The other side of utopia

How are buildings aesthetic players in the production of the inner-city environment? What kinds of becoming does it engender? What is generated through this space?

Reverse function of symbolism: the symbolic function of its materiality is always made in relation to something else, something outside of the architecture itself. That outside, as well, is dually coded materially as well. Such outsides are the ideological futurity of utopia and the bodies that dwell within its symbolism. Building's re-arrange perspectives, but they are also re-arranged by perspectives mapped through them as well.

The first sketches and images of superblock housing in the US are sweeping landscape shots of tall buildings emerging from the industrial city. Scale coordinates with utopic vision: the brick constructions tower over the old city, doing their best to awkwardly integrate. But as utopia began to deteriorate, the intimate spaces of home, the scale of the corridor, room, and face, became the dominant imagery of the projects. Utopia began to have the face of Black urban poverty.

Place was made through utopia's ideology, against its future-oriented, de-historicized vision, demanding attention to the present and presence of bodies and social conditions that were inclusively excluded from modernism's utopian dreams. Occupying utopia as outsiders, the perspective of the outside become increasingly one from within as the projects engendered poverty, destitution, Blackness as the ghetto, inner-city. The projects became, seemingly overnight, socially constituted by their material conditions; these conditions engendered social bodies and identities through practice and discourse that turned the inside and outside upon itself. To know oneself through external conditions was the moral conditioning of the projects. Buildings that looked like prisons (externally) constituted feelings of oppression (internally).

The interstitial space between construction and demolition is collapsed: "the becoming-spectral of a utopian future that, by the time the project was completed, was already identified with the past" (Martin 15). But between the past the future was a time wherein social problems engendered and maginified by broken and devient environments represented the heterogenaeity that was normal in the inner-city. As exceptional poverty became normalized, the projects grew more and more to resemble camps: fixed in an eternal state of exception.

With the destruction of the projects a second utopia, that of nostalgia, emerged from the ruins and the memories of the bodies left behind. Nostalgia is a desire for what never was, a kind of empty signifier, without a sign, that holds the trace of desire, but not of any one thing. It is a utopian space that is constituted by the present for the future through an imagined past. Utopia obscures the present, or unfolds it, diversifies it to the extent that it can hold the fixed imaginings of past and future. The present must be multivalent enough to hold the suspended temporality of utopia, imprinting its shadows upon the bodies in its presence.