- 34 minutes ago
Category
📚
LearningTranscript
00:02Utopia, that good place, a hope, a dream, always tantalizingly just out of reach.
00:14Utopia has been imagined a thousand different ways.
00:22Yet when people try to build utopia, they struggle and very often fail.
00:28I want to explore why.
00:32We'll encounter experimental communities searching for greater meaning in life.
00:38Utopian ideologies and plans for the masses that didn't leave space for the individual.
00:45And utopian architects with the faith that humanity's lot can be improved through better design.
00:53To practice architecture, you're planning for the future.
00:57You're looking far ahead.
01:00This is about how utopias either adapt or else they crumble.
01:06It's about the clash of grand utopian visions and very human flaws.
01:12Our craving for community versus our desire to break free.
01:17It's about what happens when you dare to turn utopian dreams into reality.
01:42The term utopia, meaning no place or good place, was coined by the Tudor statesman and philosopher, Thomas More.
01:54In 1516, Moore dreamt up a fictional society where there was no private property, an early welfare state and communal
02:05meals.
02:07Moore's utopia is ambiguous and satirical, but also decidedly monkish.
02:27Moore suggests that an ordered way of life is an important part of utopian living.
02:37Here at Belmont Abbey near Hereford, this search for harmony is captured, it seems to me, in the repetitions of
02:45the monks playing song.
03:00For us, a monastery is a good place in which to live and in which to really attempt the ideal
03:12of monastic life.
03:13And we aim for that, and then very often there's a reality which is not quite on the same level,
03:21as it were.
03:22We struggle.
03:32Eighteen benedictine monks live here with a code that lays down all the fundamentals of how they live their daily
03:39life.
03:42The big decisions are made for them, freeing up their minds to think and to explore deeper questions about existence
03:52and meaning.
03:54We spend a great deal of time reading and meditating the scriptures, praying, and trying to live according to the
04:06teaching and the example of Jesus Christ.
04:10And, of course, Thomas More would have done the same in his own way in family life.
04:18For him, the family was like a small monastery, living in community, sharing everything, loving one another.
04:31A communal way of life, sharing space and food and wealth, by extolling monkish equality as the key value of
04:45a radical new society.
04:48More was being incredibly political in an age of kings and queens.
05:00In the years that followed, other religious thinkers came up with new ways of living and put them into practice
05:08in the real world.
05:13Persecuted in Europe, many radical Protestant sects found a more welcoming home for their communities in the wide expanse of
05:22the new world.
05:25From the Mayflower Pilgrims to the Quakers, America became a testing ground for their utopias.
05:38I've come to Canterbury, New Hampshire.
05:42Believe it or not, this was once a home to America's most radical utopians.
05:48An extraordinary experiment that ultimately failed.
05:57Hard-working and hard worshipping, the shakers got their name as Shaking Quakers because of their ecstatic movement and dancing
06:07during worship.
06:16Canterbury, like other Shaker villages on America's east coast, is now a living museum.
06:23A place for a fun family outing.
06:27Yet the shakers' way of life could hardly be more alien to modern American values of aggressive individualism.
06:39The shakers were pacifist and communalist and, way ahead of their time, believed in equality between the sexes.
06:51They were founded in the 18th century by Anne Lee, who had a vision that Christ would reappear in female
06:59form.
07:02At their peak in the mid-19th century, some 18 Shaker communities like Canterbury were home to over 5,000
07:11converts,
07:12sharing open space, good food, accommodation and education.
07:19I think the two of the words that guided them were union and order.
07:29And by union, they meant the idea that, as we would put it today, everyone's on the same page.
07:39And then, the idea of order.
07:42You can see that the buildings are lined up in orderly rows.
07:48They had a set of rules.
07:51The time that they rose in the morning.
07:55The time for their meals.
07:57The time that they had lights out at night.
08:00They had rules for almost everything, as a way of producing a calm and orderly life.
08:12In an attic of one of the old Shaker dormitories, a well-used rocking chair reveals much about the Shaker
08:21mindset.
08:27You know, to modernize, this book's beautiful, simple, but beautiful.
08:34It's got something Bauhaus about it, but to Shakers, that would have been a nonsense.
