ERIKA NAGINSKI: So let's begin with the frontispiece

to a book that remains profoundly important for architects--

in fact, all architects should read it--
and also important in terms of architecture's relationship to language
because, in fact, it defined the literary genre of the utopian novel.
I'm talking about Sir Thomas More's "Utopia."
More was a jurist,
and he also had a diplomatic career.
He became an envoy to Flanders.
And in 1516, he published in Latin a novel, simply called "Utopia."
It saw a second edition in 1518 and then began
to be translated, which is a testimony to its immense success
in the 16th century.
What is crucial about this book, and what
I mean to say when I say that it defined the genre of utopian writing,
is its literary structure.
It is essentially a binary structure.
It is divided into two parts.
The first unfolds as a conversation, a conversation
which ultimately ends up as a critique of contemporary society
and of kingship as a model of governance, as a model for the state,
and as a principle, as a political principle.
The second part-- we encounter there a traveler,
a traveler who describes the island of Utopia that he's visited.
In other words, what is happening because of this binary structure
is the idea that a criticism of the real is
embedded in the imagining of an ideal, of a utopia.
So utopia is not simply a word that evokes a kind of social fiction
or a kind of delusion.
Instead, key to the idea of utopia, whether it's in a novel,
or whether it appears in architecture, as with Ledoux,
is that it always stems, always stems from a critique
of current social conditions.
Embedded in the principle of utopia is a critical intentionality.
We also want to add to this the fact that the word utopia, etymologically,
has two meanings.
It stems from the Greek.
And it can mean "no place" or "happy place," which
is a kind of fascinating collision, a collision underscoring
that utopia is necessarily unrealizable, but that it establishes conditions
of possibility, whether they are architectural
or whether they are in terms of social, legal, or political policy.
To look back at the woodcuts that functioned as a frontispiece
for the novel, we can see that it actually
responded to the literary trope that More was unfurling in the novel.
If you look at the title, you'll see that essentially it
is called the "Figure of the Island of Utopia,"
meaning that utopia here finds its figure in the island.
What does this mean?
It means that it is somewhere else.
It is only accessible by a ship.
It is only part of, or the outcome of, a voyage of discovery.
If you also look more closely, though, you'll
see that the island slowly morphs into the figure of a skull.
In other words, it is a "memento mori."
It is the image of death in Arcadia, if you
will, a way to say that utopia has never happened and can never happen.
But we can dream of the possibilities it offers.
Now, in addition to this literary tradition,
or this relationship, as it were, to language,
we also have a very specific lineage that is more relevant, directly
relevant, to architecture-- in other words, a visual tradition.
We can go back to the classical world, in fact,
and look at the architectural treatise of Vitruvius,
where Vitruvius was a Roman architect and engineer from the first century BC.
And in his treatise, which is actually still today really
the most complete classical treatise we have on architecture,
we will find a section devoted to the ideal city, or to city planning,
as it were.
What's important for us is that this treatise was, as it were,
rediscovered during the Renaissance.
And the curious part of this is that the illustrations,
the original illustrations in the classical text, were lost.
So what Renaissance architects did, in fact,
was represent the ideas that they found in the text.
They drew from the language of the text to imagine in diagrammatic form,
in terms of visual representation, what the text was
saying about the ideal city.
So if we look at a 1511 edition, with illustrations
added in by the Renaissance author, we see here a Renaissance version
of Vitruvian ideas.
What's very clear from the text and the images that were inserted
is that Vitruvius seems to have put aside practical issues when
he dealt with town planning.
Instead, the diagram shows us an ideal form
enclosed by a protective wall like a kind of military fort--
think forward to Ledoux's ramparts--
with reinforced towers for strategic purposes.
This is a radial arrangement.
It's a radial arrangement that will affect the image of the city
throughout the Renaissance and be carried over into the Enlightenment.
It's also a very specific kind of radial arrangement.
It is essentially octagonal.
It's based on the eight directions of the prevailing winds, which
are avoided, Vitruvius tells us, for hygienic purposes,
by eight streets that bisect them.
Here, in other words, the octagon, the notion of the eight-sided city,
emerges as an ideal geometry for the contour of the urban fabric--
which brings us really to this example, which
is the very first ideal city conceived in the Renaissance.
It's called Sforzinda, the town of Sforzinda.
What we have here is a plan that's not based on any actual surroundings,
any real surroundings, but rather made to obey those principles of harmony,
of regularity, and of enclosure, whose seeds were found in Vitruvius's text.
In other words, you could argue that this is not exactly
a utopia, but rather a formal pattern.
We can see Vitruvian principles being extended and imagined
in the Italian Renaissance with the military fortress of the ancients still
the dominant metaphor for urban planning.