This exhibition was mounted at the Estonian Museum of Architecture, in spring 2023. Curated by Andres Kurg and Mari Laanemets, it was accompanied by an excellent book published by Lugemik / Estonian Museum of Architecture. My review appears in Kunstiteaduslikke Uurimusi, the leading Estonian art history journal.
As its title made clear, Forecast and Fantasy: Architecture without Borders, 1960s to 1980s, an exhibition mounted by the Estonian Museum of Architecture in the first quarter of 2023, set out to fathom the ways in which architecture was once imagined without limits. Two generations ago, architects and artists designed ‘impossible’ architectural and urban schemes that ignored the limits of technology or refuted the division of the planet into the first, second and third worlds. Polish architect Stefan Müller’s Terra X: An Idea of Total Urbanisation of the World (1973) did both. He proposed a massive framework girding the entire planet at a height of 2,500m above sea-level. All humanity would live in homes that could be programmed to move anywhere on this exoskeleton. This was a vision of a planet which no longer had borders. And, in an act of ecological protection, the primary threat to the Earth – humankind – would be moved ‘off world’, and industry would be automated and be moved underground. Nature could then revive, and cities and towns could become historic open-air museums. Müller’s megastructure may have been utopian but it was not, as he was keen to stress, impossible: ‘We live in a time when perhaps, for the first time in human history, political objectives, which have always been a leading force driving architecture, are directed to the development of areas of human activity [in ways that] directly disables architecture. If, for example, funds for nuclear armaments or the conquest of space were to be directed to the construction of Terra X, its implementation would be fully realized … by 2000.’[1]
Terra X echoes many other better known visions of the period, not least Superstudio’s Interplanetary Architecture. ‘From Galileo’s telescope onward,’ wrote architect Alessandro Poli for the voice over for Superstudio’s 1971 film of the same name, ‘everything is architecture. The planet, the Moon, the stars and the Sun are solid bodies of mechanical architecture’.[2] The film – shown in Tallinn – is a proposition to create a superhighway between the Earth and the Moon by arresting the movement of ‘errant meteorites’ to harvest their gravitational force. Combining sublime photographs of space taken on the Apollo missions with technical drawings and lifestyle shots from glossy magazines, Interplanetary Architecture is a hubristic declaration of faith in human command of science and technology. In the space age, Poli and his Florentine colleagues claimed that humans were remaking themselves: ‘Today it is no longer possible to re-join the natural system, and acknowledging this fundament for reflection on our lives. We speak of human as animals, as machines, and as biochemical complexes.’[3]
An impressive futurological congress, Forecast and Fantasy brought dozens of such uninhibited visions of the future from both sides of the East West divide to Tallinn. The exhibits were often spectacular, both in terms of their expressive élan and their audacity. The repertoire of techniques in which an architectural idea might be expressed expanded considerably around 1970. Instead of the conventional products of the architect’s drawing table, the show included photographic documentation of improvised happenings on the former Lasnamäe airfield by young Tallinn architects; 8mm films capturing the obscure rituals of the Slovene OHO group; Anne Halprin’s choreographic scores for dancers from San Francisco; Soviet feature films, for their dystopian sets; moulded glass vessels by Kai Koppel suggesting buildings (illustrated here); as well as inky etchings by Soviet paper architects. Projects by the international supergroups of the genre – Archigram and, of course, Superstudio – featured. But the stand-out works were far less well-known. They included hallucinogenic bio-cybernetic environments for future beings created by the Dvizhenie collective in Moscow in the late 1960s and the dark riffs on Soviet constructivism by the Hungarian dissident and architect László Rajk in the 1980s. Many were shown for the first time in years: Dvizhenie’s supernatural scenes had spent the last 45 years in the stores of German museums (acquired following a show by the group in 1978[4]); while some of the works of Rajk – an architect, film designer and politician who died in 2017 – came from the wall of his studio-home in Budapest.