08:41They'd say, we're not interested in beautiful, we're interested in useful.
08:45That's all we're really interested in.
08:48If you make something absolutely useful, it's just a coincidence if it happens to be beautiful.
08:54It's like an aesthetic that doesn't care about aesthetics.
08:59It's wonderful, simple, airy, lightweight, super practical, easy to stow away,
09:08and just coincidentally delicious to look at.
09:17Nice chair.
09:20It's a huge irony, of course, that the clean-lined, minimalist Shaker aesthetic
09:26has influenced commercial kitchen design and flat-pack furniture the world over.
09:33Because while their furniture conquered millions of homes, the Shakers are no longer here.
09:41The reason lies back in the founder, Anne Lee's, story.
09:46Her four children died in infancy, convinced their deaths were divine punishment for sins of the flesh.
09:56Her personal tragedy doomed this utopia.
10:00She bound the Shakers to one very faithful rule, celibacy.
10:06They were saying, if you follow us, we are offering you a path to a life free of sin, a
10:17heaven on earth.
10:18And their prescription for doing this was to give up the traditional bonds of matrimony, to live as brothers and
10:29sisters.
10:33The rigid rule of the group clashed with natural sexual urges and individual choice.
10:41Perhaps even more significantly, the vow of celibacy meant that the Shakers were unable to bring up their own children
10:49in their faith.
10:52Like monks, but without the weight of Catholic tradition behind them, the Shakers relied on new recruits,
11:00taking in orphans and teaching them their way of life.
11:05After the mid-19th century, cities began to grow.
11:12They were very attractive, especially to young people.
11:16So with opportunities to live a more modern life, and of course for young people, the opportunity to marry, to
11:27have a family of their own, became more and more attractive.
11:43The Shakers clearly had an amazing vision for their time.
11:47You know, this focus on gender equality, well over 200 years ago, it's extraordinary.
11:53But on the other hand, there's a kind of flaw in the weave.
11:57This obsession with celibacy means that they can never reproduce, that the community is surely, inevitably, just going to collapse.
12:16The tension between the utopian ideal and hard reality, the collective vision and individual freedom, has been played out in
12:26communities all across the world.
12:31In rural Virginia, an eco-commune has become one of America's longest-enduring experimental communities.
12:43Over 50 years, Twin Oaks has learned to adapt, to balance the needs of the group versus the individual.
12:55Like monks and shakers before them, the 106 people who live here share everything.
13:02Food, housing, and in Twin Oaks' case, childcare, and sometimes, sexual partners.
13:13Unlike the old religious utopias, the founding principles at Twin Oaks were secular and highly rational.
13:28The psychologist B.F. Skinner is remembered today for his controversial experiments on pigeons.
13:35His life's work was an attempt to establish that free will is an illusion, and that behavior can be modified
13:43by systems of reward and punishment.
13:48In 1948, in his novel, Walden II, Skinner dreamed of a utopian community where people are nudged towards living in
13:58harmony, being productive and happy through behavioral engineering.
14:06What is love?
14:08What is love?
14:08Skinner writes.
14:09Except another name for the use of positive reinforcement.
14:16In 1960s America, amid anti-war protests, the beat poets and the emerging counterculture, people were dropping out to seek
14:26alternative answers to life's big questions.
14:31Psychology books setting out new ideas of self boomed, and Skinner's behaviorist fantasy started to be read all over again.
14:42My mom and I were living in Los Angeles, and she read Walden II, and she just sort of looked
14:48up and said, does this exist? This is what I want.
14:53In 1967, Josie's mother, Kat Kincaid, helped to found the Twin Oaks community.
15:02She was a low-level secretary with no college, a single mom. She had no prospects for a good career.
15:10So she wrote to B.F. Skinner and said, so where is it? I'm ready.
15:14And of course she wrote back and said, well, sorry, there's no such thing. Then she saw an ad in
15:20a magazine that said, forming Walden II community. And next thing I knew, within two or three months, we had
15:27packed up all our earthly goods and come out on a train.
15:30Well, people aren't equal. We don't pretend that they are. The idea of equality, we define it as no member
15:41envying or having cause to envy another member.
