Ritchie and Pearman on Utopia, 2016

No…
Architects are idealists, but they can also be control freaks, writes critic HUGH PEARMAN

‘Behold Celesteville! The elephants have just finished building it and are now resting or bathing. Babar, with Arthur and Zephir, is sailing round it in his boat, admiring his new Capital.
Each elephant has a house of his own… All the windows look out over the big lake. The Palace of Work is next to the Palace of Pleasure, which is very convenient.’
Behold also the mighty king-elephant Babar himself, seemingly so clever and concerned for the good of his people. But he is in fact an absolute monarch, requested to become king by a council of elephants who neglected to put a time limit on his tenure. His home at the top of the town looks out over the regimented rows of houses, just as the mill-owners’ mansions in Industrial-Revolution Britain looked out past their own palaces of work to the terraces they had so kindly provided for their workers. It’s all about surveillance and control, of course. It’s more than a little creepy, this utopia malarkey.
‘The problem with utopia is the obsession with symmetry and perfection and its suppression of any individual impulse’
Opinions are divided on the intentions of Babar’s French author, Jean de Brunhoff, back in the 1930s. As Babar brings his newly learned metropolitan ways back to Africa, wearing his dandy green suit and establishing his elite settlement, they look a lot like French neocolonialism.
But was De Brunhoff championing colonialism (neo or actual) in these otherwise charming children’s stories, or satirising it?
The same question, of course, is constantly asked of Thomas More’s original Utopia as he delineated it 500 years ago. His model is a compact country with 54 cities. Note the isolationist tendency: its builders have dug a 14-mile wide channel to separate it from the mainland, so making it into an island as hard to escape as to invade. Even on the island, movement is restricted and passes must be shown at all times. It is a slave society with an elected monarch-for-life. Punishments meted out for sexual misconduct there would be familiar to those living in today’s Saudi Arabia. There are, of course, also sumptuary laws, governing the way people must dress. Everyone must do certain kinds of work, especially manual labour. To keep the population absolutely stable, it is forcibly moved around the cities or sent off to mainland colonies. It is all very prophetic of Mao’s catastrophic Cultural Revolution.
The problem with the concept of utopia is obvious: the obsession with symmetry and perfection, and its inevitable suppression of any individual impulse by the will of rulers always prone to over-simplification and tyranny. To achieve such an idealised society is to force people into ways of living and behaving that brooks no denial, admits of no alternative. Architecturally, exactly the same applies. Architects are idealists: they want to make the world better and they have the skills and imagination to do so. But some architects can also be control freaks who like everything to be in its proper designated space, preferably geometrically arranged on a grid plan.
It’s the same mindset, which is why historically every tyrant has a squad of helpful architects in tow. And of course, some great buildings can result.
But there is always a Resistance, as fictionally celebrated in films ranging from Logan’s Run to The Lego Movie. Utopias are doomed to crumble because their straitjacket – political and physical
– is too rigid, too brittle. Too perfect, resistant to further development. There is nothing wrong with dreaming of a better and fairer society, and making efforts to implement it. We should never give up on that. But don’t over-think or overcontrol either the system or the place. Everything will not be awesome. Eventually, the people will rise against you.