Affirmative architectural dystopias: experimental relations between humans and the built environment | Simon Sellars

Summary: Changing the Climate: Utopia, Dystopia and Catastrophe | Simon Sellars In a time of environmental concern, architecture is dominated by the mantra of sustainability. This is the ‘new high priest of moralism’ according to Francois Roche, a ‘green wash’ cordoning off nature as a sterile theme park. But can alternative solutions be found within the archetypal ‘dystopia’, within the fraught intertwining of the human and natural worlds that negatively generates the utopian rhetoric of sustainability? In this paper, I explore recent architectural practice that explicitly deploys science fiction, utopia and dystopia to investigate experimental relationships between humans, the built environment and the natural world. Juxtaposing the SF texts of architects including Greg Lynn and Roche with the work of novelist J.G. Ballard, an influence on many practitioners within this new discourse, I suggest that the movement towards the ‘dystopian’ in these texts can perhaps be simply read as ‘embracing change’, a new relationship that generates a new outcome: ‘affirmative architectural dystopias’. Simon Sellars is a Research Fellow at the Spatial Information Architecture Laboratory, RMIT University, and an Honorary Research Associate at the Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, Monash University. He publishes the popular website www.ballardian.com, about the career and influence of J.G. Ballard, and is writing a book, Applied Ballardianism, on Ballardian philosophy.