15:45Twin Oaks is one big experiment. Basically, Twin Oaks is setting out to do two things. One of them is
15:54to create a society fit for humans to live in. The other one is to create humans fit to live
16:00in that society.
16:04What was it like in the early days? It must have been incredibly hard work.
16:09You know, I mean, Twin Oaks ran out of money in its first two months and people had to travel
16:1350 miles to go get jobs in order to bring enough money in.
16:19A whole bunch of people are leaving because there have been interpersonal difficulties and how is the group going to
16:24survive? And my mother would just worry and worry.
16:27So it wasn't love and sunshine every day, but there was so much purpose that it was absolutely engaging and
16:36inspiring.
16:38Work isn't just an aversive thing. Work is something that people really enjoy.
16:43There was Walden II and it laid out the template. And so Twin Oaks to this day, as far as
16:50I know, has the planner manager system.
16:56So the planners were the official decision makers. They would ask for input from the group. There would be several
17:04meetings about it.
17:05Then they would put out the decision onto the bulletin board and then comments would be written about that.
17:13And then if there weren't too many objections, then it would become the decision, the made decision.
17:17It sounds dangerously like democracy actually could work.
17:23Well, certainly in small groups.
17:31One of those main decisions early on was to abandon behaviorism, which had soon become a dirty word amongst Twin
17:39Oaks more hippie-ish residents.
17:43Yet, look more closely behind the laid back exterior here today and you find many leftovers from Skinner's systematic scientific
17:54approach.
17:58So this is the T'Challa.
18:01Paxus has lived at Twin Oaks for 19 years.
18:05Building this space, which is where the community had its community meetings for the first 15 or 20 years in
18:12this pit.
18:13But then we got too big.
18:15He explains the role planning and work has played in helping this utopia to both tick over and adapt to
18:23change.
18:24One of the things I wanted to show you, this is the people finder.
18:30Every person who is in the community has a labor sheet for the work that they're doing.
18:35These labor sheets are part of the clockwork nature of the community.
18:41We have a bunch of policy.
18:42We have a bunch of systems that are in place.
18:45One of the advantages of being in a clockwork community is lunch is available at noon.
18:51Dinner is available at 6 and takes 88 shifts to run a tofu production week.
18:56That gives us a kind of reliability and a kind of internal structure that makes doing some of the more
19:04complicated things that we do here possible.
19:08If Twin Oaks holds something sacred, it's its labor system.
19:14This is a community with a work ethic.
19:16Each resident is required to contribute 42 hours a week, choosing tasks ranging from farming to cooking.
19:26Cleaning and work in the commune's thriving tofu making and hammock weaving businesses.
19:40Running alongside this communal graft, the residents use their power as a group to save money and pool resources.
19:49So this is one of my favorite institutions inside of the community.
19:58This is commie clothes or community clothes.
20:01It's simple and surprising.
20:05This is awesome.
20:06Yeah.
20:06So this is a free collective clothes library where everything is sorted by type and by size and everything up
20:16here is clean.
20:18Paxas explains how this lending library for clothes discourages the Twin Oaks residents from seeing clothing as personal possessions.
20:28It's nurturing the resources by not focusing on private ownership and rather on services.
20:36It's the commons.
20:37Yes, right.
20:38As long as the commons are not forced on people, but the commons are something that people participate in in
20:43a way that works for them.
20:44Then you get people saying, oh, yeah, I don't feel oppressed by the commons.
20:50I don't feel like I'm forced to share.
20:53I feel like sharing is a benefit to me.
20:59When I fully grasp that the residents share even their clothes, it strikes me just how radical Twin Oaks is
21:07in turning normal assumptions about ownership on the head.
21:15We're a deviant culture, right?
21:18Like in the mainstream, there's all this crime.
21:21There isn't any crime where I live.
21:23We made the choice to give everybody equal access to all the stuff.
21:28So almost all the property crime just vanishes.
21:32We change the relationship that the people who are here have with material goods because we're able to use dramatically
21:39fewer cars.
21:40And because we're sharing clothes and bicycles and all of the rest of this stuff, we have a tiny carbon
21:47footprint.
21:48We also have a tiny per person annual taxable income.
