January 2008 Archives
Marquis de Sade envisioned an imaginary world where personal pleasure would be the guiding principle determining its life and form. This utopian reality is set in complete isolation; usually a chateau hermetically shut, away from the world’s punitive attempts; a place where people can enjoy the quality of their existence, the sensual pleasure of being, without any reason to hide anything. People and setting form a basis of a social autarchy. The members of this society (libertines, assistants, and their subjects) once shut in, constitute a total social order with its own economy, morality, language, and time articulated into schedules, labors and celebrations. Sade attempts to create a complete organized space, and schedule an everyday utopia with timetables, dietary programs, clothing, etc, everything based on the pleasure principle.
Ignatius Loyola, principal founder and first Superior General of the Society of Jesus, developed a set of exercises, a system of relationships, which where to be followed by someone as an attempt to achieve transmission of mental experience and capture a sign by the Divinity. He aimed to a totally new approach to the method of praying where the exercitant, apart from been isolated to a retreat, had to strictly behave according to a set of rules (regulating days, schedules, postures, diets, specific activities, dressing, eating) which would determine a field of exclusion and permit him to focus on his aim.
François Fourier envisioned a place of cooperation and brilliance; a harmonious world where behaviors are guided from individual passions and manias. Each community (called phalanx) in its ideal form should have 1620 inhabitants and everyday life is a never-ending celebration of the harmonious coexistence between different individuals. The topography of the phalanstery is similar to that of a palace or a monastery characterized by an increased isolation from its surrounding and continuous mobility within it; it is a retreat where someone moves, constantly reinventing his inner self.
Constant, member of the Situationists, attempted to form a utopian setting called ‘New Babylon’, according to the formulas and principles of the SI; a network of passages and labyrinths connecting different fragments (sectors). Principal activity of the Homo Ludens (inhabitant of this world) would be a never ending ‘drifting’ within this system. Life in the New Babylon would be an endless chain of encounters between mind, body, space and architecture; the whole formation of the structure was planned to exploit social interaction and personal exploration.
At this point I am called to define a new ‘phalanstery’ of religious character set in
Each individual member of this community is asked to follow a general set of rules which would provide a harmonious coexistence but at the same time occupy with activities that will introduce him to a field of ‘exclusion’ followed by a field of self exploration; an interrelation between the past and the present; the fact and the myth; a place where imagination is the guiding principle structuring everyday life, using all possible methods for guidance through this culture of fantasy.
The architecture of this world should engender and mould its peoples’ dreams. It should resemble the idea of totality within it, containing a set of places articulated in a way that do not predefine a path, but act as guidances along one’s process of transformation. It is up to the individual to decipher fragments of this utopian reality, his fantasy and subconscious and develop a special path of life that will regenerate his soul.
