Two Large-Scale Design Fictions
“Flood Florence permanently by building a dam at the Gonfolina ravine” suggested the Italian collective Superstudio in their project Salvages of Italian Historic Centers, which was featured in a 1972 issue of the journal IN.[1] An accompanying photomontage depicted the Brunelleschi dome surrounded by water and pleasure boats—as the last buoyant reminder of the history lying beneath. For “buildings,” Superstudio claimed, “are conserved better and longer when they are submerged [in water] than when they are exposed to atmospheric agents.”[2] The text was written on a document template crafted to look official and was accompanied by a map of the Arno valley showing the geographic expanse of the designed flood. The architects were responding to their contemporaneous discourse on the preservation of architectural monuments, which was particularly vivid in Italy. The proposal for the flooding of Florence was only one of six interventions targeting an equal number of important Italian cities. The rest of the proposals were no less bold: bury the center of Rome; drain and pave over all of Venice’s canals; nest Naples within an illustrated shed; tilt all buildings in Pisa; enclose Milan within a glass cage. Sometimes, Superstudio argued, one first needs to destroy, in order to be saved.
Cut to 48 years later. Picture “a city of 10 billion people, the entire population of the earth—where we surrender the rest of the world to a global scaled wilderness and the return of stolen lands”: 221,376 km² of buildings, 7,047 spoken languages, 49,445,671,570 solar panels, 42,877,520,340 fruit trees, and other precisely accounted for elements compose a busy, dense, and ever luminescent agglomeration fit to accommodate every person on earth.[3] This is Planet City, a 2020 speculative project by Australian architect Liam Young and a team of researchers he brought together, responding to the conversations on climate adaptation and planetary urbanization. The City is imagined in different mediums, including a film, a book, and a series of costume installations and dance performances.
Although half a century and many realizations apart, the two projects bear important similarities. Despite their distinct points of interest—historic preservation for Superstudio and planetary urbanization for Young—both projects essentially comprise design fictions that operate on territorial scale. More than oriented to any particular building or manmade construction, they both target a large-scale reformation of the biogeophysical environment.
In addition, despite their similarly gargantuan claims, both projects manage to remain suspended between seriousness and absurdity. The outrageous suggestion of a Pliocene era preservation baseline did not stop Superstudio from demonstrating their nuanced understanding of the preservation discourse they entered, and from articulating an honest and serious vision that is more-than-technical: displeased with the prevailing attitudes that, in their opinion, paralyzed historic centers and opened the way for an economization of monuments, Superstudio sought to unearth a radical potential of preservation. Similarly, Planet City, Young writes, “is a city form that … has evolved through the most rigorous pragmatism. … [it] is a grounded and possible proposal developed from real calculations, cutting edge research, and the support of a distributed council of acclaimed environmental scientists, technologists, economists and authors.”[4] At the same time, both projects are unavoidably marked by their extravagant claims, embracing absurdity as a form of conscious strategy. Adolfo Natalini, one of the outspoken Superstudio members, later made clear that their photomontage projects aimed at “demonstratio per absurdum,” a design-rhetorical device stretching the premises and claims of a proposal “in grandiose style” in order to make what they saw as a critical point.[5] In a parallel fashion, Young admitted that Planet City drives his hypothesis “almost to the point of absurdity,” perhaps pointing to the immense implications that such a plan would entail on the physical, and even more on the human geography of the planet. Balancing between honest intentions and rhetorical absurdity, both projects are posed not as realizable projects, but rather as provocations aimed at their contemporaneous ongoing discourses.
Yet, despite all other similarities, the two design fictions are uttered in markedly different tones of voice. With its colorfully dark, cyberpunk-saturated visuals, Planet City expresses a solemn agony. It transports the viewer to a near future where automated urban farms and festivalesque dance rituals have managed to coexist literally on top of each other, allowing enough space for an urgent global ecosystem restoration—that some decided they have to get serious about. Salvages on the other hand, foregrounds its bright photocollages and is surrounded by a certain playfulness. Superstudio wink at their readers as they frivolously suggest that preservation should be done otherwise. In other words, Planet City may be burlesque, but is perceived as a sincere, urgent, and action-oriented provocation, while Salvages is unavoidably read within an aura of balanced irony. Both projects are dismissive of their contemporaneous conditions and discourses, yet Planet City points to a positive project, while Salvages doesn’t seem bothered to commit to one.