21:54My taxable income for last year was $7,000.
21:58That's like two thirds the poverty line.
22:00But I've got a sauna and I've got a weight room and I've got a musical instrument library.
22:04I've got 450 acres of land.
22:06I've got organic food being cooked, being harvested and cooked on the site prepared for me every day.
22:13I don't cook very well.
22:14This is a really good circumstance, right?
22:18It doesn't feel like poverty.
22:23Twin Oaks appears to be an extraordinary alternative to consumerist, capitalist America.
22:29Hi, can I join you?
22:32But isn't it hard to share everything all the time?
22:36What do residents have to give up in this utopia?
22:42So I can see a lot of the upsides, but are there any downsides that you would be prepared to
22:48share with me?
22:48The fact that I could go decades without building long term savings for myself if I would ever lead is
23:00pretty nervous making.
23:02Like there's not, you know, the community has a really powerful safety net.
23:10But once you leave, you know, then you're out there in the mainstream again.
23:16Instead of dating someone and moving in, you already live with them.
23:22So relationships progress fairly quickly and whether they're romantic or not, you're just, you're just in there with people and
23:32you cannot avoid building relationships through conflict with lots of people.
23:39Very complicated relationships.
23:42We are definitely interested in a better place, but I care more about fairness, sustainability, designing new culture than I
23:54do about creating something that's perfect.
23:56And if you're focused on something that's perfect, then that's taking you away from these other things that are actually
24:03much more accessible.
24:08Twin Oaks has worked against the grain of mainstream American life for half a century now.
24:14I can see why it survives.
24:16There's lots to be said for the flexibility of work, the liberation of sharing, the plenty of beautiful land and
24:25food,
24:25and a strong internal organization around which the community mutates and flexes.
24:34But the turnover of a fifth of residents every year shows how hard it can be to give up privacy
24:42and individual choice for life in the group.
24:47It isn't easy to fit into Utopia, even for the founder's daughter.
24:53Josie Kincaid left the community as a young woman.
24:59Moon Oaks for me is partly, you know, being surrounded by love and a beautiful place and partly having to
25:11work it out with everybody.
25:13Like when you live in a marriage, you, you know, where does he put his shampoo and who drops her
25:19socks on the floor and, you know, that sort of thing.
25:23You work out with two people.
25:25Well, here you work that out with 50 or 60 or 100 people.
25:29And for me, I just wanted a little bit more autonomy.
25:39The utopian dream is that people can work it out.
25:43They can exist in harmony if together they build and continually tweak the right environment and the right rules by
25:52which to live.
25:54But this is a dream that is, of course, not limited to small communities.
25:59The idea of the perfect society has long been a political project directed from above.
26:09The 20th century, in many ways, can be viewed as a period of historic struggle between utopian ideologies, Nazi, Soviet
26:20and capitalist.
26:21All with a very different view of how people should live.
26:26This year, too, all the German youth will participate enthusiastically in gathering the crops, is the commentator's introduction.
26:35To serve in gathering the crops is to serve the people.
26:40To serve the people.
26:41To serve the people.
26:44In the early 20th century, utopia became a social experiment on a mass scale, often with unforeseen consequences.
27:05In 1930s America, the city population swelled.
27:10The government imposed a top-down solution for housing the poor.
27:19Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal declared a war on slums.
27:25Conceiving vast housing schemes in the inner cities.
27:33Places of hope and new opportunity.
27:37This was the birth of the projects.
27:43Unsightly buildings, dangerous and unsanitary, come crashing to the ground as the works program clears the way for a great
27:50housing project.
27:51Named for Chicago's beloved Jane Addams, this housing development will lead the way to better living conditions for families of
28:00low income.
28:16Keith McGee, founding director of the National Public Housing Museum in Chicago, takes me into a public housing block that
28:25still survives today.
28:32Taking their name from a local philanthropist, 32 Jane Addams homes like this were built in Chicago's west side in
28:41the late 1930s.
28:44So this would have been an apartment.
28:47Almost a thousand individual apartments in which many residents would have experienced running water and indoor bathrooms for the first
28:56time.
29:00Here was an environment designed to create conditions for social cohesion and harmony.
