Utopias thrive as ideas, and the archigram utopian visions of the 1960s show how far they can reach. They mock authority, expose the present, and anticipate desires that people have not yet articulated. Once they are built, they change. Andrés Jaque argues that a utopia cannot carry its politics intact into the future.
Disclosure: designboom published Jaque’s essay and interview as part of a series presented in partnership with INDX|GLOBAL, a cultural platform focused on Indian architecture, design, and creative intelligence.
Jaque is a Spanish architect, researcher, and educator. He founded the Office for Political Innovation (OFFPOLINN) in 2003, and the practice operates from New York and Madrid. He is Professor and Dean of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. His honors include the 2016 Frederick Kiesler Prize for Architecture and the Arts and the Silver Lion for Best Research Project at the 14th Venice Architecture Biennale.
When archigram utopian visions arrive
The archigram utopian visions of the 1960s offer the clearest example. Its visions of mobile architecture, technological freedom, continuous connectivity, and cities released from fixed institutions shaped the energy of twentieth-century utopian architecture. Jaque sees that energy as inseparable from the intelligence and vitality of the young people who produced it.
Those same promises now look different. According to Jaque’s essay, labor reaches into nearly every hour and room of daily life. Platforms advertise choice while concentrating power. Digital tools sell freedom while enabling surveillance, extraction, segregation, and constant availability.
Freedom to move runs into borders designed to sort who may pass. Flexibility runs into housing shortages that push millions out of their homes. Advanced computation travels alongside warfare and the destruction of cities, and the networks that promise universal knowledge also serve as engines of mass disinformation.
Jaque’s point that computation cannot be separated from its consequences has a built-world counterpart: Architects Make the Case for Beautiful Data Centers shows how these vast infrastructures are being designed as urban neighbours rather than hidden machinery.
What once looked like liberation can harden into a system of control. Jaque’s point is not that the archigram utopian visions failed. Its realization altered the politics it carried.
Crises without clean boundaries
Jaque’s central claim is that today’s crises refuse neat categories. Housing depends on financial algorithms, property law, migration, and the bodies trying to survive inside it. Climate instability links the atmosphere, energy grids, factories, governance, and predictive software.
Biodiversity loss ties together agriculture, logistics, microbial ecologies, and land finance. Warfare pairs automated detection with the destruction of people, habitats, and infrastructure. Each of these problems runs through many systems at once.
Jaque describes these conditions as posthuman enactments, meaning situations in which people no longer stand outside the systems they shape. Computation and biology, sensing and decision-making, cannot be separated. People take part in these transformations constantly, even when the processes that drive them lie beyond human perception.
He calls the edge of that perception the threshold of sensing. Experimenting there means entering the conflicts that produce reality, not sketching alternatives from a safe distance. It means questioning what software recognizes, what institutions exclude, and who absorbs the consequences.
Cracks in a system in crisis
In an interview with designboom, Jaque said that “the world in which we’re living is sinking.” He named several overlapping systems that he believes architecture helped build through modernism: destructivism, racialization, patriarchy, technocracy, and anthropocentrism. He sees those systems beginning to break.
“Utopia is no longer something that exists as an alternative to what is here,” he said. “It is potential growing within the cracks of a system in crisis.” For Jaque, utopia is a method of finding tensions in the present that point toward futures worth building.
The Reggio School in Madrid shows the method at work. The building stands on a former landfill with very little biodiversity compared with its surroundings. Its multilayer facade is made of locally sourced Spanish cork, whose tiny pores allow fungi and mycelium to grow. The team now tracks that microbial life with scientists and microbiologists, and it has observed rising insect populations in the surrounding soil.
Jaque says the practice now works closely with activists, scientists, and architects from other disciplines. He presents this as a practical necessity rather than a moral stance. “Architects are no longer solo authors,” he said, contrasting today’s approach with the provocations common in architecture twenty years ago.
From representation to mobilization
Jaque also describes a shift in method. Designers, he says, care less about images that inspire, like the archigram utopian visions, and more about bringing realities into existence.
The central question becomes how to organize the world so that it is inclusive and supports ecosystems and societies that can coexist.
Turning material waste into something that can inhabit the world is another way architects are working inside real conflicts, as seen when a studio turns red mud waste into ceramics and architecture that rethinks what a building material can be.
Jaque’s work asks architects to stop delivering images of a better world and start working inside the cracks where one might take shape. The open question is not whether a utopia can be built. It is who will test it while it is still taking shape.
Source: designboom.com
Frequently asked questions
What does Andrés Jaque argue happens to utopias once built?
Andrés Jaque argues that a utopia cannot carry its politics intact into the future. Once utopian visions are built, they change, and the politics they carried are altered by their realization.
Which systems does Jaque say modernist architecture helped build?
Jaque names destructivism, racialization, patriarchy, technocracy, and anthropocentrism as overlapping systems that he believes architecture helped build through modernism. He says he sees these systems beginning to break.
What is the Reggio School in Madrid and why does it matter?
The Reggio School in Madrid is a building that stands on a former landfill with very little biodiversity compared with its surroundings. The article presents it as an example of Jaque’s method, since its cork facade lets fungi and mycelium grow and the team now tracks microbial life with scientists.
What does Jaque mean by utopia as a method?
For Jaque, utopia is a method of finding tensions in the present that point toward futures worth building. He describes it as potential growing within the cracks of a system in crisis rather than an alternative that exists apart from what is here.
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