I am interested to examine this divergence, asking why the two projects are presented and encountered differently, and what these distinctions can tell us. Is theirs just a difference in attitude? My argument is that there is an evolution in the genealogy of design fictions that attempt to grasp the world at territorial scale, and in this evolution we are increasingly seeing a sort of operative speculations substituting their rather rhetorical postmodern counterparts. In this evolution, probed by a sense of urgency for the environmental predicament, irony is displaced as an unnecessary—if not irresponsible—ingredient. However, irony, I will posit, still retains a radical possibility in reframing and questioning the premises of a speculative sort of thinking, something that the anxiously uttered operative fictions are less effective at.
Although I do not claim that Salvages or Planet City are necessarily the most comprehensive or representative examples, or even that they are the best match for each other, I do believe they are indicative of the speculative architectural thinking of the respective time periods they appeared in.[6] Moreover, translating a truism from science fiction studies, speculative design and landscape fictions can be a good barometer of the intellectual climate at a certain point in time, revealing the honest desires of artists, architects, and other creators, uttered as they are unconstrained by client pragmatics.
From Sincerity to Irony and Back
Due to their scalar ambitions, the two projects considered here could be classified within a longer history of architectural attempts to negotiate large-scale environmental transformations. Hashim Sarkis and Roi Salgueiro Barrio with Gabriel Kozlowski mapped part of this domain in their 2019 book The World as an Architectural Project, which collected 50 designs aimed at a territorial or planetary scale in the period since the late 19th century. Although until recently underexplored, this history is critical in understanding the lineage within which speculations like Salvages and Planet City emerged.[7]
As the volume by Sarkis and his colleagues show, to a large extent architecture’s preoccupation with the world is developed as part of the ongoing modernist project with such authors as Arturo Soria y Mata and Patrick Geddes in the turn of the 20th century, and more significantly with Le Corbusier, Buckminster Fuller, or Ivan Leonidov during the interwar period. One characteristic example recited in The World, consistent with the examples I am studying here, is the Atlantropa project by the German architect engineer Herman Sörgel. Within the context of the German colonial project, and influenced by the rise of international development infrastructural projects, Sörgel approached the distribution of water, earth, energy, and minerals around the Mediterranean basin as a design project, essentially proposing a unified treatment of Europe and Africa as one continental landmass, where the water of the Mediterranean Sea could be redistributed freely towards the drier areas of North Africa. Utilizing a system of kilometer-long hydroelectric dams in the straits of Gibraltar and the Dardanelles, Atlantropa imagined a Mediterranean that was lowered by as much as 500 meters, revealing entirely new landscapes in the process. Interestingly, after Germany’s defeat in the second World War, Sörgel reframed the project as a climate engineering intervention—a form of speculation that had slowly started to appear in both the West and the Soviet Union.[8] Sörgel’s Atlantropa exemplifies an attitude towards territorial-scale architectural projects up until the 1960s, in which visions were megalomaniacal but still very earnestly proposed. Influenced by the understanding of an increasingly interconnected world, and expressed mostly by men of the global north, these visions reveal a heroic, positive, optimistic, and highly normative attitude towards the “design of the world.”
Such overly confident visions came to be radically challenged by a wave of anti-modernist reactions by architects and collectives in the 1960s and 1970s. However, the scalar ambition that modernism progressively rehearsed was not entirely discarded, but rather it was turned to its head: Radical groups including Archizoom and Superstudio embraced the engagement with the scale of territory and the reformation of the environment, yet purposefully exposing its absurdity. In 1971, Archizoom published No-Stop City as a paper project in Domus, positing an endless and ultimate programming of the surface of the planet. In a similar vein, from 1969 to 1971 Superstudio developed The Continuous Monument, a vision for architectural singularity in which a behemothic living infrastructure encircles the earth and envelops humanity in a terminal condition of ubiquitous urbanity. Despite their extravagance, projects like No-Stop City and The Continuous Monument were not meant as simplistic parodies. That is, their obviously ironic style should not be read as an attempt to un-constructive mockery of their contemporaneous architectural reality. Rather, they implied an earnest preoccupation with the radical potential of architecture’s acceleration and eventual annihilation.[9] Adolfo Natalini, one of the Superstudio members later spoke of their work in this period as employing a form of “utopian irony.”[10] Salvages is conceived within this context, continuing the underlying critique of architecture’s complicity with capital. The proposal to submerge Florence referenced the very recent 1966 flood of the city that Italians still had fresh memories of. As Lucia Allais has suggested, the logic of disaster is utilized for its radical potential to rethink certain givens, “upsetting the logic of capitalist hyper-accumulation by reshuffling the matter of architecture.”[11] Perhaps not accidentally, the Florence flood is also the context within which the Italian Radical Architecture movement begins to coalesce, further pointing to the potential of bold shocks of the status quo.[12] But in Salvages, as in other projects suggested by Radical Architecture groups, while the intentions were utterly sincere, the design gestures were rather ironic and absurd—perhaps suggesting a disillusionment with what architecture and design could really achieve.
