From Design Fiction to Design Futures: The Changing Role of Architecture in Cultural Production

"When Archigram published their fanatical vision for pneumatic cities and walking megastructures in the 1960s, they seemed to be designing buildings. Beneath the surface, the avant-gardeists were pushing culture through radical alternatives to lifestyles and forms of organizing in the city. Laboratories found themselves between the lines of copy on Domus or Casabella magazines, propositions doubling as blueprints for the civilizations to come."

"From Gropius's Bauhaus in 1919 to Arcosanti's desert experiments in the 1970s, architecture operated as a form of cultural prophecy. Built form was the argument. The drawing was the vision. Today, we live in a world that remarkably resembles what the starchitects of the 1900s imagined - modular construction, interconnected digital cities, and automated systems. Yet contemporary architecture rarely proposes culture with the same totalizing confidence."

Avant-garde architects used drawings and manifestos as performative tools to propose radical lifestyles and new forms of urban organization, treating built form as an argument for cultural change. Between the 1920s and 1970s a coherent modernist canon, rapid print circulation, and receptive state institutions enabled architectural ideas to spread across professionals and patrons and to shape public life. Postwar projects like Brasília, Chandigarh, and British New Towns embodied programmatic visions tied to political and social agendas. Technological and built realities now mirror earlier visions, yet contemporary architecture rarely advances similarly totalizing cultural programs.

Read at ArchDaily