Daily Archives: April 21, 2017

Image: Courtesy of the Edith Lutyens and Norman Bel Geddes Foundation, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin

A new biography of Norman Bel Geddes, designer of the Futurama, tells the story of American innovation.

Inside every utopia is a dystopia striving to get out. World-changing plans to bring all human life and activity under beneficent control devolve inevitably into regimentation and compulsion. Edenic life-affirming communes descend into chaos and waste. Our presently evolving techutopia has barely reached its peak, and yet in it this horror-movie process has already begun: information must be free, and so lies and manipulations proliferate; common human connections are degraded; limits on power and self-dealing erode. Inequality increases with differential access. And all this in less than a single generation.

The utopian promises of the mid-twentieth century (modernism, broadly understood) stayed alive for longer, largely because its projects, which depended on design, manufacturing processes, materials, and city planning, took years or decades to be fully realized, while the world seemed to stay much the same. In 1939 the greater part of America was still a land of Toonerville trolleys, boarding houses, balky mules, door-to-door salesmen, pump handles, iceboxes, A&Ps, nerve tonics, kerosene, two-bit haircuts, hand-rolled cigarettes, incurable diseases, and patched inner-tubes, even as the idea of the future was brought closer with every newsreel and skyscraper and issue of Life or Look.

While older utopias often were predicated on returning to the virtues of an imagined past, a key figure behind this utopia of the new was Norman Bel Geddes, a theatre designer turned industrial designer. Bel Geddes is best known for designing the General Motors Futurama exhibit at the 1939 New York Worlds Fair, a huge and hugely celebrated vision of the world of 1960, full of towering modernist skyscrapers in new cities and lots and lots of cars.

The World's Fair assumed that the future would simply remake us as it came into being.

In a rich, swift, and entrancing new biography, The Man Who Designed the Future, Barbara Alexander Szerlip goes so far as to credit Bel Geddes with the invention of twentieth century America. Credit for that is more commonly ascribed to Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison or Henry Ford, but Szerlips claim is justified if by the twentieth century we mean the things, the look, the places, and the occasions of the new. Bel Geddes, as Szerlip shows, invented the new not once but again and again, superficially and radically, in theater and stage design, in the windows of department stores, in appliances, public spaces, tools, and spectacles.

All that kept his projects from wholly burdening the future with the utopian condition of corruption was that many were imaginary, ephemeral, unbuilt or destroyed; the simplest and smallest (a gas range, an electric typewriter, a dance floor) can still inspire the common American nostalgia for the new.

How did he become who he would be? Szerlips first chapters recount an 1890s Midwestern upbringing reminiscent of Orson Welless depiction of The Magnificent Ambersons: a huge Victorian house with broad lawns and deep porches, and prize-winning horses with silver-plated harnesses that would soon be replaced by large cars. The Geddes family was ruled by a grandfather, the judge, and cared for by several servants, including a Native American man named Will de Haw who served as the young Normans teacher, groom, handler, and coachman for years. Norman grew up fascinated with Indians: his first major theater spectacle would be a pageant-play about Native American lore.

Normans father also seems drawn from a novel of the period: a charming, careless and restless man who after the judges death invested the family money unwisely, losing the big house and the prize horses, and who left his family in bad straits to go recoup in businesses elsewhere. He failed and died young, perhaps by suicide.

That is the origin story, and the right one for the work the young Norman set out upon. As a penniless striving illustrator and adman, dreamer of vast theater projects, tinkerer and toymaker, he was so sure of himself that he traveled to New York to pitch his radical idea for stage lighting to the great impresario David Belasco. Instead of flat overhead lights and footlights, he said, theatres ought to use thousand-watt spotlights, dimmable and in any color, to pick out which part of the stage the audiences attention should be drawn to; side-lighting should be used to model and heighten actors faces. Belasco dismissed the 24-year old novice and his plans and then adopted the idea, advertising it as his own. But do we guess that Norman will be sidelined, driven back to the provinces for good? We do not.

Back in Ohio he meets Helen Belle Schneider, aka Bel, a young school teacher who graduated second in her class at Smith College. Her passions were music and poetry, Szerlip tells us, and more enchanting, she was a master of bird calls. The afternoon they met he kissed her. She was a Methodist (as was his family) and a teetotaler. They were soon partners in the advertising and art business in Toledo, and he added her nickname to his own, becoming Norman Bel Geddes. They married and had two daughters (the youngest, Barbara, became an actress and is likely better known today than her father).

