Heterotopic Dreamscapes
Technology, Culture, and the Popular ImaginationSpring 2018 | History of World Architecture II | Professor Betsy Purvis + Clara Ma, PhD
I. Exhibition Statement II. Object List III. Bibliography
Exhibition Statement
Throughout history, technology has opened humanity up to possibilities impossible to predetermine. Every era-defining advancement demands a collective reevaluation of the status quo, leading to inevitable changes in lifestyle and identity. Today we live in that historical time period in the aftermath of the cyber utility that has been designated the Information Age, characterized by the mass consumption of cyber utilities and induction of those utilities into the very fabric of social interaction. After the massive leap forward from the past brought about by the 1982 release and rapid popularization of the Commodore 64 microcomputer, the course was set for a new culture forced to evolve faster than ever before in order to keep pace with an accelerating slew of technological advancements up through and beyond the inception of the iPhone, and social media with it, that form the basis of both the cyber-saturated present and society’s forecasted future, which is defined as the popular imagination.
The popular imagination is a social construct indelibly tied to a society’s identity, transforming sociohistorical context— values, attitudes, apprehensions, contemporary forces, and technological advancements— into a vision of the future. It manifests at the cross pollination of the avant-garde: cinema, the simulatory art form of aspiration; architecture, the constructional art form of spatial orientation; and technology, the enabling art form of revolutionary progress. As steampunk is to the Victorian Age, so is constructivism to the Modern Age, and astroculture to the Atomic Age. Concerning the contemporary, the competing visions of cyberpunk and postcyberpunk film grapple for control over the popular imagination of today’s Information Age. Both propose the concept of “heterotopia,” while defining the heterotopia in a variety of ways.
In cyberpunk, notable elements of the heterotopia are the spinning of technology as a force for the dismantling of social and political constructs; distrust of institutions and the rising techno-plutocracy; anxiety about AI, hacking, genomic editing, and IoT(Internet of Things) surveillance; densification and distribution of technological resources along class lines; and the hybridization of cultures thrown into a global mélange for the first time. The primary point of departure for post-cyberpunk is a shrugging of the pessimistic countercultural stance characteristic of cyberpunk. Lawrence Person examines the crucial mindset shift that takes place in the move from cyberpunk to postcyberpunk as it relates to literature, a domain outside the scope of this paper that nonetheless yields valuable insights into the domains of film, architecture and technology.
“Cyberpunk characters frequently seek to topple or exploit corrupt social orders. Postcyberpunk characters tend to seek ways to live in, or even strengthen, an existing social order, or help construct a better one. In cyberpunk, technology facilitates alienation from society. In postcyberpunk, technology is society. Technology is what the characters breathe, eat, and live in (in the case of Walter Jon William's Aristoi or Greg Egan's Diaspora, live in the literal sense of the word, with their selves (in part or in total) immersed in the datasphere). Postcyberpunk characters dwell in what Sterling has dubbed ‘permanent technological revolution’... as we do today.”
Having defined the technological and artistic impetuses for the proliferation of contemporary civilization, the next step is to look at those proliferated products, specifically architectural constructs. Cyberpunk and postcyberpunk have as their companion Neofuturism, a movement in architecture encompassing a vast body of work sharing its commitment to drawing from the cutting edge in technology and culture to define the built environment of the future.
This begs the question: which artistic lens— cyberpunk or postcyberpunk— is true to the realities of the present? Which informs the popular imagination and manifests as the current architectural mindscape? As it turns out, this dichotomy is misguided because it ignores the basic function of architecture: to bring together all possible influences and considerations into a single product for human habitation. Architecture is, by nature, a discipline of synthesis; therefore, it deals no differently with the aforementioned catalyzing conditions of art and technology.
What makes the transition from the warring siloes of cyberpunk and postcyberpunk to the spaces we inhabit so thrilling is that architecture, in drawing from both cyberpunk and postcyberpunk in equal measure, demolishes the rigid divide between the two, opening the way for paradoxes and insights alike. A corporate park can at once embody the postcyberpunk societal idyll as an aspirational masterpiece of Green architecture, and also inspire serious cyberpunk misgivings with the Silicon Valley elites’ profiteering from society’s reliance upon its products. A plaza can maintain an air of capitalist prosperity at the ground level, giving the appearance of a thriving post-nationalist technoculture in line with postcyberpunk, while office spaces above stand vacant like the devastated urban landscapes of cyberpunk cinema. Even in structures predating the official start date of the Information Age, like the Tour Montréal, the comingling of cyberpunk and postcyberpunk is apparent; the edifice and surrounding complex both saddled the city with crippling debt while standing obsolete for years after the Olympic games, and also propelled the city into prominence by placing it at the forefront of architectural innovation. Juxtaposing cyberpunk and postcyberpunk as mutually exclusive societal actors is but a crude imposition of black and white, purely negative and positive value judgements; architecture, like everything else, is a mixed bag of corruption and idealism, failure and progress, expense and reward, despair and aspiration.
