated urban society but also projected an ephemeral urban
poetics. With ties to the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts
(ENSBA) in central Paris and to the sociology department established by
Henri Lefebvre at the suburban campus of Nanterre, the group challenged
postwar modernization and urban planning and questioned the roles into
which architects, sociologists, and urban planners had been cast. Utopie
makes the group's diverse body of theoretical work accessible in English
for the first time, offering translations of more than twenty key texts.
Designed in a facsimile format that follows the innovative graphic
layouts of the journals, pamphlets, posters, and articles produced by
Utopie, the volume not only provides the first thorough overview of the
group's activities but also seeks to capture Utopie's linkage of
architectural and urban theory to radical publication strategies.