The rediscovery of forgotten schemes and visions is important but that’s not reason enough for their exhibition. And, clearly, curators always make judgments about what to show. So what is to be made of the line up in Tallinn? The exhibition’s pronounced emphasis on Eastern Europe under communist rule is noteworthy, and changes the way in which one might think about the sister concepts of forecast and fantasy. Forecasting was given official imprimatur on both sides of the Cold War, with 2000 often selected as a date on the horizon for which predictions about patterns of life could be reasonably made. For instance, in 1965, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences initiated the Commission on the Year 2000 and, four years later, the Polish Academy of Science established the ‘Polska 2000’ Committee of Research and Prognosis, an interdisciplinary commission of experts including, of course, architects. Other futurologists – suspicious of human fallibility – put their faith in the development of calculating machines that might accurately, and objectively, forecast the future. Relatively few official manifestations of futurology found their way into the Tallinn show, perhaps because forecast, as curators Andres Kurg and Mari Laanemets point out, was grounded ‘state knowledge of its time’. In Eastern Europe that meant alignment with ‘scientific’ Marxist-Leninism too. Whereas fantasy, by definition, is freewheeling thought. Dvizhenie’s Artificial Bion-Kinetic Environment (IBKS, 1968) proposed the long-term development of a total environment, synthesising technology and nature. By 2070, the IBKS would form a single ‘carpet’ into which nature – rivers, lakes, marshes, animals, weather – would be stitched, along with fantastic machines and microstructures. These zones would support the education, pleasure and ’mind expansion’ of their human visitors. This vision far exceed the utopianism of official Soviet architecture at the time or the statistical realism to which state forecasters were expected to adhere. But, at the same time, it projected a future for Soviet forecasting too (and perhaps for state surveillance). The different zones of the IBKS were to be created by researchers operating in the Regulatory Centre, described as a ‘collective of the most important specialists in philosophy, cybernetics, mathematics, physics, psychology, physiology, biophysics, biochemistry, biology, botany, etc.’ and an ‘artificial brain’. Feedback would be relayed by the visitor wearing a purpose-made suit that would share information about ‘his emotion and biophysical state with the Centre as well as his behaviour in the zone’.[5] While, the Dvizhenie collective were no doubt sincere believers in the liberating potential of technology, other fantastic propositions from the era teetered on the edge of irony: Slovak artist Jozef Jankovič’s 1974 Project for a Slovak National Eroscentre in the form of a monumental phallus took the idea of family planning to an absurd extreme.
One of the more surprising conclusions of the show is that relatively little of this Eastern European material was censored at the time. The large number of publications and other archival materials presented in vitrines (and reproduced handsomely in the accompanying book) demonstrate that unsanctioned ideas could be sometimes be shared, at least among professionals in the more liberal settings of the Eastern Bloc. Some visionary schemes were published, admittedly in low run publications like Bercsenyi 28-30, a photostat issued by architecture students at the Budapest University of Technology. And in the 1980s Technicky Magazin (Technical Magazine) – issued by the State Publisher of Technical Literature in Czechoslovakia – went further: brightly-illustrated articles critiqued the drab urban environments of state socialism as well as the ossification of the profession. The publication was a sign of the relaxation of control that characterised the Glasnost years as well as the receptive engagement with postmodern ideas there. Public exhibitions extended the audience for architectural fantasies too: Stefan Müller, for instance, developed his Terra X project into the Terra-1 International Exhibition of Intentional Architecture exhibition in Wrocław in 1975, by inviting participants from around the world to supply schemes which explored “The relationship between art, science and technology as a social development factor of our era”. Superstudio, Constantinos Doxiadis, Aldo Rossi and many others responded to his invitation. Sometimes, visionary architects from the East were even conscripted into soft power politics. The NER group from Moscow were commissioned to represent Soviet architecture at the Milan Triennale in 1968 and the Osaka World’s Fair in 1970. Their biomorphic designs for future linear cities brought a remarkable organicism to offset Soviet architecture’s reputation for grey utility. This begs a question about the status of such latter-day futurists: was their work a critique of the communist project or the means for its re-enchantment? If not blueprints on the future, these fantastic works might at least be understood as expressions of a desire to restore the autonomy of the architectural avant-garde, and to lift architecture out of the technocratic zone that it had come to occupy from the 1950s on.