The invention of twentieth century America can be ascribed to Norman Bel Geddes, alongside Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, and Henry Ford.

Lifted by his talents and the times, Bel Geddes leaves the wife and kids and family business in Toledo and goes back to New York, that cosmopolitan realm of endless possibility. The late 20s were when his greatest theater successes were made. Szerlip recounts the epic story of Bel Geddess work on the pageant-play The Miracle, produced and directed by Max Reinhardt, for which he turned a large Broadway theater into a Gothic cathedral. Theater-goers entered what appeared to be a dim, towering 110-foot church, their footsteps echoing on the stone-slabbed aisles (an asbestos composition).

As they looked for their seats (pews for 3,100 people), priests, sacristans and the occasional worshiper would be moving about lighting candles or counting their beads. The smell of incense would mix with the smell of melting wax. The only illumination, beyond the candles (more than 800) and faux candles (834), would be brilliant shafts of artificial sunlight, punctuating the sacred gloom through three dozen Bel Geddes-designed stained glass windowsranging from 40 to 80 feet in height, made of thin 10,000-square-foot sheets of muslin stretched and painted to appear semitransparent when lit from behind.

The numbers are impressive even now. Costs exceeded a half-million in 1928 dollars, or some five million in todays. And it was a vast, long-lasting, wildly-praised, continent-touring hit. From then on producers interested in high-risk innovative spectacles counted on Bel Geddes to bring them in successfully.

Keeping up with Bel Geddess meteoric rise tests Szerlips considerable storytelling skills; the sensational anecdotes and sidebars come so fast that they clamber over one another, sometimes falling out of order. Often she has to backtrack from Bel Geddes designing a car or a stove to Bel Geddes in the theater or remaking a corporate boardroom. The book is crowded with detail and managed seemingly on the fly, as the mans projects often were. It is dizzying and highly accomplished fun.

Bel Geddes triumphed with innovative designs even for forgettable or trivial plays; every opening night was packed with the worlds of art and wit and money. Szerlip carries her subject through 1920s Manhattan with so many famous names dropped that the reader risks a slip-and-fall. In the course of an afternoon, Szerlip tells us, he met William and Lucius Beebe, Nelson Doubleday, Alva Johnston, cartoonists Don Marquis and Rube Goldberg, photographer Arnold Genthe, Broadway producer Gilbert Miller, conductor Walter Damrosch, painter Rockwell Kent and the Prime Minister of Australia. She makes time for a thrilling recap of Bel Geddess minutes-long affair with the diarist Anais Nin after a night in the Harlem nightclubs he loved. (He was a great dancer.)

It is all swift and smart and charming, and by the time it turns darker with the Depression, Bel Geddes has not yet thought about inventing the future. That would come when he put aside the immense career he had built in theater and popular art and turned instead to designing places and things of use to the new world coming to be: things and places that would themselves be that new world.

What would come to be called industrial design was chiefly the province of engineers and architects, and Bel Geddes was neither. He certainly engineered things that he needed for his projects, and he designed spaces and places, but he was forced to add a line to his contracts stating that he and his firm were not architects. His talent was imaginationnot only imagining how something should look, but why, and for what purpose, and how it could be made to serve that purpose.

Bel Geddes designed the places and things that would themselves constitute the new world.

One of Szerlips most revealing stories is of the remake of the Standard Gas Equipment companys household gas range in 1930. Bel Geddes refused to simply remake the look of their stodgy product. He started from the beginning, sending out a team of investigators to ask people, especially women, what they would like to see in a new stove and what their complaints were about the old one. The result was what we still think of as a stove. SGE ranges had fixed oven racks; Bel Geddes made them slide out, for obvious reasons. He saw that the floor beneath a black enameled cabinet standing on legs like a bureau would get filthy and could be cleaned only on hands and knees; his would be flush with the floor, as they all are now. His design was white, with gleaming curved sides and bands of chrome that signified new, sleek, and faststreamlined, in other words.

Streamlining, which would forever be associated with the industrial and commercial design of the period, began as a set of guidelines meant to reduce air and water resistance (drag on planes and cars and ships). It also imparted to objects an inherent yet gratuitous beauty that entranced people and designers alike, the very essence of new. The style rarely achieved the goals set for it (1930s cars and trains did not travel fast enough to be affected very much by air resistance), but it persisted as pure style, as signifier. And the look could be applied to anything. Before long, Szerlip notes, there were streamlined radios, typewriters, and Chippewa potatoes (the absence of deep eyes reduces waste in peeling and also speeds up the job for the housewife), streamlined financial cutbacks, weight loss programs, inkwells and coffins. We now had a word we did not know we needed, for uses we did not expect would arise. But the greatest efflorescence of applications for it came in the 1939 New York Worlds Fair, the site of Bel Geddess best-known triumph.

