“A container and its contents,” Revisited

Prof. Dr. Simon Sadler is Professor of Design and Chair of the Department of Design at the University of California, Davis.  His research and publications focus on the histories, theories, and ideologies of architecture, design, and urbanism since the mid-twentieth century. His published work includes studies of the Archigram group, the Situationists, and countercultural design.

Interviewed on 22 February 2021 By Dulmini Perera

On page 44, you write:
‘In short, he boils ecology down to another politics—another moment in modernism’s history of reform. He introduces the word “critical” not in the systems-analysis sense of Fuller (as the sequence determining the minimum time needed for an operation—see, for instance, his book Critical Path of 1981) but in its dialectic sense, as he analyzes the merits and faults of design.’

What is the relevance of Maldonado’s definition of the word “critical” to the current environmental discourse in architecture? 

On page 49, you write:
‘Of outstanding importance to Maldonado is Bloch’s description of the “concrete utopia.” “Abstract utopia is fantastic and compensatory” (in Ruth Levitas’s summary), whereas “concrete utopia…is anticipatory rather than compensatory. It reaches forward to a real possible future and involves not merely wishful but will-full thinking.” Maldonado prioritizes the concrete over the speculative, as, surely, does any designer. And yet the book ends with nothing concretized, a sleight of hand that, if anything, deepens the book’s legacy because it remains open.”

This paradox of arguing for a concrete utopia while ending up with something speculative is perhaps why Maldonado’s work has never reached a broader audience. Nevertheless, do you think that his inquiry’s paradoxical nature can help emerging architects think of utopia or the term ‘utopian’ in another way?