With its strong Eastern European focus and exhibits that date from the late 1980s, Forecast and Fantasy extends what has become the conventional approach taken by surveys of visionary architecture both in terms of geography and period. In the West, the oil crisis and the economic downturn of the early 1970s as well as the implosion of the counter-culture, are usually taken as sounding the death knell for technotopian thought. Exit Utopia. Architecture Provocations 1956-1976, a book resulting from a major conference held in the Netherlands in that symbolic year of 2000, for instance, concludes with propositions by Leon Krier for La Villette in Paris (1976-77) to make a point about the rappel a l’ordre.[6] Extending into the 1980s, theexhibition in the Estonian Museum of Architectureasked what fantasies and forecasts came after utopianism, at least in the setting of Eastern Europe? One answer is postmodernism, and the Tallinn show featured a few on-trend examples of the phenomenon including Hardijs Lediņš’ House for Blue Bay (1984), a line of towers overlooking the Daugava river in Riga, each a landmark clad in a symbolic form – a cloud, a rainbow or a fork of lightning. But what stands out more strongly is the melancholic ‘turn’ which seems to have been taken in Eastern Europe in the late 1970s: this is evident in the obsession with columbaria amongst Soviet paper architects – Mikhail Belov and Yuri Avakumov, as well as the partnership of Aleksander Brodsky and Ilya Utkin. Similarly, Sirje Runge pictured architectural ruins overcome with nature, while Jüri Okas overlaid mysterious geometries over gritty images of urban decay and neglect in Tallinn in his enigmatic ‘Reconstruction’ engravings (1974). Kurg and Laanemets characterise such images, as well as films like Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979), as the imagination of entropy – ‘the measure of disorder of a system’. A synonym for entropy might be ‘stagnation’, Gorbachev’s preferred description for the Brezhnev era. Should we see Runge and Okas’s taste for entropy as signs pointing to stagnancy, and, as such, the corrosion of communist progress? Polish sociologist and philosopher Zygmunt Bauman said something similar in 1976 when he wrote: ‘The lack of utopia creates a void, an opaque, bottomless abyss, in place of a smooth extension of the present.’[7] He followed these words with another sentence pointing to the appeal of esoteric thought which followed utopianism: ‘It is the dread of this intellectually unfathomable void that leads people to escape into the mystique of irrationalism.’ A Marxist, Bauman’s disdain was clear, but his point was well made. The hold of religiosity, esoteric thinking and occult practices – as well as belief in UFOs and extra-terrestrial life – grew in the Eastern Bloc in the 1970s as the official enthusiasm for the future waned. Perhaps mystical thought satisfied a deep desire for alterity and feeling in a world that demanded numb conformity. But it penetrated Soviet power too, finding its way into the Kremlin with General Secretary Brezhnev reportedly employing a faith healer, Eugenia Davitashvili.
Esoterica – of various kinds – featured in Forecast and Fantasy. With its ziggurat-like profile and cruciform plan, Estonian architect Toomas Rein’s Nirvana (1983), a scheme for the home for the spiritualist and healer, Vigala Sass, was a pan-theological expression – in architectural form – of the sacred. He had a kindred spirit in Hungarian architect Istvan B Gellér who created the ruins of fictional civilisation that he called The Growing City (1978-89). This involved not only reconstructions of settlements and temples in beautifully-detailed ‘archaeological’ records and architectural drawings, but also reconstructions the ritual ceremonies which once took place in their vicinity. Perhaps the most expansive engagement with sacred geometries in Forecast and Fantasy was Tõnis Vint’s Lielvārde Belt, a 1980 Riga Film Studio documentary made with director Ansis Epners exploring the cosmology of the traditional Latvian woven band. This familiar symbol of the nation was, in Vint’s heady analysis, a universal form that could be found as far away as Japan. In other words, it was a design without borders. And when recognised in the ornaments of lost civilisations in the Americas, China and India, the pixelated pattern of the belt was a message from the past to the future too. Perhaps, Vint speculated, it was the code to interpret every mystery of space and the means to communicate with alien life. A key to the universe, the Lielvārde belt far outstripped Müller’s singular vision for life on Earth and even Superstudio’s interplanetary reach. To ask whether these fantasies and forecasts came true seems a fruitless task. Instead, perhaps the question is this: do the exhibits contain lessons for today, now that these erstwhile versions of the future are long past? Is, for instance, the display of Müller’s Terra X a kind of instruction for the present moment when ecological catastrophe is not a speculation but a fact? This seems unlikely, and Kurg and Laanemets make no such claims. But they do suggest that fantasy might be considered a ‘storage room for holding objects and phenomena that have gone too far from the understanding of its time, but could perhaps be revived in the future’.[8] This suggests an argument about their potential for future usefulness. But what seems so compelling about many of these expansive fantasies is their wonderful eccentricity and innocence. By contrast, the future today can – inevitably, it seems – only be glimpsed through the narrowing lens of forecast.
[1] Stefan Müller in conversation with Jerzy Ludwinski (1975) transcription published in Wynurzenia, czyli nic [Outpourings, or Nothing] (Wrocław: Muzeum Architektury we Wrocławiu, 2009), 174.
[2] Poli cited in Forecast and Fantasy: Architecture without Borders, 1960s to 1980s (Tallinn: Lugemik / Estonian Museum of Architecture), p. 321.
[3] ibid
[4] Lew Nussberg und die Gruppe Bewegung Moskau 1962-1977 exhibition catalogue (Bochum: Museum Bochum, 1978).
[5] Ibid.
[6] Martin van Schaik, Otakar Máčel, eds, Exit Utopia. Architecture Provocations 1956-1976, (Munich: Prestel, 2004).
[7] Zygmunt Bauman, Socialism – The Active Utopia (London: Routledge, 2011), p. 19.
[8] Andres Kurg and Mari Laanemets, ‘Introduction’ in Forecast and Fantasy: Architecture without Borders, 1960s to 1980s (Tallinn: Lugemik / Estonian Museum of Architecture), p. 29.
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