Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: From the moment of its so-called "discovery," America has been imagined as a place of possibility.The New World: A moniker built from afar and without; a land of promise, risk, abundance, and myth.These visions of untapped potential-entangled with conquest and extractivism-cast the continent as a site where utopias could be realized, often at the cost of erasing its original inhabitants and ecologies.Coined by Thomas More in 1516, the word utopia holds a telling ambiguity: it means "no place" (ou-topos) but is sufficiently similar to "good place" (eu-topos).Since then, the concept has oscillated between aspiration and critique-between imagining radical alternatives and exposing society's deepest failures.In our current context, marked by climate collapse and political instability, this issue of ARQ asks what utopia might amount to today.How do its ideas-of refusal, possibility, transformation-continue to resonate across the territories and architecture in America?Which contemporary projects mobilize utopia not as escape, but as a tool for imagining more just, more situated, and no less radical futures?Fernando Luiz Lara's article offers the conceptual and historical framework for this discussion.His thesis is striking: the very idea of utopia-and America as its substrate-cannot be understood without revisiting the spatial abstraction that accompanied the occupation of the continent.This thesis, incidentally, implies a 180-degree turn away from the notion of a "received modernity": it was the occupation of America that triggered spatial transformations without which, Lara argues, modern architecture as we know it would not exist.The constitutive paradox of Utopian America lies in this encounter between modernity and coloniality: the same Cartesian logic that enabled the imagining and planning of better worlds was used to erase geographies, communities, and ways of life.Across the continent, these impulses took diverse forms.From industrial utopias embedded in complex landscapes to tourist paradises designed to attract an international cohort, multiple modernizing processes projected onto America social laboratories, territorial factories, and consumption enclaves, where the ideal collided time and time again with ecological, political, and cultural realities.The articles by Gonzalo Carrasco and Enrique Sing et al. dwell on this point of friction: moments when planning, technology, or capital attempted to impose a totalizing vision-in the Brazilian Amazon or in the Peruvian Amazon-and encountered in the territory and its inhabitants a limit, a resistance, or simply an unexpected response.In 1935, Uruguayan artist and thinker Joaquín Torres García offered another reading of the continent: an inverted map accompanied by the declaration "Our North is the South."It was more than a symbolic inversion; it was an invitation to imagine utopia from within America itself-not as an imported vision, but as a projection rooted in the continent's own spatial, cultural, and political horizons.This turn echoes in the article by Artur de Souza Duarte and Renato Cymbalista on CRUSP, which shows how a modernist utopia does not disappear when it fails, but is transformed through use, collectivity, and political resistance.Utopia is no longer a project imposed from above but becomes a lived, appropriated, and contested practice.Rayna Razmilic's critique shares this political horizon: it dismantles the ideal of imposed totality-alongside certain canons of exhibition architecture-and shifts the discussion toward identity and belonging.From a decolonial perspective, utopia in America unfolds not only in territorial visions, but also in performative How would you define America?ARQ's 2025 cycle, titled Esto es América / This is America, sets out to explore the continent through a transnational lens-beyond political borders and linguistic divides.We are interested in understanding America through shared conditions, tensions, and phenomena that cut across geographic, historical, and cultural boundaries.This issue marks the end of a three-part editorial series that approaches the continent from three complementary angles: geography and territory (American Territories), urban density and processes of informality (Popular America), and ideological projections and collective imaginaries (Utopian America).
Source: ARQ
Author: Stephannie Fell
Institution: Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile
Language: English
Subfield: Architecture
Field: Engineering
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W7123363802
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