Utopian Towers

Skills: Installation, Robot, Utopia

Utopian Towers. Shared Spaces (2023)

Nowadays we are constantly witnessing new proposals for urban developments and alternative cities, architectural spaces that propose different forms of habitability and mobility in contemporary global societies as a whole, and even in projects for future cities on other planets such as Mars. Many of these projects are inspired by previous social, anthropological, architectural, philosophical and utopian imaginary…

Historically, we find conceptual contributions of utopian systems in the construction of structures of egalitarian coexistence such as Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), Johann Valentin Andreae’s Christianopolis (1619), Tomaso Campanella’s La Città del Sole (1623) or Francis Bacon’s The New Atlantis (1627). After the Industrial Revolution, in the face of the inequalities that the new economic structures introduced into society (unhealthy cities, intensive work, labour exploitation, etc.), utopian socialism advocated the creation of more humane, just and balanced communities.

In parallel, as the philosopher Ernst Bloch points out, in the field of aesthetics we have witnessed the construction of images and artistic formats that have deepened the realisation of possible spaces and utopias as visible referential frameworks for society as a whole: Constant, Nicolas Schöffer, Kosice, Xul Xola, Collective Reclaim the Streets, Nils Norman, Thomas Hirschhorn, Atelier van Lieshout… Finally, the implosion of new technological tools (ICTs, AI and robotics), with their advantages and disadvantages, are proposing other alternatives for the City of the Present-Future: Technopolis (Postman, 2018), informational city (Castells, 1995), postmetropolis (Soja, 2009), futuropolis (Gaja i Díaz, 2016).

To this end, we present the construction of a vertical ‘utopian’ robotic structure, formed by several empty and recycled computer towers, stacked on top of each other, executed as small interconnected spaces that are part of a large megalopolis. Each tower represents a specific aspect of the Megalopolis: living space, nature reserve with vertical forests, open and hierarchical citizen space with different sets of common and individual buildings, robotic industry space with enormous factory masses and the energy space hidden at the base of the structure. In each space there are a series of channels for local movement and between areas.

Project carried out with aid for contemporary creation and national and international mobility 2022/2023. Madrid City Council.