The work was carried out within the framework of the theme: "The evolution of architectural theories: from the utopias of the twentieth century to modern methods of forecasting the future." Postgraduate study at the Moscow Architectural Institute. The scientific advisor is Professor Oskar Raulievich Mamleev.
Analysis. World of the future
In the 16th century, Sir Thomas More used the word "utopia" to describe a fictitious place or state in which everything is perfect. The word "dystopia" was first pronounced in 1868 by the philosopher John Stuart Mill during a speech in the House of Commons as something opposite to utopia: a future that is more nightmarish than heavenly.
Any architectural utopia has its own heuristic limits, which sooner or later turn it into an architectural dystopia - every model of the future becomes obsolete, as our ideas about the future change. Until recently, this state of affairs required immediate intervention and the creation of a new version of the future, capable of getting ahead of its time and offering a new vector of development from the dead end in which we found ourselves. The appearance of dystopia on the horizon was seen by science fiction architects as a mistake in their magic formula for an ideal world.
However, at the turn of the new century, a fundamentally new turn was outlined in the architectural intellectual field regarding the process of designing the future. “Throughout the XX century. and partly already in the formed new-utopian discourse of the beginning of the XXI century, the trajectory of the movement of utopia and dystopia to a new meta-genre based on the principle of [their] dialectically inseparable combination is systematized”[4].
Today we live in the heyday of architectural metautopias. The new phenomenon is quite young and ambiguous, and therefore has a number of conceptual questions. Nevertheless, it is possible that it is precisely such a diffuse method of designing an architectural future that will be able to overcome the crisis of utopian thought created by architectural theory in the 21st century.
We are seeing a shift in utopian design towards playful fluidity. I would like to more carefully analyze the main features of the emerging phenomenon and outline the contours of a new theory of the future.
The crisis. A chaotic and never-ending era of game-vision
Architectural utopia reached its highest culmination point as a genre in the 20th century. Then the most significant models of cities of the future and the main directions of thought appeared: neo-futurism, Russian cosmism, Italian futurism, paper architecture and many others.
After the 20th century, not a single significant and fundamentally new big utopia has emerged. The process of recombination of architectural forms-theories began. It was the 21st century that became a turning point, highlighting the main problem of theories of the future - the limit of utopia. Today we are witnessing a crisis in utopian thought. It becomes obvious that we need to search for new approaches in designing the future.
Modern futuristic architects, dreaming of knowing if there is a future world after utopia, are beginning to look for answers outside of it. One of the new directions shaping the intellectual quest for the future today is the process of creating an atlas of dystopias. In recent years, it has developed a rapid turnover and has clearly shown itself in the field of cinema, art, architecture and even computer games. We live in a golden age of future dystopias.
The main feature of modern dystopia is that it is no longer perceived as the "limit of theory", but becomes a separate meta-genre of design - a playable sandbox. If the main function of dystopia in the 20th century was "reflection" (a value-oriented form of forecasting), then in the 21st century it was replaced by "play" (experimentation). In architectural sandboxes, the player's creativity is unleashed through the creation of multidimensional game dimensions. Eschatological catastrophes, once in such a game world-system, lead to new discoveries.
The new approach makes it possible to get out of the matrix of the “human view of the future” and get into the looking glass. Throughout the entire time, this gaze limited the horizon of the future and did not let in everything that is hidden behind it and that we do not see. For example, how to present utopia from the perspective of the forest? Imagine the world of the future, in which objects found feelings and fantasies, and mountains came to life and began to travel for the sun and rain. Such elements fall into the "blind zone", which does not allow seeing all the options for the future due to the "distortions" imposed by humans. Metautopia proposes going beyond the limited angle of vision of the future - it creates the lenses of the play space and proposes to move from the subject-object model (man-world) to object-oriented anthologies (world-world).
However, as soon as we begin to imagine the world of the future outside the "corner of our vision", then we immediately get a horror - a world that is filled with incomprehensible, fantastic, monstrous and completely unfamiliar to us, where everything begins to come to life before our eyes and realizes itself as different - as soon as a person sees something that defies any description, it is difficult for him to fit it into a single model of the world. A game metautopia is an open system that incorporates elements of “horror” as conceptual building blocks into a single game model and becomes a new experimental theory of the future.
Breakthrough. The end of the world or what utopians are looking for in the dark
A group of speculative realists (Quentin Meillassoux, Ian Hamilton Grant, Ray Brassier and Graham Harman) met - for the first and last time - in London in April 2007. This meeting brought together four young philosophers. One of the two things in common was a love for the American horror writer Howard Lovecraft. In their object-oriented philosophy, human thinking is only one type of thing among trillions of others, and inhuman forms of the living / (non) living come to the fore. Speculative realism has existed for hardly more than a decade, but it is already one of the most influential philosophical movements in art, architecture and the humanities (theories of Peter Gratton, Stephen Shaviro, Tom Sparrow). [five]
In the XXI century. philosophers are beginning to rapidly explore the problems of the "dark", "strange" (weird), "other" - in the spectrum from the Enlightenment to ecology and horror stadiz [6]. Whole directions of new metautopic thought emerge: actor-network theory (Bruno Latour), object-oriented ontology (Graham Harman), dark vitalism (Ben Woodard), dark ecology (Timot Morton), Cannibal metaphysics (E. Viveyros de Castro and E. Kon), post-structuralist anthropology and cybergothic. Dark intellectuals fill the pages of their prose with black creatures, nightmarish forebodings, ominous insights. Black fiction has spread to the architecture of the future, giving a rapid development to a variety of scenarios of the architectural world after and after tomorrow. For example, Sacred Detroit by Quisi Jeslands, Sin City by Kai Hang, or Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by James Smith.