29:19Keith, this is such an evocative space.
29:24What do you think it would have been like living here back in the 30s, 40s, 50s?
29:29In the 30s, 40s, 50s, I think you would have imagined or experienced the diversity of people who are poor
29:38and working class people.
29:42In one apartment, you may have smelled kosher food, but across the hall you would smell fried chicken.
29:51And so it was the people from down south, immigrants who came to America, who were all finding a place
30:00to settle and ultimately call home.
30:03This is a melting pot.
30:07It sounds so full of promise.
30:10Alas.
30:11What happened to make this block a derelict shell?
30:17The planners had overlooked the tension between the group and the individual.
30:24Unlike the egalitarian communities of monks, shakers and twin oaks, these blocks began to have huge disparities of wealth.
30:35As money from drugs offered a few, an easy way to get ahead and crime soared, public housing became part
30:44of the problem rather than the solution.
30:50You could have in one apartment a working class family, a janitor, a nurse and four children and a pretty
30:59stable family.
31:01Next door to that, you could have had someone that was totally depending on social services.
31:07Perhaps across the hall, you could have had someone that was selling drugs.
31:12And they were probably faring best out of everyone in the community.
31:18But the impact of it all devastated public housing.
31:25By the 1970s, Chicago's housing projects were no-go areas, controlled by gangs like the Black Gangster Disciples.
31:35And ironically, Keith believes it might have been the very strength of community ties that aggravated the descent into dystopia.
31:49Because it was a community, people looked out for each other, not realizing that the level of devastation that drugs
31:58were having on the community, the selling of drugs.
32:01I mean, if you look here, over this wall would have been a dresser or wardrobe that covered this.
32:10But when the police would come looking for the drug dealer, they shifted it so that you could escape your
32:16apartment and go to the next apartment.
32:19Well, that would seem to be a great idea to look out for your community.
32:24But what was it absolutely doing to the community?
32:27It was tearing it apart.
32:31In the 1990s, the city authorities had had enough.
32:36They dispersed residents into nixed income neighborhoods and tore down the projects.
32:41This last derelict block will be converted into a national public housing museum.
32:51What an incredibly atmospheric place this is.
32:55To think that it was once such a good place.
32:59So many people.
33:01People coming in from all over the states to join a community.
33:06But it wasn't, by all means, just a good place.
33:10It was a place with its problems and with its challenges.
33:14Some of them insurmountable.
33:19The projects were utopian in their attempt to take people of very different backgrounds out of poverty.
33:26But a good place of public housing simply couldn't address all of the social issues of a complex and changing
33:36inner city.
33:39But at least the intention here was benevolent.
33:55What if the utopian ideology is not so well intentioned?
34:07If it's all turned on its head and the utopia is dreamt up by a megalomaniac individual with a rigid
34:16view on solving all social issues in the most brutal and final way possible.
34:35There's no doubt it's somebody's utopian vision, but it certainly isn't mine.
34:43It's vast.
34:45It's ambitious.
34:47But I can't help wonder, where's the human in all this?
34:52Where's the human scale?
34:54To walk down this avenue would make you feel tiny, almost irrelevant.
35:03Constantly flanked by these overbearing buildings.
35:09You get down into this ceremonial plaza with these vast superhuman figures towering over you.
35:19We gather with 180,000 people in the biggest building on earth to hear one voice.
35:30Utopian vision.
35:32But at what cost?
35:42Adolf Hitler dreamed of making Berlin the capital of the world.
36:03generalny.
36:04I think the
36:06Beat the name of BBC.
36:08I could think about it, it's the end of a day.
36:15Hitler obsessed over the models, based on his own sketches.
36:23Throughout the war, as Allied bombs flattened the real city,
36:28he'd make torchlight visits at night to pore over his utopian toy town.
36:37Meanwhile, tens of thousands of prisoners died in SS-run labour camps,
36:43quarrying the granite needed to build the Nazi fantasy capital.
36:58For years after the war, local residents were unsure
37:02what this block of concrete was doing amid a quiet Berlin suburb.
37:09But geologists knew it was a strange remnant of Hitler's utopia.
