THE IDEA OF UTOPIA, which in Latin means “nowhere,” was dabbled in by painters, but only took on serious pursuits in modernist architecture. The result are mixed, depending on your tastes. That is because, while a painting of Utopia is to be looked at, a utopian urban plan must be lived within.
The polymath Leonardo da Vinci drew up utopia-like city plans, and in the late Renaissance several adept painters limned vistas of ideal city squares, all in the elegant, symmetrical ambiance of Renaissance revival of classicism.
After that, it was engineering that took over. And soon enough, the pursuit of aesthetic utopia became a tug of war between engineering and ideology. The first sought large, useful structures for mass populations. The second believed that reformed architecture and urban planning could “reform” people themselves—the new ideological twist.
As to the first, the British built vast iron and glass train stations, for example, and in the United States, the “hanging wall” system was developed: Build a steel frame, and let the weight of the building hang from that. Chicago architecture was the exemplar.
These were revolutions in engineering, but another kind of revolution had also been percolating since the French Revolution. Back then, a utopian city was envisioned to reshape the minds and hearts of the population (on paper, but never realized).
The realization, arguably, began with the Arts & Crafts movement in late 1800s England, and then blossomed in the early 1900s with the Bauhaus movement in Germany. There, modernist ideas about how modern design shaped individual and collective lives were formed. There were malevolent deviations, of course. The Nazis, Italian Fascists, and later the Soviets also had utopian idea about architecture and cities, either to show power or to control the minds of the populace.
Far more benign, of course, was the Bauhaus (which means “building house) movement, which argued for new sentiments in design. The sentiments had already showed up in a 1914 manifesto on the “futurist city,” one with a “futurist house like a machine.” This, in turn, would reform society, socially engineering a kind of utopia.
A 1923 Bauhaus publication put it succinctly: Art and technology: a New Unity. Indeed, the goal was to design entire cities, and do this in a collective “collaboration” of architects (versus the lone-wolf career of the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright).
Some of the catchphrases growing out of the era capture the utopian rudiments of modernism: “truth in architecture,” “total work of art,” “workshop practice,” “collective artists at work,” “architectural functionalism,” “high rise and prefab housing,” “architectural and truth and honesty,” and the “International Style.” This was a prelude to both the glass and steel skyscrapers of New York and Chicago, but also the design of minimalist household accoutrements now seen in a company like Ikea.
It is telling that one historian, favorable to the Bauhaus founder, Walter Gropius, said that in the end, the influential German modernist was more “a great philosopher than a great architect.” Gropius was a chief architect of the 59-story minimalist Pan Am Building—now the MetLife Building—in Manhattan, opened in 1963. Many of his other projects never materialized, or were stillborn, however, due to the harsh economic conditions in the mid-century of wars and the Depression.
Gropius said what a lot of his generation’s modern urban planners were thinking: an architect “Can’t go on reviving revivals.” Something new had to take the field, and modernist architecture and city planning was the new force. With that intent, “The Bauhaus reshaped the world,” in the view of one Gropius biographer.
The adherence to modernism, and rejection of classicism, is strong an deep, and was carved in stone by the U.S. government’s 1962, “Guiding Principles for Federal Architecture.” When the Trump Administration issued new “guiding principle” favoring classical federal buildings, the uproar from modernist elites was colossal.
Nevertheless, many utopian architectural visions have been no more helpful to the public than the Renaissance paintings of ideal city squares. A good deal of modernist architecture over the past 40 years has decayed, been torn down, abandoned, or turned ramshackle by its human occupants. Like a painting, the vision of the modernist, utopian architect was one of buildings and cities as a beautiful “picture,” and because they were pictures—or like large sculptures—they did not suit most human needs.
Although the modern style has dictated much of our modern landscape—it is now functional, economical, and compact—its heroic projects are seen as great art, but not necessarily great places to live and work. Housing projects are the epitome. In this sense, utopian art-and-architecture was in many ways to be looked at with admiration, but not lived in.
The utopian project was worth a try, one historian says, but its 40-year hegemony taught many valuable lessons. Utopias designed by artists are easier to look at than to live in. Today, a key legacy of the Bauhaus is the adoption of its “basic design course” in most art colleges. All for the good. The Renaissance paintings of the ideal city probably proved another thing long ago: a work of art (i.e. a painting or building) doesn’t change people, as interesting or as beautiful as it may be.