To browse Academia. Meaning paradoxically both "no place" and "a good place," utopia also challenges humanity to bring this dream into existence. If all the arts offer a realm of fantasy where Utopian ideals can be embodied and shared, then architecture is especially captivating, in part because it provides the communal spaces of cultural identity-meeting rooms, religious structures, and government buildings-and presents the opportunity to conceive and build a new environment for humanity.
He is a pale reflection of all the others, of the outside world as if he would carry a mirror all the way. Hence, building imaginary spaces out of words prevails in all Modernist programs and ideas and came as a quick response to the extremely perished state of the dissolved Ego but also as an imperative need of regaining a lost unity. Extremely eloquent for staging the psychological evolution of the subject, the space textuality comes to re-establish the relation of the underworld fire and the celestial light.
For that reason, the tremendous effort of building a book, an imaginary city, a library as utopian space of vegetal memory fuses iconic figures with a coherent vision of a spiritual universe. Keywords - imaginary city, modernist artist, allomatic experience, catabasis, utopian space. Utopias create an imagined world of possibilities and allow for the visualization of impossibilities; like a dream, they allow for the triggering of the imagination, opening spaces for new possibilities to emerge.
At the heart of modernism, was a utopian desire to create a better world, and the belief that design, art and architecture could transform society and move towards better ideals.
In contemporary art and architecture, this utopian desire still defines creation, however in a new and distinct way. Two case studies are presented exemplifying two types of contemporary utopia in art and in architecture. In architecture, with John Pawson, the research clarifies a type of utopian spiritual depuration through minimalism, creating a space that allows for a contemplative way of life.