37:17These are the final material remains of a Nazi vision of a Germania
37:25that was going to last for a thousand years.
37:28Twelve thousand tons of concrete towering over you like a nightmarish tombstone.
37:36Built by forced French labour, it runs deeper underground than it does above.
37:44It was intended to test the ability of the soil of Berlin
37:51to bear the weight of the biggest triumphal arch ever conceived.
37:56A triumphal arch for a utopian vision that thankfully failed.
38:06The other great utopian experiment of the 20th century was Soviet communism.
38:15This ideology had its origins in Karl Marx's utopian vision
38:20of a workers' revolution and common ownership of the means of production.
38:28The Soviet utopia also attempted to reprogram society through design and architecture.
38:42This is Lithuania.
38:45What's fascinating, I think, about the Soviet-era buildings left here
38:49is what they reveal about the regime's preoccupations,
38:54about how the individual should live
38:56and what they should care about in a socialist utopia.
39:09From the 1970s, we get this.
39:14A futuristic, exuberant statement in concrete.
39:26The palace of concerts and sports is a landmark of communist modernism,
39:32shouting about the virtues of fitness and health
39:36as ways to perfect the Soviet citizen.
39:41It's a bit bonkers, but I like it.
39:48There's something incredibly organic about this Brezhnev-era building,
39:53this temple to sport.
39:56You've got these kind of gills down the side of it,
40:00made out of this textured concrete.
40:03It's like coral.
40:05The broken panes of glass are almost like shed fish scales.
40:11You've got organic marks left by the wood shuttering
40:15to build the concrete structure.
40:18It's like a creature rearing out of the sea.
40:23A massive celebration of the monumental achievements of Soviet athletes.
40:41Outside Vilnius, in a small town called Druskininkai,
40:46by the ruins of another Soviet utopian project.
40:52In this place of spas and sanatoria, workers could come for treatment,
40:58paid for by the state that wanted to keep them productive
41:01and probably happier for longer.
41:18The abandoned spa Namunas dates from the 1980s.
41:23It would once have accommodated thousands of guests.
41:26Across the Soviet Union, there were hundreds of these spa towns.
41:32This particular spa town in Lithuania used to get almost half a million visitors a year.
41:39There is something somewhat pathetic about this place today,
41:43but it's not a massive leap of imagination to picture it teeming with families
41:50enjoying their summer holidays.
41:53Those who'd come here having worked in arduous industries like mining
41:58might get a fortnight away to enjoy the Black Sea mud baths
42:03and the saunas and the whirlpools,
42:06the fruits of a Soviet utopian vision of working together,
42:11but also playing together.
42:17Housing the workers was another key drive of the Soviet project.
42:24This is the Lasdini estate on the outskirts of Vilnius.
42:34In creating this complex of three-bedroom departments,
42:38the local Lithuanian architects expressed a little freedom from central Russian control,
42:48innovating the site of blocks to fit around the local woodland.
42:53The estate went on to win the 1974 Lenin prize for architectural design
42:59for the whole of the Soviet Union.
43:05They called estates like this micro-districts,
43:09as they had all the facilities of a town in one place.
43:14They were also known as sleeping districts,
43:18as this was where workers came to sleep before getting up and going back to work.
43:26So the main idea was, in order to feel comfortable,
43:31besides apartment, you need a school, you need a kindergarten,
43:36you need a playground, you need a swimming pool, cinemas, shops and so on.
43:43So it sounds wonderful, but when people moved in,
43:48did they find that living here was quite as perfect as the architects might have imagined?
43:54People were quite astonished, you know, why it's so located so far away,
44:00just in the middle of nowhere, so it was a problem to get to the war.
44:05As well, when the time was passing, people were disappointed with the quality.
44:13You know, like, walls were not straight, the windows were very bad.
44:20The whole construction wasn't regular.
44:23There was even a joke that it was really a difference
44:28if the building was built in a summer or in the winter.
44:33Because in the winter it is cold, so architects, the builders,
44:38were working very fast, so the quality was much lower.
44:45OK.
44:46So sometimes in the West there's a bit of a reductive view of the Soviet Union.
44:51It was all bad, everything was awful.
44:53But actually, for the people who lived here,
44:55what do you think their view might be today?