The 1939 fair was conceived by what might be called practical utopians. That is, it was an enclosed space where new and better modes of life could be shown to be possible and workable. It was as much prescription as prediction. Social theorists, businessmen, and academics were recruited to educate the public in the industrialized, communitarian, engineered world that was sure to comethe world of tomorrow, as the slogans promised. They urged exhibitors not to simply show their goods and services, but to show the processes by which they were made, the worldwide trade in commodities they depended on, and the advances in cybernetics and administration they would bring about.

This got international businesses excited, and a lot of exhibitors not only invested hugely in educational displaysit was effectually the start of the modern audio-visual instruction modebut also looked into the future, showing robots, simulated voyages to the moon, flying cars, streamlined everything. Bel Geddess Futurama within the General Motors exhibit hall (which he also designed) was the culmination. GM was set to redo the show they had built for the 1933 Chicago fair: an animated diorama of an assembly line, showing Chevys being put together. Butas in a scene from a movie of the periodBel Geddes took a night flight to Detroit to meet with GMs management and argue for something much grander. What if the goal, Szerlip recounts, was to have the public wedded to GMs vision, and to make that vision so attractive and accessible that the average Jack and Jill would have a hard time imagining a future apart from it? It is made more cinematic by Szerlips visual effects, with stuffy executives from central casting and the Old Man (in this case Alfred Sloan, chairman of the board) arising at last to anoint the brash optimist. Whos to say it didnt happen exactly as Bel Geddes, and Szerlip, tell it?

The Futurama not only talked about the future, it was the future. Bel Geddes, like a mad father setting up the worlds biggest train set for his kids, let people see the year 1960 in busy moving detail. Some 50,000 miniature streamlined cars traveled on miniature multilane highways like none that had then been built (buses and trains were, for obvious reasons, not emphasized). In that future America, the past had been scrubbed away. Not even farms and orchards were the same, and Bel Geddess towers and ports and highways arose without any reference to the past. It posed, without actually asking, the great question that utopias are never quite able to solve: how do we get from this flawed and hurtful world we live in, and the flawed and confused people we are, to the rational and cooperative world we want? The Futurama and the fair assumed that the future would simply remake us as it came into being, so that we could profit from its wondersthat the wonders would make the people, rather than the other way around.

The utopian visions of the Worlds Fair were deliberately conceived in opposition not only to the wounded and weary America of the Depression, but to alternative utopian visions that were then making great strides around the world. Nazi Germany had no pavilion at the fair, though it was very much present in spirit. Lewis Mumford, author of The City in History and one of the initial planners of the fair, had envisioned the World of Tomorrow as a school for democracy, an education for visitors in taking charge of their world and their future. The new sciences and technologies, manufacturing processes, communications and social organization had to be understood, he argued, in order to be useful and successful for all, or for as many as possible.

But Mumford ended up disappointed in the fair as built. It simply asserted the completely tedious and unconvincing belief in the triumph of modern industry. The less said about that today, the better, he wrote at the time. The fair was still receiving millions of visitors when the German army invaded Poland, initiating a new world war only twenty-five years after the first began. The world had not only failed to learn the right lessons, it seemed to have internalized the wrong ones.

Bel Geddes should perhaps be included with the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Orson Welles as 'a kind of magnificent failure.'

Bel Geddes spent the war years working on projects for the military, both ones they asked him for, such as better camouflage, and his own ideas, like a remote-controlled Television Bombing Plane (early television had been a big draw at the 1939 fair). But his great interest was the car. In a glamorous 1940 photo-book, Magic Motorways, he envisioned the American highway system, complete with multiple lanes and on-and-off ramps. The Pennsylvania Turnpike opened its first stretch that very year, but it wasnt until 1956 that the Interstate Highway System was officially established. When it was, it was as much the offspring of Bel Geddess Futurama and the dominance of the car as it was a result of the bomb and the need for a rapid-response national defense.

Of course, the unintended ramifications of that long project include large components of air pollution and climate change, the slow death of public transportation, the erosion of cities and Main Street, and the sprawling expansion of a peacetime military. The challenge of changing the dystopia we find ourselves in now, again, is stupefying.

