The Metropolis of the Future: Architecture as Tangential Universes and Background Image
In Trevor Patt’s essay in Architecture on the Edge of Everything Else, he criticises the previous developmental models for the City / the Metropolis of the Future - the kind that attempts to categorically organize the strata of the city into a coherent structural beings of organized components - as models that have fallen “on the side of prediction, explanation, and organization”1. These models fall short of the imaginative minds of its makers, relying on a pragmatic means to its existence, thus eradicating the totality and intensification of actual, real, living cities.
Instead, when we take a look at examples of the Metropolis of the Future in its filmic, fictional, or speculative realizations, like the vertically sprawling cities in Fifth Element (1997):
I still remember being mesmerized by the image of this city as a kid, and also with the guy with the amazing hair and ‘tache (played by the talented Gary Oldman).
Or the Metropolis of the substitute city in Evangelion.
Within the very fabrics of these cities we see echoes of what the models of modernist projections of future metropolises have attempted to achieve - of a coherent network of systems based on a principle of organization that which investigates alternative modes of living beyond our current configurations.
If anything, these speculative models containing the full richness of the Metropolis spur new models of engagement with the city in much more effective ways than the critically-engaged and causally-defined projects that stifles the autonomous and self-organizing principles of the subject. The city as background image is a playground for instigating further action. Each fictional city is a fictional tangential operation of the social, economic, and political consequences of certain actions - actions that may define our realities - and are able to offer a surface of reflection.
This may mean that architects must forgo the creation of authored meanings in exchange for the promotion of othered possibilities.
We move beyond architecture and future as absolutes and into an architecture of a possible realm, the background to the protagonist of culture, living, social roles and so on, as it should be and as it is in our lives, a dominant but dormant systematization that appears if you look close enough. Ahead of us we can see these imaginations taken as eventual realizations, but that’s not really the point either - the point is to create new architectures, new potentialities and tangential universes that are embarks beyond that-which-is-all-wrong with the present epoch, and resist.
But it’s not sufficient for a city to become a realization of its very apparent predictions, which may eventually reach only the apex of each of its own defects, magnified. Finding an appropriate problem for which to solve is crucial, otherwise there is a risk of producing dystopian fiction rather than speculative design.
1 Trevor Patt in Architecture At the Edge of Everything Else.