Andrés Jaque Argues Utopia's Realization Changed Its Politics

Andrés Jaque says utopias lose their edge the moment they come true. In a guest essay published by designboom, the Spanish architect argues that the connected, mobile, institution-free world once promised by Archigram has arrived — and it looks nothing like liberation.

His core claim is blunt. "What once looked like liberation can become an infrastructure of domination. Utopia did not simply fail. Its realization changed the politics of its promises. A utopia does not carry its politics intact into the future."

What did Archigram promise?

Jaque credits the British group with some of the twentieth century's most energizing propositions: technological freedom, mobile architectures, continuous connectivity, and cities emancipated from fixed institutions. He describes their irreverence as inseparable from the architects' intelligence and vitality — young minds "having enormous fun imagining the demolition of established orders."

Now compare that with the present he sketches:

• Work finds us everywhere through permanent connectivity
• Platforms promise choice while concentrating power
• Technologies celebrate freedom while organizing surveillance, extraction, segregation, and uninterrupted availability
• Promised mobility meets fortified, segregation-making borders
• Promised flexibility meets a housing crisis that displaces millions
• Sophisticated computation accompanies warfare and the destruction of cities
• Networks promising universal knowledge also industrialize disinformation

Does he blame Archigram?

No. "Blaming Archigram would be absurd," Jaque writes. "But the resemblance is disturbing." His point is structural, not accusatory: the utopia's realization changed its politics, and something else changed too.

That something is how today's crises work. They emerge through interactions among computational systems, biological processes, economic institutions, and planetary ecologies. Housing is shaped by financial algorithms, property regimes, migration, and bodies struggling to survive. Climate instability connects atmospheric processes, energy infrastructures, industrial production, governance, and predictive computation. Biodiversity loss involves agriculture, logistics, microbial ecologies, and land finance. Warfare combines automated detection with the destruction of bodies, habitats, and infrastructures.

These aren't separate technological, social, and environmental problems, he argues. They are "posthuman enactments" in which computation and biology, sensing and decision-making, are inseparable.

What can architecture actually do?

Jaque frames the discipline's task as experimentation at the thresholds of sensing. "We struggle to imagine our participation in transformations whose production exceeds what we can sense. Yet we participate constantly."

Experimenting, in his definition, means entering the conflicts through which reality is produced rather than imagining alternatives from a safe distance. It means challenging what computational systems recognize, what institutions exclude, what bodies endure, and what other forms of life make possible. And it means changing not only what we know, but who and what can produce knowledge, intervene in decisions, and redirect their consequences.

"The radicality of architecture lies in making reality itself a site of collective experimentation, where the power to sense, contest, and transform is not merely imagined or proposed but enacted and bodyenvironmentally lived," he writes.

The essay is illustrated with Jaque's own built and installed work: Rambla Climate-House (photographed by Jose Hevia), Colegio Reggio, and The Transspecies Palace and Transspecies Kitchen, all by his practice OFFPOLINN.

Jaque founded the Office for Political Innovation in 2003; it operates from New York and Madrid. He is Professor and Dean of Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, and his awards include the 2016 Frederick Kiesler Prize for Architecture and the Arts and the Silver Lion for Best Research Project at the 14th Venice Architecture Biennale.

The essay forms part of designboom's POSTHUMAN UTOPIAS chapter, presented in partnership with INDX|GLOBAL, and it sets a test for the field: whether architecture can move from proposing worlds to contesting the systems that build this one.