But just because a utopia is unattainable in practiceunattainable is almost part of the definitionthat doesnt mean the utopian impulse cant have great power along a different parameter. In an important way it is not different from the general impulse to create imagined worlds that have no larger purpose than to be seen and experienced, in theater, in fiction, on film, in the model-train landscape of tunnels, bridges and stations running endlessly for its own sake.

In this respect it is interesting that in 1964, when a Worlds Fair was again held in New York City, General Motors largely recycled the Bel Geddes future it had promised would already be in place by then. The point turned out not to be the future after all, except in the power it granted to the imagination to see it all as possible. The 1939 fair might have been conceived as a training course in living under late capitalism, but time has vacated that purpose and in a sense restored its innocence. It affords now not false promises of easy social progress butin Vladimir Nabokovs termsaesthetic bliss: that is, a sense of being somehow, somewhere connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm.

Szerlips book has only reached the two-thirds mark when the Futurama is behind her. The last hundred pages are as full as the first two hundred, with new projects, new love affairs, Barbaras stardom and retreat, more famous names, a plan to put The Miracle on film starring Katherine Hepburn or maybe Greta Garbobut fewer real accomplishments. When he died, in 1958, on a New York street of a heart attack at the age of sixty-five, Bel Geddes was pretty much broke and on his way to being forgotten. Szerlip, who obviously loves the man, tags him as oxymoronic: a pacifist fascinated by war, a naturalist who loved technology, a serious prankster, a pragmatic futurist, a private man who was rarely alone.

Bel Geddes was a practical man. He was an engineer and a maker who worked in the real world of mechanical stresses and materials and mass production and financing. It is impossible to distinguish between what he did to please his paying clients and what he did just because he wanted to see if he couldwhich is a fair definition of a popular artistand often enough he could convince magnates and manufacturers that what he wanted to do was exactly what they needed.

Yet his most inspiring projects might be the impossible ones, the gratuitous acts of the imagination: the absurdly vast airliner with ballroom and orchestra, the unrealized theater projects, the flying carand the aerial restaurant. Szerlip wonders if Bel Geddes should be included with the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Orson Welles as a kind of magnificent failure. His standing ratio of conceptions realized to those unrealized, after all, was about 50-50. But the gorgeous only-imagined ones defy time and perversion. They obey perforce the greatest single prescription ever laid down for human action: first do no harm.

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Inside Every Utopia Is a Dystopia - Boston Review

A hundred years before architect Adolf Loos published the Modernist manifesto, Ornament and Crime, a similar guiding set of principles honesty, utility and simplicity was inspiring a religious sect to develop a design aesthetic that became its livelihood. The Shakers inherent modesty called for a rejection of unnecessary decoration and resulted in a minimalist and austere sense of beauty thats often misunderstood today, when the term Shaker is more likely to be used to describe door panels on big-box store cabinetry. But a series of recent exhibitions is aiming to enlighten the world about the influence of this small, influential and all-but-extinct group, and a design ethos that feels even more relevanttoday.

Theres something about stripping down something to its central shape and its essential elements that is always going to be appealing to people, says Lesley Herzberg, the curator at the Hancock Shaker Village in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. For them, work is a form of worship, so anything they made was a way to worship God. It really did need to be made to the best of yourability.

Enfield Shaker table by John Baker and JasonCollett.

Mjlk

The Shakers were founded in Manchester, England by Ann Lee (known as Mother Ann), a former Quaker who had a vision of being reborn as a child of God. In 1774, Mother Ann and eight followers arrived in America and settled in Watervliet, New York where they established the first Shaker community. By the mid-1800s, when woodworking proved to be a prosperous business, over two-dozen Shaker communities with a combined population of 6,000 existed down the East Coast of the United States, from Maine to Florida.

The groups pacifism made them exempt from military service during the American Civil War and record numbers joined the group during that period. They were really proud of how progressive they were, says John Baker, the co-owner of the Toronto design shop Mjlk. They didnt recognize slavery and they didnt recognize race or discrimination between men andwomen.

Although Shakers embraced modern technology, the boom in industrial manufacturing at the turn of the 20th century proved to be too stiff competition for their meticulous approach, and the Shaker population began to decline. Today, only a few living Shakers remain, but several settlements have been preserved as places of pilgrimage fordesigners.

A circa 1910 ladder-back chair from the ShakerMuseum.

