Come out! Utopia

Architecture and utopia are twins of history. A utopian’s architecture is naïve; it conceives a perfect structure of politics and society modelled as a circular or rectangular concentration camp. An architect’s utopia is innocent; it seeks for euphoria and equality, attempts to eliminate social evilness by means of forms, and therefore descends to formalism. However, utopia is indeed the ‘unsatisfied yet desired history’ of human beings, which catalyses socialism, the Disney, the naissance of future technologies or the extermination of humanity. It is the Pandora’s box of human struggle for existence; once uncovering it, optimistic revolutionists see today’s utopia i.e. tomorrow’s reality while pessimistic critics move towards the dystopia that has a deepened class-consciousness to avoid the totalitarianism of equality. Come out! Utopia extracts the utopian ideality of cities and the embers of formalist tragedy. The vertical cutting design of the colossal mirror tower is inspired by the famous utopian architectural plans in history, and those unimplemented blueprints are realised into a life-size 3D model built in the tower. It pays a tribute to the previous masters and sparks contemplation, and the concave-convex mirrors reflect the gap between their wisdom and the reality. Outside the colossal mirror tower, the artist employs the typological archiving method that architects are skilful at to display the revolutions in history and files the historical criticism on architecture and utopia. On one hand, the mirror tower absorbs the utopian practice in history and the reverberations at present on the site; on the other hand, it collects the figures of the ‘common people’ and thus strikes a contrast between ideologies and the world. The purpose of mirroring history is not to resurrect it but to let people learn history lest there should be complacent farces or formalist ignorance.