The early 1970s, when Salvages is published, seems to mark a shifting moment in this irony-infused, larger-than-building focused attitude. This was true not only for Superstudio, who went on to focus on more grounded and anthropological materialist projects such as their Fundamental Acts and Global Tools projects, but also more generally for the domain of architectural speculation.[13] Indeed, in The World, the editors acknowledge that the three decades that followed until the early years of the new millennium were significantly less dense in forms of ambitious design speculations: Following “a very intense moment of planetary speculation in the mid 1960s and early 1970s … its cultural death comes after the late 1970s with the consolidation of a postmodernism that reacts against the architectural profession’s involvement with broader societal issues by reorienting design toward the internal conditions of the discipline, history, and the space of the city.”[14] Per the book’s analysis, Rem Koolhaas and Madelon Vriesendorp’s City of the Captive Globe concludes this phase in architectural history.[15] Interestingly, in the latter, irony, it seems, has transformed into cynicism—a surrendered acceptance of the status quo also defended by some as pragmatism, a mode of work for which Koolhaas will become known.[16] Retrospectively, commentators and theorists noted that this was a period in which the future as a positive project waned. With regards to architecture, in his 2010 revision of postmodern historiography, Reinhold Martin indicates that among postmodernism’s rules of engagement was “a near universal proscription against utopian thought.”[17]
It wasn’t until the turn of the millennium that an interest in territorial-scale thinking in architecture was newly nourished. The rising environmental anxieties brought back the earth-spheres and expanded environments into architectural drawings. Even if many of those are analytical or diagnostic, such as Design Earth’s Geostories narrative series or the cartographies by Plan B in their City of Seven Billion, others do engage with propositional speculations, like Young’s Planet City.[18] Common among them is an earnest attitude seemingly driven by a sense of urgency, eventually forming what we could call operative speculations—fictions that are not necessarily made to be realized, but to instigate some sort of action. Yet, in their sincere utterances, this latter wave of territorial scale speculations, is also defined by a more reserved ethos compared to the excited pronunciations of their modern-era counterparts. What’s crucial in the context of this essay, however, is that in these contemporary speculations, the climate and biodiversity concerns, as well as the urge to understand and map the Anthropocene seems to leave little space for playfulness or irony. The recent additions in this longer genealogy, through their explicit claims to planetarity, detailed statistical accounting of metabolic and material processes, and persistent GIS aesthetics, communicate the sober and serious intentions of their authors.
Metamodernism, Technologies of Speculation, and Disciplined Imaginations
Τhe waning and substitution of postmodern irony that I observed above in the context of architectural speculation appears to extend to other domains of cultural production as well. In a recent commentary critic and scholar of postmodernism Steven Connor observed that the “as-yet unchristened era [of the] early decades of the twenty-first century has seen a drastic shrinkage in the capacity and appetite for irony and ambivalence and a return of absolute forms of belief, along with the desire for unqualified commitment.”[19] The tendency was noted earlier in literary studies, where by some accounts it followed the explicit call by influential postmodern writer David Foster Wallace in the early 1990s who urged creators to adopt a new sensibility that would steer clear of the ostensibly cool, yet cynic, detached, and often nihilistic irony of postmodernism, replacing it with an ethos of new sincerity.[20] In 2010, examining the fields of architecture, art, and film, scholars of cultural and urban studies respectively, Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker, observed a pattern in the “structure of feelings” expressed in these fields after the turn of the millennium, and suggested to name it “metamodernism.” According to them, the category represents an oscillation “between a modern enthusiasm and a postmodern irony, between hope and melancholy, between naiveté and knowingness, empathy and apathy, unity and plurality, totality and fragmentation, purity and ambiguity.”[21] In their reading too, even if still present, irony was nonetheless displaced as a dominant strategy. For both commentaries the renewed cultural sensibility comes as a response to an experience of social reality characterized by financial, political, and environmental uncertainties. To be sure, their emphasis differs: While Vermeulen and van den Akker highlight “hope”—or better, a “melancholy for hope”—for a collectively “better world,” Connor rather focuses on “urgency” as the critical factor overshadowing irony. In both cases, however, the imperative is the same: an engaged approach. If the “melancholy for hope” means one wants to believe they can act meaningfully, “urgency” demands that one must act meaningfully. In both cases, disengaged criticism is not enough; the world requires practical responses.
