Utopian Landscapes

Idealistic

"….This world needs Utopias as it needs fairy stories. It does not matter so much where we are going, as long as we are making consciously for some definite goal. And a Utopia, however strange or fanciful, is the only possible beacon upon the uncharted seas of the distant future."  

-       Hendrik Willem Van Loon

Lorinc, John.  “In the utopian city there’s no trash, no graffiti – and no people.”  National Post

            (Canada) 22 Mar. 2003, Saturday ed. : SP4. 

John Lorinic is an anchor and editor for CNNRadio.  In his article he discusses and reviews a book by art historian Ruth Eaton titled “Ideal Cities:  Utopianism and the (un)built environment.”  Lorinc begins his article by mentioning that as Eaton states, “the human desire to build utopian societies as a response to the grim realities of actual cities stretches back to the very dawn of civilization.”  An important figure in the Utopian movement was Le Corbusier, a “misanthropic” Swiss architect and planner, whose “mathematically inspired urban reform reached a kind of frightening apotheosis, with its dreams of megablocks and identical apartment towers sweeping away the archaic street life of old cities such as Paris.”  According to Lorinc, Eaton’s novel contains images of idealized societies that are both “arresting and seductive: One can sense how these thinkers appealed to their patrons.  Lorinc goes on to state that all of the utopian images are devoid of people, “In the elegant architectural renderings depicting Renaissance Florence and Le Corbusier's dioramas, real people are nowhere to be seen, which reveals something about the essence of utopianism.”  What Lorinc seems to be hinting at is that perhaps we have yet to achieve an utopian society because we as human beings are too complicated, messy, and unsuitable for a perfect world. 

Utopianism is slowly becoming an underlying idea in my imagery.  Creating utopic landscapes that are so pristine and devoid of any human touch that they in turn begin to look bizarre is something that really fascinates me.  Although the ultimate idea of utopia sounds pleasant enough, there is something creepy and almost totalitarian about utopian cities and living structures, where everything is organized and structured  in such a way that nothing is ever out of place, and superflous activity is discouraged. 

Image:

http://blog.roughtheory.org/wp-content/uploads/le_corbusier_vision_paris_smaller.jpg