44:59The life was simpler, we can say.
45:03You could imagine, person finishes school, school is free.
45:08Person goes to university, university is free.
45:12Person is getting the free healthcare.
45:15And when he gets married and he has work,
45:20so he's given an apartment for free.
45:22So, it's not like nowadays you spend all your life earning for the apartment.
45:30But you have already an apartment,
45:33and you can earn for something else.
45:44What is a utopia? Is it no place?
45:47Well, this is definitely some place.
45:50The architecture, OK, it's looking a bit tired.
45:55But it's southward facing balconies.
45:59It's a short walk into the woods.
46:01There's little community noticeports outside each block.
46:06You get the sense that this is a vibrant, alive community still.
46:13Today, some might say that to be utopian means to be naive.
46:18Utopia is an impossible, unknowable dream.
46:24We look back on previous utopian escapades like Soviet communism
46:28and conclude that they were just pie in the sky.
46:32Possibly well-meaning, but staggeringly open to manipulation.
46:40But is there a danger in taking such a view?
46:44Utopian visions rise and fall,
46:47but what makes them interesting, I think,
46:50and perhaps valuable,
46:52is their ability to inspire radical and innovative new design.
47:01On a pilgrimage to find utopia,
47:04sometimes you find staging posts in the most unexpected places.
47:11Attempts to build something better
47:14that might not have worked in themselves,
47:16but the drive behind them can still be celebrated.
47:33They might not look like much,
47:36clustered here in a disused army base in New Jersey,
47:39but these are the ruins of an idea from a utopian architect
47:44who designed some of the most revolutionary
47:46and efficient structures of the 20th century.
47:53I'm an explorer in structures.
47:58I'm interested in the fundamental principles
48:00by which nature holds her shapes together.
48:08Richard Buckminster Fuller was, to put it mildly, unconventional.
48:14He was kicked out of Harvard twice.
48:17He went bankrupt in his thirties,
48:20and reeling from personal tragedy,
48:23the death of his infant daughter from spinal meningitis,
48:27he devoted himself to an extraordinary experiment.
48:31How much could he contribute to changing the world
48:35and helping humanity in the life left it?
48:45Fuller was horrified by newsreel of the London Blitz in 1940,
48:50and he dreamt of a whole new way of housing the displaced.
48:55Passing a Midwest grain silo one day,
48:58he had a Eureka moment,
49:00and built what he called the Dymaxion Deployment Unit,
49:04or DDU,
49:06to rehouse a family of up to four people.
49:14Fuller coined the term Dymaxion,
49:18a combination of dynamic maximum and tension.
49:22To sum up what he wanted to achieve,
49:25maximum gain of advantage from minimal energy input.
49:41These DDUs are imaginary leaps into the future.
49:47How do you house people have been bombed out of their homes?
49:50You put them into these miniature grain silos.
49:56And the detail is amazing.
49:58It's the machine-age stuff.
50:00These portals.
50:02Amazing design.
50:04Baker-like windows.
50:05Like something from a spaceship or possibly a submarine.
50:10And then this layer of insulation all the way around the building
50:14and through the roof.
50:16Built-in shelving units.
50:18Even got a built-in electricity system.
50:22It's astonishing.
50:24And the gorgeous roof.
50:26It's like a flower opening.
50:29And there used to be a self-regulating air ventilation system.
50:35It's a beautiful and useful solution.
50:43To get the military on board, Fuller supposedly parked one of these outside the Pentagon in 1941.
50:51The military did buy a few hundred.
50:55There are said to be mysterious tin sheds in disused American bases all over the world.
51:04These tired but beautifully organic buildings have these lovely little details.
51:12Like almost human eyes with little eyelashes.
51:15But they're mass-produced goods.
51:18Hundreds of them manufactured quickly and cheaply.
51:23They could be erected in a day by two people.
51:26Flown in anywhere in the world.
51:29Minimum resources for maximum impact.
51:41For years nobody knew what these units here were.
51:45The scorched ones were used for munitions testing.
51:49A sad end for this project perhaps.
51:53But Fuller had many other influential ideas.
52:00Buckminster Fuller's utopian legacy has been profound.