However, it would be insufficient to explain this development from old irony to new sincerity solely on the grounds of an abstractly renewed collective sentiment. I want to suggest that the technologies of speculation are crucial in the creation of this feeling and rationale. The ways in which the future is thought, fictions are constructed, and projections are made are important in both the epistemological construction of the sense of urgency, and the promotion of the feeling of hope for the future. For the main question of this essay—that is the interrogation of the development from Salvages to Planet City—the postwar culture of future thinking, and especially the developments around the 1970s, play a central and consequential role.
Modeling, simulation, scenario planning, technological forecasting, and cybernetic thinking were all words in an emergent vocabulary of contemplating and designing the future in the western postwar world, following the shock of the second World War and later the insecurities of the Cold War. A practice that had started right after World War II, one that later came to be called strategic foresight research, was steadily formalizing into a discipline.[22] This field, primarily inhabited by technologists, engineers, and economists (and later many computer scientists), was coming to thoroughly shape planning, replacing architecture and design as the privileged fields of planning and propositional thinking. Certain institutions and researchers introduced and systematized novel techniques in thinking about the future. One of the better known stories is that of Herman Kahn, who devised a method of thinking through and comparing alternative plausible versions of the future while working for the RAND corporation in the 1950s.[23] In the next decade Kahn founded the Hudson Institute to elaborate on and disseminate his method, where he and his colleagues offered scenario planning workshops to corporate employees. As historian John Williams notes, by the 1970s more than sixty corporations such as IBM, Coca Cola, the National Bank of Mexico, and Royal Dutch Shell were using some form of scenario planning to lay out their corporate strategies.[24] The increasing computational power was key to this development, as it allowed not only for a wider consideration of future alternatives, but also for precision in modeling. The same year that Salvages was published, in 1972, the Club of Rome prepared its seminal report titled Limits to Growth, which was one of the first attempts at extensive modeling of future environmental change.[25] Engineer and computer scientist Jay Forrester’s infamous “world model” that was used to produce the report factored in “66 Critical Problems” of humanity and produced projections for the future of the earth and its systems.[26] The culture of projective modeling only kept rising thereafter, further systematizing future thinking and turning it into a science.[27] In other words, while the Architettura Radicale movement in Italy and their architect contemporaries in the UK, the US and the USSR were creating their many times frivolous, quasi-liberated visions, a few western think tanks, states, and corporations were establishing future thinking into a serious business and systematized task.
To be sure, it remains a question as to whether there was an interface between these two worlds. Although it is outside the scope of this essay to provide historical evidence of how specific speculative practices after the 1970s might have been influenced by the rise and systematization of futurological thinking, nonetheless, a few points can begin to make the case for this connection. Let me first note that, indeed, future thinking and foresight were coming to the attention of a wider public in what cultural studies scholar Theo Reeves-Evison called a “socialization of prediction.” Studying evidence from artworks and exhibitions of the 1970s he notes a “general diffusion of predictive thinking” that not only was the result of a heightened “confidence in the new social technologies of speculation,” but it also meant that “the speculative infrastructures developed within organizations such as RAND found their way into wider public consciousness.”[28] Secondly, received literature on a few personas influential in architectural circles attests to the existence of an interface between the then worlds of architecture and strategic foresight, even if thin. Buckminster Fuller is one of the people inhabiting this interface, perhaps most significantly with his late 1960s World Game. Initially proposed for the Expo ’67 in Montreal, this was essentially a game of resource logistics, where players would compete to “make the total world work successfully for all of humankind,” producing scenaria of the future on their way.[29] In another instance, around the same time, Fuller’s close acquaintance Constantinos Doxiadis and his colleagues put their in-house super-computer at work, to produce “49 million scenaria” for the future development of Detroit.[30] It seems therefore fair to operate under the hypothesis that from the 1970s, the increasing systematization of future-thinking and strategic foresight began to seep into the practices of architectural speculation. Fifty years later, projects such as Planet City, Geostories, or City of Seven Billion, can be confidently placed at the resulting end of this lineage.[31]
The development of future thinking in these past 50 years is crucial for the argument pursued here, because the evolution of the new socio-technical apparatus of speculation effectively “disciplined imagination,” as management theorist and consultant Paul Schoemaker would evocatively phrase it close to the turn of the millennium.[32] Interestingly, this disciplining and its vocabulary of techniques has provided useful ways of navigating uncertainty and risk—while paradoxically it has simultaneously helped to reproduce them.[33] But what I want to focus on here, is the suggestion that a disciplined imagination is also usually a narrower one. In its early history, foresight and scenario planning could sometimes include quantitative reasoning based on computable factors, yet it was essentially a text-based, narrative technique, that often incorporated less plausible, imaginative, and far-fetched projections.[34] In some occasions the scenaria could even be informed or played out in game-like settings—like in Fuller’s World Game. But as the computational power increased, the focus on plausibility, high resolution, and precise calculations seems to have overtaken the imaginative and the playful. Cultural studies scholar Frederik Tygstrup puts it this way:
