SUPERSTADT! Utopia, Utopia!

A symposium on the future of the city
SUPERSTADT! Utopia, Utopia!

Thursday, October 18th, 2012 | 10:00-19:00
University of Art and Design Linz, 4010 Linz, Kollegiumgasse 2, 1st floor, Audimax

http://www.superstadt.at

ADMISSION FREE!

+ + +

PROGRAMME

10:00 Opening
10:15 SABINE POLLAK | Vienna/Linz
11:00 MAGNUS LARSSON | Stockholm
11:45 AMID.cero9 | Madrid
14:00 SIBYLLE HAMANN | Vienna
14:45 LIAM YOUNG : Tomorrow's Thoughts Today | London
16:00 LARS SCHMID : red park | Vienna
16:45 JAN TABOR | Vienna
17:30 MELISSA LOGAN & ALEX MURRAY-LESLIE : Chicks on Speed | Hamburg
19:00 Buffet & Drinks, SUPERPARTY!

+ + +

Utopia, Utopia!

Floating cities, artificial mountains, vertical farms and flying houses: Today, utopias are in fashion again. Like the early utopias, they respond to collapsing systems, are built on inhospitable territories and conceive structures freed from social constraints and gravity. Utopias have always fulfilled a multi-functional role. They transcend reality and permit its vehement criticism at the same time. In 1930, Buckminster Fuller predicted cosmic bankruptcy and offered houses using space technology in reply. The 1960s exhibited an ironic remodelling of technological progress, and the 1970s, in response to any economies whatsoever, an architecture of maximum pleasure gain. Towards the end of the 20th century, architectonic utopias increasingly disappeared, making room for a construction boom and a new pragmatism. Even without utopias, new cities grew, demanding fast concepts in global architecture. Utopic thinking was posited to be obsolete.

Today's utopias may have lost the criticism of the system, then again they are still meaningful. Climate change, disasters and social inequalities cannot be solved in the now, making a drifting-off into possibilities plausible. How to deal with drought, floodings and mountains of garbage? What to do in the future, with the cities, the landscape, the deserts and the sea?

Utopia, Utopia! congregates radical and questioning counterworlds of the yet impossible to build for tomorrow's supercity. Architects show insane buildings, urbanists the city in a hundred years from now, artists present subversive counter models, men and women of letters enter fictional spaces and philosophers talk about the sense or nonsense of utopias.

+ + +

CURATOR: Sabine Pollak, Architecture | Urbanism, University of Art and Design Linz
MODERATION: Angelika Fitz
ORGANISATION: Anja Aichinger