Critique of Utopia

Photo: Shiqiao Li

Lecture on the contemporary Chinese city. "Critique of Utopia" by Professor Shiqiao Li, School of Architecture, University of Virginia and author, Understanding the Chinese City (2014)

The idea that architecture and the city are made according to models of perfection is, the lecture argues, a distinctive intellectual conception of the Indo-European civilization. Among many important features, this enduring intellectual legacy formulates a path to good life via renunciation, reduction, and imprint, through which architectural and urban utopias – systems of purified ideals – came into existence, often in defiance of ecological orders of the planet. The environmental crisis today compels us to retrofit our deeply problematic but normative production of utopias with a more thoughtful sense of “material orders”, the prototypes of which may be found in many East Asian cities. This is a restoration of not only orders of material things but also orders of moral and aesthetic functions.

Lecture for Ark 4505 Theories & Histories of Urbanism, Instructor Fances Hsu.

This event is in English.