Mjlk

In the 20th century, Shaker objects including furniture, boxes, textiles and tools became a source of great inspiration for modern design luminaries. In 1937, Freda Diamond developed a Shaker-inspired collection for Herman Miller. George Nakashima, who often referred to himself as a Japanese Shaker, referenced their slat or ladder chair backs. And Hans Wegner integrated Shaker austerity into an aesthetic that we now associate with Danishdesign.

The current revival can be traced back to 2015, when the exhibition Masterpieces of Shaker Design (1820 to 1890) was on display at the European Fine Art Fair in Maastricht, Netherlands along with an accompanying publication, Shaker: Function, Purity, Perfection, produced by Assouline in collaboration with the Shaker Museum Mount Lebanon, in New Lebanon, NewYork.

Last year, John and Wonhee Arndt of Studio Gorm debuted the collaborative project, Furnishing Utopia, at New York Design Week (it recently travelled to the 2017 Stockholm Furniture & Lighting Fair). Prompted by their own visit to a historic Shaker site, its an ongoing investigation into the design-savvy sects craft principles. There is an honesty to the way Shakers created their work, says John Arndt, one half of the Eugene, Oregon-basedcouple.

The Brush Study by Zo Mowat from the Furnishing Utopiaproject.

CHARLIE SCHUCk

In partnership with the Hancock Shaker Village and the Shaker Museum, a group of international designers Ladies & Gentlemen Studio, Darin Montgomery, Norm Architects, Jonah Takagi, Studio Tolvanen, Christopher Specce, Gabriel Tan, Ze Mowat, Tom Bonamici and Hallgeir Homstvedt attended a week-long workshop before being invited to produce new work that embodies theaesthetic.

We were so impressed with their use of colour, says Wonhee Arndt. Most of the interactions [with the Shaker aesthetic] that we had before visiting Hancock was through books, where most of the furniture is shown in dark colours or natural wood, but we found Shakers used so many vibrant colours like yellow, blue, green, red and even pink. Those hues are beautifully realized in Montreal-based Mowats brushes, made with white oak and natural horsehair. Colour also popped up in Ladies & Gentlemen Studios take on the classic Shaker work desk, complete with compartments and wheels that were common in large-scale furniture. Studio Gorm opted for natural maple for its iteration of a rocking chair with a spindle back. Last summer, Furnishing Utopia held a second workshop and added three additional design studios for an upcoming collection that will be shown during New York Design Week inMay.

A Shaker design revival is taking hold in Canada, too. In January, Mjlk hosted the group exhibition, That is Best Which Works Best, as part of the Toronto Design Offsite Festival. The show mixed contemporary pieces with two-dozen original items from the Hancock village. Winnipeg-based Thom Fougere interpreted the shows theme as an elegant fire tool set. Oslo-based Hallgeir Homstvedt produced a hanging rail and mirror, his take on the ubiquitous peg rail that borders most Shaker rooms. Bakers contribution was a multi-use Shaker drawer table created with Jason Collett.

Since the group is often confused with the likes of Quakers, the Amish and Mennonites, the Mjlk installation was a history lesson for many visitors. I was surprised how many people didnt know of the Shakers, says Baker. They made a huge impact on our everyday life; they invented so many things such as the apple parer, and were inventive in how they utilized space andfunction.

Even though knowledge of Shakers is hit or miss among design consumers, Herzberg notes that members of the group itself seemed aware of the impact of their work. To illustrate that point, she references a quote from an elderly Shaker woman in the 1984 Ken Burns documentary, The Shakers: Hands to Work, Hearts to God, in which she says that she fully expects to be remembered as a chair after her death. They recognized even then that their legacy in this world wasnt necessarily their religion and their tradition, she says. It was their material culture that has been widely disseminated andcelebrated.

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Pure and simple - The Globe and Mail

Lisbons new Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (MAAT) seems like ideal location to consider the current mood of urban civilisation. The smooth, naturalistic yet futuristic building designed by Amanda Leveterises up out of the bank of the river Tagus, in a city which, even after the crippling nationwide financial crisis of 2010, received Wallpapers Best City award for 2017.The inaugural exhibition titled Utopia/Dystopia: A paradigm shift in art and architecture sparked by the 500th anniversary of Thomas Mores seminal text Utopia presents over 60 works by artist and architects who examine shifts in political structures through physical manifestations of constructed and envisioned urban designs.

Curators Pedro Gadanho, Joo Laia and Susana Ventura, whose backgrounds vary across architectural and artistic expertise, do not distinguish in the exhibition between artists and architects, presenting conceptual ideas across the two disciplines side by side, and selecting practitioners with diverse background. To name a few from the group show: Didier Faustino, Kader Attia, Tacita Dean, Cao Fei, OMA, and Wolfgang Tillmans.

