ThRAD Special Issue on UTOPIA

A Present for Victor Margolin

Editor In-Chief, Eduardo Côrte-Real 
Co-Editor In-Chief, Helena Souto

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“It is fashionable today to scoff at the grand claims made by the artistic-social 
avant-garde earlier in this century (20th). After all, they wanted nothing less than 
to bring about utopia through the practice of art.”
Victor Margolin, Conclusion of “The Struggle for Utopia”, 1997

“This, which is the essence of his book, is the essence also of the struggle
in which we are engaged.”
William Morris, Foreword to Thomas More’s Utopia, 1893

A few notes on Utopia as it was

In 1516, the first edition of Utopia, by Thomas More, was printed in Latin. This year we celebrate five centuries of such influential book. Few have read it in full length  and fewer in Latin. However, the word and the underlying ideas of Utopia strove not so utopically until our days.

One of our masters and friend, Victor Margolin utopian adept, wrote, from his doctoral research, a celebrated book: The Struggle for Utopia: Rodchenko, Lissitzky, Moholy-Nagy, 1917-1946, that soon will celebrate 20 years of publication (in the year of the Russian Revolution centennial anniversary).  Also, his book of collected essays The Politics of the Artificial positioned the reader in a stance in which human social affairs should be considered primarily in Design Studies. Two years ago, in a preface for a book of essays published in Portuguese, Victor was called a “Paladin of Utopia”.

Utopia, as a book, a concept and an imaginary place in the world, have been highly influential for the past 500 years. By 1913, the words Utopian, Utopianism, Utopianist, Utopical and Utopist were in use and were listed in an American English Dictionary (Webster, 1913).

A reputed pioneer of modern design, William Morris wrote about More’s Utopia:

“In More, then, are met together the man instinctively sympathetic with the Communistic side of Medieval society; the protestor against the ugly brutality of the earliest period of Commercialism; the enthusiast of the Renaissance, ever looking toward his idealised ancient society as the type and example of all really intelligent human life; the man tinged with the asceticism at once of the classical philosopher and of the monk: an asceticism indeed which he puts forward not so much as a duty, but rather as a kind of stern adornment of life.”
(Morris, 1893)

A CALL TO RESCUE THE ANCIENT “UTOPIA OF BEAUTY”, TOGETHER WITH AN INVITATION TO MOVE BEYOND AESTHETIC ELITISM

Anna CALVERA 

University of Barcelona, Design Department; GRACMON Research Group 

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Abstract
ThRAD’s editors have set a challenge to write about “Utopia”, and with it utopian ways of thinking about reality. It makes little difference whether “Utopia” refers to an old book put in its historical context, or an everlasting concept that is still-relevant. The topic is grounded in a debate concerning elitism and the elitist nature of the majority of theoretical approaches within the eld of the Humanities. Meanwhile, in Alessandro Mendini’s recent visit to Barcelona, he referred to the “utopia della bellezza”, illuminating his inspiring point of view. To accept the ThRAD challenge it seemed necessary to review the aesthetic dimension of everyday life, the relation of beauty to ethics within design and the design factor as well. Les jeux sont faits!

This is the background of this article. Reviewing the history of design, this text analyses ideas and approaches to beauty as brought to the fore over various periods, proposing a dialogue between the understanding of ordinary life as proposed by certain philosophers, and, on the other hand, what has been said by designers themselves. The main aim of this essay is to capture the utopian elements embedded in aesthetic pleasures and delights even on their more elementary levels, here referring to the immediateness of the senses and sensual perception. Our inquiry also seeks to understand how aestheticism could become a sort of offense to be argued against, rather than something to be praised. It also seeks out the historical roots for the charge of elitism launched so often against aesthetic facts and aestheticist enactments. In this domain, the utopia of design is made suspect, as is the utopia of beauty. Hence, one underlying aim of this article is to reconsider the role played by the design industry in shaping the contemporary world. Finally, the text further serves as a call to enjoy and give cultural value to everyday life on the basis of its cultural depth and permanence, though being all the while humble and quite often simple. Thus, design practice also becomes a hopeful practice, culturally relevant while remaining ordinary all the same.

Tufan OREL

Consultant in Design Management, France

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Abstract
This paper is divided into two parts. In this first part I propose to re-contextualize some of the design policies of today in Utopian literature by the means of a fictional dialogue, in order to witness their genesis. In a sense, my fiction can be considered as a “reverse scenario”, especially when compared to other studies on Utopia, for example the study of Victor Margolin, (The Struggle for Utopia), which deals directly with Utopian elements used in design practice today. To illustrate my point I have chosen Utopia of Thomas More (1478-1535) and The New Atlantis of Francis Bacon (1561-1626). The fictional dialogue is constructed around the idea of three days of conversation between the protagonist of Utopia and the protagonist of The New Atlantis: i.e. Raphael Hythloday (a philosopher of Portuguese origin) and The Reverend Father (a scientific worker of “The House of Solomon”). For the sake of the scenario I symbolise the origins of social design policies within the arguments of Raphael, and the origins of the market policies are represented by the Reverend Father. In the second part of this paper I will try to present an idea of Utopian design, which is more in coherence with the design practice of today. To illustrate this point, I will consider the Utopian element in design not as a passage from an idealist discourse to practice, but as a crossing from one sphere or “universe of design” to another.

Keywords
Fiction, Utopia, The New Atlantis, Utopian Design, Design Policies, Dialogue on Design