Utopioids
The Generic Sublime 04
Harvard University
Cambridge, United States, 2013
Professor: Ciro Najle
Assistant: Pablo Barría Urenda
Students: Alessandro Boccacci, Elle Gerdeman, Georgios Athanasopoulos, Hector Tarrido Picart, Emmanuel Torres,
Jielu Lu, Simon Willett, Max Wong
Skyscraper collectives, tower agglomerations, bundles, clusters, and twins; waterfront developments, mixed-use developments, high-rise housing developments, housing marinas and luxury condominiums; airport hubs, corporate office enclaves, industrial parks, hotel complexes, conference, commercial, and financial centres; satellite cities, theme parks, thematic cities, branded cities, new central districts, gated communities: what is the potential latent in extraordinarily large urban typologies, currently restricted by the typological tradition of urbanism and the segregation of architectural domains?
Utopioids follows the rationale of commercial effectiveness embedded in extra-large scale developments as a means for the construction of culturally aggressive, ideologically radical, brutally indifferent architectural canons, emancipating the real into the realm of the fantastic through the instrumentalization and exaggeration of pervasive values.