The authors of Japanese horor manga, who reflect on the structure of the future outside the human world, can be safely attributed to the followers of the new metautopic direction. They are based on the concepts of "world-without-us" by Eugene Tucker and "cthulhucene" by Donna Haraway. For example, the novel "Pisces" (GYO, 2012) draws images of cyclopean-sized whales with legs, the novel "Beasts" (Jinmen, 2016–2019) introduces the world where a human-faced elephant is possible, and the ecological horror "Insects" (Insect Princess, 2013 - 2015) describes giant butterflies and a vengeful louse.
Looking for the prerequisites for a new direction of intellectual thought that combined architectural utopia and dystopia and opened up a new space for playful experiments with the future, one cannot fail to mention the phenomenon of "afrofuturism", invented in 1993 by the writer Mark Deri. In his essay Black to the Future, he talks about the emergence of a new vision of the future, darker with a greater fear of technology and based on completely different cultural experiences. According to Afrofuturism, the world of the future is a diffuse state between oppositions, like male versus female, human versus animal, old versus new, dark versus light. One of the images important for this idea is the heroine of Octavia Butler's fantasy novel "Wild Seed", the immortal woman Eninwu, who, by an effort of will, can rebuild her body so that it takes on the appearance of other people or animals.
Thus, the beginning of the XXI century is a bifurcation point. Our ideas about the fundamental principles of utopianism are crumbling. Metautopia creates a space for new game theories of the future.
The final. Theory of the future. Wonderland, magic, rare animals and monsters
The first tale. Cyborgs came out of the forest.
Once in the world of the future there were so many things and objects that they found freedom. Their population was growing and, in order to avoid a collapse due to a catastrophic and uncontrolled release of energy, it was decided to limit the growth of their population and form an “Object policy” (“Committee on the restriction of the birth rate of things” - ed.). Then came the first declaration on the rights of objects. A whole world arose in which suddenly not objects, but the connections between them became important, and instead of the philosophy of "object-person" - "object-space" came into fashion. The commandment, written by the first object-like in the ancient language, understandable to absolutely every object-like: “Sharing live. Ever speed, ever green. Free energy. Stop object abuse!”, - every object-like person has read these lines at least once.
On Tuesdays things danced on the dance floor, on Wednesdays they spent time in the lost property office. In fact, any object secretly dreamed of being a human in a world without a human. Objectlike dreamed of eternal transformation. Machinery of the future. On Fridays, they shared details: the printer was moonlighting with a USB flash drive in the evening, and the coffee maker and vacuum cleaner fell in love, created a child, which will surely turn the industry around in the future. One object consumed the consciousness of others, in the end who he was, even he himself did not know. The need to work was found to violate the basic rights of subjects. Subject matter! Object universalis!
The second tale. Brownie
At night, the houses of the future came to life. A spirit lived in each of them - a Brownie. When it got dark, the house of the future began to creak, objects in its rooms made noise, and the wallpaper whispered to each other. The brownie was dragging things from place to place, so it seemed that they were moving on their own - in fact, the thing left that you don't use yet dissolves and grows in another place in the city of the future, where it is needed now, and in the morning it appeared on the same place where you left it, as if nothing had happened.
There are many different communications inside - these stupid staircases have been thrown out. There are cranes that move visitors. Rivers instead of corridors. And a fog in which you can hide from annoying guests. The walls of the house are liquid, like a cake - you can move and climb in them.
One day, the Girl and her friends gathered at X, together to meet the new, 2069, year. Z, as always, did not calculate the proportion and spread like a jelly all over the room and we had to pick it up in a basin. It's unpleasant, of course, when your friend loses shape so quickly, but just then, while I was rubbing off sticky fingers, and X's fins, they decided to talk about how much their architectural world has changed and how much they themselves have changed, living in the city the future.
The third tale. Zmey Gorynych
Every day Kirill gets up early for a morning run. Knowing about his sad mood (Kirill chose a sad playlist), his smartwatch paved a special route for him to get rid of bad thoughts. The shoes' sensors analyze running rhythm, heart rate and monitor blood chemistry. In the city of the future, Cyril's human body has become a new common territory for objects and things. Cyril's things are jealous of him for each other, argue, make trouble for other things so that he would pay attention to them today and spend a little more time with them than usual, because they miss him very much.
Cyril makes his morning jog in the park, and the next minute - the route for some reason redirects and directs him to the right so that he sees a picturesque falling star, his right hand begins to write the best novel in the history of mankind and his left hand composes a symphony for a bet, the next he learns Yiddish for a minute and answers an unexpected video call from another part of the world to talk to a stranger about Plato's philosophical ideas.
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