Architectural utopia between fictional and realistic visions

Abstract

For long time Utopia was the dream of mankind. Since that day in 1516, when Sir Thomas More portrayed "Utopia" as a fantastic island where the people lived in an integrated perfect world, the Utopia has become an abbreviation for all what is ideal. Utopia has always been a revolutionary fictional that has already affected to civilizations along history,with its thought, creativity, science and technology, to add happiness and luxury to human. Unlike the Utopia in the past, where questing to create a new reality with overestimated quixotic values, and as a result of the accumulated knowledge, we have witnessed the evolution of the utopian concept "Utopianism" and how it aims to reform what already exists. The designer's mission is to create a vision for better world, the depth of design stems from ideals, and how to be more responsible, sensitive, and compassionate to human beings or residents of the place. Designers believed that their buildings could help solve the world's problems. Utopia has become a vision with philosophical and social dimensions concerned with architecture, the interior environment and its infrastructure, and how to restore it for the purpose of serving the mechanism of social organization, political control, and everything else related to the "moral life". Unfortunately, the unprecedented environmental destruction today is intricate and tricky to confront despite the solid technological presence; in the context of the changes in the global climate and its impact on sea levels, energy crisis, and the problem of population growth among many other issues. It is necessary to rethink everything related to our cities, and to work on developing new utopian visions for a better world in which all these problems and community issues can be solved ... Perhaps today's utopias, become the reality of tomorrow.

Keywords

• utopia; architecture; ecotopia