52:05Shaping architectural thinking today.
52:08In particular with his concern for the preciousness of the planet's resources and space.
52:17Buckminster Fuller's revolutionary super city is a huge but graceful angular floating platform.
52:25Like most of Fuller's ideas, it has a mathematical feel about it.
52:29This is designed so that we can take a whole complex of the little mobile homes.
52:40And a giant crane would pick these up off the water and they could be slid in here.
52:46This is the Triton City project.
52:49This is the Triton City project.
52:49Yeah, this is the Triton City project.
52:51The architect, Shoji Sadal, was a long-term collaborator with a man he affectionately calls Bucky.
53:02It would require about 5000 inhabitants to really form a community.
53:08It was a project based on the fact that most of the large urban cities in the U.S. are
53:15near large bodies of water.
53:17And rather than trying to build on the land around these bodies of water, you create your own land by
53:26these floating platforms.
53:29This is a very young year. And Buckminster Fuller?
53:32Yes. This is Bucky and me in front of the Southern Illinois University Religious Center.
53:39The Southern Illinois University Religious Center is a classic example of Buckminster Fuller's most famous invention, the Geodesic Dome.
53:50This is the architectural structure that can enclose the most space with the least material, and it's conquered the world.
53:59Domes dot the globe, including the monumental U.S. pavilion at Montreal's Expo 67 and the Avery at Queen's Zoo
54:09in New York.
54:17Shoji explains the engineering principles.
54:22What you're doing is you're making equilateral triangles here.
54:26If you have five triangles around this vertex, if you have six, it'll be flat, and it won't form into
54:34a sphere.
54:35But by using just five around the point, you begin to make a spherical shape.
54:42Ah, so once you've done the first row, it kind of builds itself.
54:47Keeping these vertexes always in the same distance from the common center, we begin to get then spherical triangles.
54:54The triangles are, fully realized, strengthened, not weakened by adding more.
55:01They interlock and support each other.
55:04The triangle is a structurally stable shape, whereas a square can be distorted, you know.
55:13By triangulating, you build a very strong structure.
55:19There you are.
55:23Very nice.
55:24Wow.
55:25Yeah, you built a sphere.
55:26It's so strong.
55:29It is, yeah.
55:37Strong and efficient.
55:39Fuller's concept of the geodesic dome is now being considered as the basis for habitats on the Moon and Mars.
55:56Norman Foster's architectural practice has been deeply involved in these dreams of the future.
56:03He met Buckminster Fuller in the 1970s, was captivated, and eventually employed him.
56:10Even at the point just before his death, he was one of the youngest people that I've ever met.
56:17In spirit, in thinking, he drew attention to the fragility of the planet.
56:25He's arguably the first green architect, before green was ever invented as a kind of, you know, buzzword.
56:34I think I detected a little bit of influence over the geodesic dome elements of some of your buildings.
56:42Is that fair?
56:44The idea of using triangulation, of distributing forces, of creating light and lightness.
56:56touching the ground lightly, using materials more economically, to create something which is inherently more beautiful and inspired by nature.
57:09And actually, paradoxically, looks quite fragile, but is stronger.
57:16And doing more with less.
57:18You seem to share this interest in waste not want not, that you can make efficient use of materials.
57:27Yes, I mean, you have, you know, 1.6 billion without access to clean water, energy, power.
57:37How do you address these issues?
57:39If you take a city, you've probably got one department which is devoted to waste and possibly using landfill to
57:48get rid of the waste.
57:49You've probably got another division of the city about generating energy.
57:54Really, if you put those two things together, you can burn the waste to create energy.
58:00And it's kind of, it's Bucky style thinking.
58:06Foster and Partners has designed hundreds of futuristic buildings and structures across the world.
58:16From the Reichstag Cupola to the Milau Viaduct and the new Apple Campus, grand utopian dreams are very much alive
58:26here.
58:27I think to practice architecture, you're planning for the future.
58:33You're looking far ahead.
58:36So you're trying to work with an environment anticipating change.
58:42So in that sense, you have to be an optimist.
58:46So optimism, utopias, I mean, it's the, the words overlap.
58:55We find that way of thinking much more.