“Prediction technologies have made us awfully good at forecasting, at looking into things to come, but it is as if we no longer look at a wide horizon, but only into a narrow zone where what we know is prolonged, a future with a narrow scope and a high resolution, as it were. Feeding on such predictions, our historical imagination itself might eventually suffer…”[35]
In hindsight, speculative thinking since the 1960s has shifted away from a culture of multiple and divergent futures towards one of finer grained and more focused projections.[36]
The Epistemological Potential of Irony
In his conclusion, Reeves-Evison observes that the particular ways of speculation that took hold after the 1960s, entrenched as they are in specific state, institutional, and corporate practices create certain path-dependencies in the thinking and making of futures, “at the expense of an expanded field of speculative practices.”[37] These path dependencies may be created by the dominant and taken-for-granted axioms of capitalist and growth-oriented logic. For example when Shell, with all its powerful lobbying apparatus and infrastructure embeddedness shapes its corporate strategy according to scenaria modeled after the maximization of hydrocarbon extraction and profits, essentially driving energy policies in that exact path for decades to follow. Or, path dependencies may be created when the climate of environmental and other emergencies dictate a particular quick-fix and solution-oriented type of thinking. For example when the IPCC chooses to only pursue “realistic” scenaria that are policy relevant (instead of utopian/dystopian), which often comes to mean scenaria informed by—and essentially perpetuating—the status quo.[38] But there is also another, less explored type of closure, that concerns the epistemological assumptions about how certain technologies and institutions work—or ought to work in the near future, and this is where I want to turn my attention.
In the “newly-sincere” search for mature and plausible scenaria, the former two conditions constraining imagination (constant growth and emergency logics) have grown immune to irony—neutralizing it as empty radicalism or nihilism. However, the third type of closure, the one concerning epistemology, seems to still be responsive to irony. In other words, irony can be operative in questioning epistemological assumptions that make future thinking too disciplined, and the gestures in Salvages testify to this.
When Superstudio proposed in jest to flood the Florentine basin, they performed a double epistemological leap. For one, they unsettled one of preservation’s core questions, namely what era the preservationist should privilege, or in other words, how far back one should look at and dig about. Reasonably, in the preservation of human heritage, this question only makes sense with regards to the time span of human civilization. Yet, in an utterance that could be misinterpreted as just childish, Superstudio posited that restoring nature in the condition that it was a few million years ago can be at least equally beneficial. In hindsight, this leap feels even more significant as their proposition keeps challenging nature restoration practices still today, 50 years later. Recently, historians of science Deborah Coen and Fredrik Albritton Jonsson noted a historically constructed “Holocene nostalgia” permeating the sciences and Anthropocene discourse, and warned against a naturalization of certain restoration thresholds.[39] The discipline of earth systems science and the practices in ecology and conservation biology, they argue, have raised the Holocene in a privileged podium, only because it’s immediately-before the industrial acceleration. Anticipating this critique, Salvages proposed to look at the combined natural and cultural heritage in a radically different way.
Superstudio’s second epistemological leap had to do with the nature-culture interface. As they wrote, “As with any operation to restore a historical condition, [a return to the Pliocene geological condition] will be of the highest value in the eyes of anyone interested in culture.”[40] That is, Superstudio posited natural conservation as a cultural operation, a thesis that also remains significant half a century later, when the institutional processes of natural and cultural preservation have grown progressively distinct. Once again, 1972 was a significant year in this history as UNESCO published the landmark Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage, in which the two types of heritage were referred to in tandem, yet in subsequent years their treatment would take separate paths.[41]
Superstudio’s cheeky attitude was meant to be provocative, yet examined closely, their irony seems fairly productive, especially in breaking away from certain epistemological givens. Irony surfaces as a tool with the capacity to enlarge the horizons of speculation. And it does so by opening up the possibility of epistemological novelty. Playfully against the grain, and as Superstudio would want it, epistemological deconstruction can indeed be creative.[42] Naivety, absurdity, antinomy, and irony can help escape from path-dependencies and epistemological lock-ins, exactly because they challenge the unthinkable. And their practice feels even more relevant when the amassed ability to correlate and predict, model and simulate, tends to render obsolete—or altogether discard—any non-positive project.