theory arq . vol 16 . no 4 . 2012 339 theory Through interrogation of utopian declarations for twentieth-century architecture and visionary urban representations, this article sharpens the loose pairing of Modernist architecture and Utopia. Utopia and modern architecture? Nathaniel Coleman doi: 10.1017/S1359135513000225 It is a commonplace to describe twentieth-century Modernist architecture as utopian, but doing so arguably has less to do with putative social agendas than with explaining the failure of such work to deliver on extravagant promises. By interrogating utopian declarations for twentieth-century architecture and visionary urban representations, the aim of this article is to sharpen the loose pairing of Modernist architecture and Utopia. Consideration is also given to how undue emphasis on representation supports post-rationalisations of failure as the inevitable teleology of Utopia, which serves only to empty architecture of its ethical function. To conclude, some preliminary thoughts on the prospects of a more convincingly utopian modern architecture are advanced. A long partnership Because Utopias will always be set somewhere, almost every description of an ideal society also includes reference to the architectural or urban stage upon which it will play out. Equally, even though the German philosopher of hope, Ernst Bloch (1885– 1977) observed that, ‘[a]rchitecture cannot at all fourish in the late capitalist hollow space since it is, far more than the other fne arts, a social creation and remains that way’, less obviously, this condition can also mean that architecture has the potential to be the most radical art, rather than only the most conservative. 1 Bloch’s conviction that: ‘[o]nly the beginnings of a different society will make true architecture possible again’ notwithstanding, architecture is among the last strongholds of concrete, rather than abstract, social imagination, even if this aspect of its potential is only very rarely explored in the present by architects and their clients alike. 2 Interestingly, in his essay ‘Function and Sign: The Semiotics of Architecture’, Umberto Eco supports both Bloch’s view of the diminished capacity of architects for thinking architecture beyond the limitations of its given condition, and my conviction that architecture has precisely this capacity, though rarely explored. Eco outlines the obstacles to imagining an architecture that can actually project beyond what is as ‘two unfortunate ideas of the role of the architect’, both of which he ascribes to ‘overconfdence’: According to the frst, he [the architect] has only to answer to what he can take as ‘programmatic’ givens; here he may accept on faith certain sociological and ideological determinations made by others, which may not be well founded. According to the second, the architect (and we know what currency this delusion has enjoyed) becomes a demiurge, an artifcer of history. 3 While Eco’s cogent illumination of the varieties of overconfdence that limit architecture possibility is undeniable, my fear is that especially the second might too quickly become prima facie evidence taken as incontrovertible proof that all encounters between architecture and Utopia must end in certain failure. Such a conclusion, however, is only sustainable so long as the view of Utopia leading to such a conclusion is fundamentally negative, unchallenged by any dissenting opinion. In point of fact, I would argue that Eco’s own alternatives to the ‘varieties of overconfdence’ he outlines elucidates a utopian conception of the architect able to outmanoeuvre the restricted position its being ‘a social creation’ places on architecture. According to Eco, to do this, ‘the architect should be designing for variable primary functions [the use architecture and the elements out of which it is formed make possible and denote] and open secondary functions [the meaning connoted by a building and the elements that form it].’ 4 On the one hand, this might only seem to redouble the restrictions placed on architecture; on the other, however, it highlights the shortcomings of confusing ‘visionary’ with ‘Utopia’ in the realm of architecture. In short, the otherness, or architecture imagined beyond the limits of the given advocated here has little or nothing to do with either impossible paper projects or with built works that confound use. A kind of paradoxical utopianism is suggested here, cognisant of Fredric Jameson’s observation that it is impossible to imagine anything outside of ourselves, highlighting ‘our constitutional inability to imagine