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| There’s No Place Like Home:
The Function of Utopia in Gyula Kosice’s Hydrospatial City Dana S. Ospina, Stanford University |
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| The following is an abstract of the paper presented at the conference.
“We must replace the rooms that have become an architectonic
and peripheral ritual—living room, dining room, bedroom, bathroom,
kitchen, furniture—by serene and intense but fully differentiated
proposals concerning places to live in. Yes, within a space, but
occupying space-time with all its attributes; not as an alteration
of the human adventure but as an understandable need deriving from
our human condition.” “A house is first and foremost a geometrical object, one
we are tempted to analyze rationally...But transposition takes place
immediately whenever a house is considered a space for cheer and
intimacy…independent of all rationality, the dreamworld beckons.” “Mankind will not be exhausted on Planet Earth.”[1] With this pronouncement, published in the avant-garde journal Arturo in 1944, Argentine kinetic artist Gyula Kosice inaugurated what Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro has termed the artist’s “interstellar utopianism.”[2] This prophecy for a supra-terrestrial future addressed not only the prospect for a civilization to come, but in addition allowed for the coherence of a number of sociological and conceptual issues investigated by the artist in the evolution of his practice, concerns that would coalesce around a vision for a new form of domestic experience. A “hydrospatial city,” to be exact, in which a sustainable community of mobile habitats would hover, suspended 3200 to 5000 feet above the earth. The concept was made public through a series of mixed media exhibitions from 1975 to 1982, bringing together for the first time the material elements of Kosice’s vision. A project comprising diagrammatic drawings, sculptures, reliefs, maquettes, photo-collages and manipulated photographs, and theoretical texts, the Hydrospatial City is, in the most general sense, an unapologetic contribution to the utopian quest for the development of an urban environment suitable for a “new civilization.” By “free[ing] human beings from each and every tie”[3] of modern living, the Hydrospatial City offers its residents the opportunity to revolutionize the experience of their domestic environments and quotidian rituals. My paper explores the ways in which the material and textual components of the Hydrospatial City provide a means of recuperating the potential residing within the concept of utopia. This restoration, I propose, relies on a shift from an investigation based solely on ideology and socio-political viability—arenas in which it is not difficult to locate areas of deficiency and outright omission in Kosice’s project—to one in which the structural or formal constructs of utopian vision and their aesthetic function are emphasized. Drawing upon Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, I offer that it is via a reconsideration of the role and experience of the domicile that the Hydrospatial City reveals the specific nature of its relationship to one form of utopian speculation.
Endnotes [1] I am borrowing this translation from Gabriel Pérez-Barriero
in “The Negation of All Melancholy: Arte Madí/Concreto-Invención
1944-1950, ed., David Elliott, Art from Argentina 1920-1944,
Oxford: The Museum of Modern Art Oxford, 1994, 60. |
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