In assembling a roughly chronological collection of artifacts that revolutionized the world, films that masterfully embody the scholarly discourse surrounding the popular imagination, and architecture that challenges everything technology and art stand for, Heterotopic Dreamscapes seeks to present society’s outlook for the future through the lens of the recent past in order to inform our design decisions in the present.
The popular imagination is a social construct indelibly tied to a society’s identity, transforming sociohistorical context— values, attitudes, apprehensions, contemporary forces, and technological advancements— into a vision of the future. It manifests at the cross pollination of the avant-garde: cinema, the simulatory art form of aspiration; architecture, the constructional art form of spatial orientation; and technology, the enabling art form of revolutionary progress. As steampunk is to the Victorian Age, so is constructivism to the Modern Age, and astroculture to the Atomic Age. Concerning the contemporary, the competing visions of cyberpunk and postcyberpunk film grapple for control over the popular imagination of today’s Information Age. Both propose the concept of “heterotopia,” while defining the heterotopia in a variety of ways.
In cyberpunk, notable elements of the heterotopia are the spinning of technology as a force for the dismantling of social and political constructs; distrust of institutions and the rising techno-plutocracy; anxiety about AI, hacking, genomic editing, and IoT(Internet of Things) surveillance; densification and distribution of technological resources along class lines; and the hybridization of cultures thrown into a global mélange for the first time. The primary point of departure for post-cyberpunk is a shrugging of the pessimistic countercultural stance characteristic of cyberpunk. Lawrence Person examines the crucial mindset shift that takes place in the move from cyberpunk to postcyberpunk as it relates to literature, a domain outside the scope of this paper that nonetheless yields valuable insights into the domains of film, architecture and technology.
“Cyberpunk characters frequently seek to topple or exploit corrupt social orders. Postcyberpunk characters tend to seek ways to live in, or even strengthen, an existing social order, or help construct a better one. In cyberpunk, technology facilitates alienation from society. In postcyberpunk, technology is society. Technology is what the characters breathe, eat, and live in (in the case of Walter Jon William's Aristoi or Greg Egan's Diaspora, live in the literal sense of the word, with their selves (in part or in total) immersed in the datasphere). Postcyberpunk characters dwell in what Sterling has dubbed ‘permanent technological revolution’... as we do today.”
Having defined the technological and artistic impetuses for the proliferation of contemporary civilization, the next step is to look at those proliferated products, specifically architectural constructs. Cyberpunk and postcyberpunk have as their companion Neofuturism, a movement in architecture encompassing a vast body of work sharing its commitment to drawing from the cutting edge in technology and culture to define the built environment of the future.
This begs the question: which artistic lens— cyberpunk or postcyberpunk— is true to the realities of the present? Which informs the popular imagination and manifests as the current architectural mindscape? As it turns out, this dichotomy is misguided because it ignores the basic function of architecture: to bring together all possible influences and considerations into a single product for human habitation. Architecture is, by nature, a discipline of synthesis; therefore, it deals no differently with the aforementioned catalyzing conditions of art and technology.
What makes the transition from the warring siloes of cyberpunk and postcyberpunk to the spaces we inhabit so thrilling is that architecture, in drawing from both cyberpunk and postcyberpunk in equal measure, demolishes the rigid divide between the two, opening the way for paradoxes and insights alike. A corporate park can at once embody the postcyberpunk societal idyll as an aspirational masterpiece of Green architecture, and also inspire serious cyberpunk misgivings with the Silicon Valley elites’ profiteering from society’s reliance upon its products. A plaza can maintain an air of capitalist prosperity at the ground level, giving the appearance of a thriving post-nationalist technoculture in line with postcyberpunk, while office spaces above stand vacant like the devastated urban landscapes of cyberpunk cinema. Even in structures predating the official start date of the Information Age, like the Tour Montréal, the comingling of cyberpunk and postcyberpunk is apparent; the edifice and surrounding complex both saddled the city with crippling debt while standing obsolete for years after the Olympic games, and also propelled the city into prominence by placing it at the forefront of architectural innovation. Juxtaposing cyberpunk and postcyberpunk as mutually exclusive societal actors is but a crude imposition of black and white, purely negative and positive value judgements; architecture, like everything else, is a mixed bag of corruption and idealism, failure and progress, expense and reward, despair and aspiration.
In assembling a roughly chronological collection of artifacts that revolutionized the world, films that masterfully embody the scholarly discourse surrounding the popular imagination, and architecture that challenges everything technology and art stand for, Heterotopic Dreamscapes seeks to present society’s outlook for the future through the lens of the recent past in order to inform our design decisions in the present.
Object List
Figure 1. The Commodore 64 microcomputer. (From Bertram).
The Commodore 64 was the first computer to reach the public, superimposing for the first time a cyber utility onto the family workflow. A massive commercial hit, it was the biggest techno-consumerist leap to follow the popularization of color television. With the Commodore 64, the seeds were sown for a society truly of the future and the Information Age began.
Figure 2. View of Le Tour Montréal in the Parc Olympique, Montréal, CA by Roger Taillibert. (From Carpentier).