The exhibition charts the gathering skepticism of idealistic modernist designs of the late 20th century, moving towards the contemporary obsession with dystopia, fuelled by science fiction and the internet, which has turned into somewhat of a dark fantasy, directly associated with post-internet culture, digital and nomadic values of freedom, a free (and black) market, spiraling lawlessness and statelessness. These concepts present interesting alternatives to post-capitalist, nationalist and neo-facist structures that are gaining power, yet losing control, across the globe today.

Cities of the Avant-Garde, by Wai Think Tank, 2012

While showing a gradual progression from modern to contemporary movements, the exhibition communicates across sections, curated in a layered chaos, spatially combining drawings, photography, sound and video. The layered configuration echoes the conceptual layered universe we are trying to explore, says Laia. Described by MAAT director and curator Gadanho as a media happy show, the exhibition journey integrates smaller spaces for video works fluidly through the gallery, which flows around the central oval-shaped arena for performance art where Mexican artist Hctor Zamoras incredible piece Order and Progress played out on the night of the public opening.

Defining the period of modernity from the end of Enlightenment to Hiroshima, the curators present optimistic and pessimistic approaches to modernist urban plans, real and imagined. How ideal can a city be? And how do you create a city that is perfect? questioned Gadanho to himself when curating the show.

Imagining the future, Alexander Brodsky & Ilya Utkins etching on paper of the urban landscape of 2001, titled Wandering Turtle, made in 1955, shows endlessly multiplying Manhattan-style blocks, while Archizooms No stop city a model or sculpture made between 1969-2001 shows an ever-expanding suburban town. These saturated vistas with their endlessly multiplying buildings echo the over-stimulated urban ecology that we begin to face.In Michael MacGarrys work Luanda, Angola, 2019 (100 Suns series), 2010, an archival inkjet print on cotton paper, the artists envisions a Dubai-like landscape with hundreds of Burj Khalifa-style towers multiplying across the horizon. Instead of the blocky skyscrapers or the detached houses for families of four, collective cities have been replaced by the ambitions of the individual.

Now, buildings act alone in competition for daylight, views and the title of the tallest and soon, darkness will prevail for the best of us. Inci Eviners video installation Nursing Modern Fall, 2012, plays out during this realisation here humans are working out, training and building, all set on a globe map on which Auschwitz is marked.Other works in the exhibition present dystopia as a form of beauty, or a sickly fantasy at least. Tabor Robaks HD video work is a rolling screen-saver style video evolving slowly through futuristic neon skyscrapers a four-dimensional style of pop art and an immersive sphere of amusement that echoes an endless digital scroll.

Installation views of works by DIS Collective and Nasan Tur

The end of the exhibition takes a post-internet turn, and how could it not. The internet is the space where this fascination with dystopia plays out. Curators of the previous, post-internet heavy Berlin Biennale, DIS Collective are included in the exhibition along with other BB9 featured artists including yr, Jonas Staal and Ryan Trecartin who present the communities who exist in these dystopian worlds. Mixing up a sour cocktail of human traits/flaws and technological hybridity, the artists in this section of the exhibition are an acquired taste. While they are products of capitalism, they revel in the destruction of it, looking to create, like the digital landscape, a free zone where people are free to destruct as much as they construct.

Nasan Turs work, Comunism, Capihtalism, Sociallism, 2016, misspells political ideologies in neon lights, referencing our current crisis of terminology to describe the political state of affairs. The problem is that now these political concatenations have lost their potency and their effectiveness writes Franco Berardi in his catalogue essay for the exhibition, Futurability Map. We are in freefall.And while the diagnoses of depression and anxiety are rising across the world, especially in young people and how soon will it be until narcissism epidemic eschews perhaps, like this post-internet generation of artists, we too need to learn to delight in instability, if we have the privilege to remain critical that is, to understand the freedom that it gives us.

Looking at the works of Yona Friedman, founder of the mobile architecture theory which argued for the idea of a non-community, and Jonas Staal, who examines ideas of co-existence in specific urban situations and the idea of democracy without a state, featured towards the end of the show, the viewer does not give up hope altogether, yet leaves with a better understanding of how utopia and dystopia could collaborate, and how idealism and realism might too.

ARCHITECTURE EXHIBITIONS

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Paradigm shift: the MAAT's inaugural exhibition debates a new world order - wallpaper.com