Radical architecture in dispute

discussions about utopias between late 1950s and early 1970s

Abstract

This article investigates some uses of the term utopia in Architecture and Urbanism in a period in which it was especially slippery and dissentious: from late 1950s to early 1970s in the European context. The article seeks to evidence the changes of an architectural imaginary that first conceived nomadic libertarian societies – in many cases, for a postrevolutionary society – and culminated in the consciousness of architecture as having contributed to the formulation of dystopian societies in which individuals are voluntarily cloistered by architecture. The promises of nomadism have become limits reinforced by architecture.