Completed for the 1976 Olympic games as part of the larger Olympic complex, Le Tour Montréal was an early catalyst for Neofuturism, pushing the boundaries of the contemporary imagination by bending physics with its canted silhouette, evoking alien or far-future typologies with its zoomorphic base, and adding to the mix a whimsical funicular. Its impact on the popular perception of the future aesthetic would reverberate in other works throughout NeoFuturism up to the present day.
Figure 3. Clip of Ghost City from 1995 film Ghost in the Shell. (From Ito).
[Click image for link to Youtube clip]
Ghost in the Shell was the most essential film to emerge from the Cyberpunk genre, lauded for its thorough encompassing of the zeitgeist. In addition to perfecting the art of contemporary placemaking in film with the adaptation of the aspect-to-aspect frame from graphic novels, the film presents for debate the concept of the “heterotopia”— a realistic middle ground between the utopia and the dystopia— that has come to define the public’s perception of globalized, technologized society.
Figure 4. J.P. Morgan Media Center at the Lord’s Cricket Ground, London, UK by Future Systems. (From Bularca).
The Lord’s Media Center creatively interprets the idea of the interface at a variety of scales. Drawing visibly from the computer monitor as a visual precedent, it houses journalists and statisticians who, watching from within the “monitor,” do in fact do the work of a computer by capturing, interpreting, and disseminating data. Additionally, CAD software made possible the structure’s sophisticated curvilinear form, and liberated architects to explore a new uncharted frontier of what could be considered buildable.
Figure 5. The central plaza at the Sony Center in Berlin, Germany by Helmut Jahn. (From Nordenfan).
The Sony Center distills the concept of the heterotopia into a built project. Funded by a duo of massive corporations, the plaza pulsates with synthetic light and bustling crowds at night under an at once aspirational and oppressive canopic superstructure. The plaza leaves behind the vernacular of Berlin in favor of international corporate architecture, while much of the office spaces above the prosperous commercial zone of the street remain empty due to the economic woes of the 2008 global recession. It has had a mixed reception, on one hand a thrilling triumph of the techno-capitalism of the future, and on the other the biproduct of vulnerable globalized cyberfinance.
Figure 6. From left: El Museu de Ciencies Principe Felipe, El Pont de l'Assut de l'Or, and L’Agora; The City of Arts and Sciences in Valencia, Spain by Santiago Calatrava. (From Mountain Reporters).
It is perhaps telling that the complex was the only real-life film location deemed suitable to feature in Tomorrowland. Calatrava took NeoFuturism to new heights in this prototype for what the future of cities can look like, proposing a complete formal language for the city of tomorrow in a manner akin to Oscar Niemeyer’s city of Brasilia. In pursuit of engineering magic like movable parts, he does often breach the limits of constructability, as evidenced by the structural issues that plague many of his buildings.
The arrival of the iPhone had irreversible ramifications. Manufacturing so-called universal access to society meant that the purchase of a consumer good could allow anyone, anywhere, to opt into collective culture. Not only did it allow one to access all the world’s assembled knowledge, but it made possible the rise of the social media landscape that dominates interpersonal interaction today.
Figure 8. Front entrance of the Heydar Aliyev Center in Baku, Azerbaijan, by Zaha Hadid Architects. (From Heydar Aliyev Markazi).
The Heydar Aliyev Center embodies the possibilities of parametricism, a compositional mode only possible with the use of cutting edge design software and defined by the setting of parameters and manipulation of algorithms to achieve a design. This mathematical mode is both hyperrational and entirely surreal, thoroughly looking to define the public culture arenas of tomorrow. Patronage by Azerbaijan’s authoritarian leader President Aliyev, in the tradition of monuments of old, does call into question whether this kind of building can take form in a post-institutional cyberworld.
Figure 9. Aerial view of Apple Park in Cupertino, California. (From 9to5 Mac).
Apple Park is the realm of the new cyber plutocracy, a forbidding corporate edifice employing all the latest architectural trends in order to elevate it to an exclusive white-collar ideal. Setting aside sprawling parkland, using solar panels to generate energy, and designing efficiency into every detail of its construction, Apple Park is an example of the dual design triumph x public relations campaign. The project’s utopian ambitions for a sustainable future inevitably collide with society’s wariness of Apple’s rise to oligarchic status.
Figure 10. The skyline of Wakanda from Black Panther. (From Malkin).
As a post-cyberpunk film, Black Panther presents another conception of the heterotopia: a society that has attained all the promise of utopia, yet apathetically hoards its privilege from those people left behind by the Information Age. Wakanda spatializes the idea of a heterotopic society. The city’s architecture imagines a postcolonial African hybrid of vernacular and international building practices and typologies, a hallmark of the Afrofuturist movement. At the same time, it conceals itself from the outside world, leaving its neighboring countries and the global diaspora to suffer the tribulations of war, poverty, famine, and oppression. Wakanda poses the question: what is the responsibility of those who reap the benefits of the Information Age to help others rise up?
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