Topologies

Amid the cultural and political ferment of 1960s France, a group of
avant-garde architects, artists, writers, theorists, and critics known as
"spatial urbanists" envisioned a series of urban utopias--phantom cities
of a possible future. The utopian "spatial" city most often took the form
of a massive grid or mesh suspended above the ground, all of its parts (and
inhabitants) circulating in a smooth, synchronous rhythm, its streets and buildings
constituting a gigantic work of plastic art or interactive machine. In this new
urban world, technology and automation were positive forces, providing for material
needs as well as time and space for leisure. In this first study of the French
avant-garde tendency known as spatial urbanism, Larry Busbea analyzes projects by
artists and architects (including the most famous spatial practitioner, Yona
Friedman) and explores texts (many of which have never before been translated from
the French) by Michel Ragon, the influential founder of the Groupe International
d'Architecture Prospective (GIAP), Victor Vasarely, and others. Even at its most
fanciful, Busbea argues, the French urban utopia provided an image for social
transformations that were only beginning to be described by cultural theorists and
sociologists.