Architecture and Anarchism: Building without Authority

Visionary architecture is a longstanding part of utopianism, a tangible expression of the utopian imagination. Anarchism is also an essential element in the pantheon of utopian thought and action, since by its nature utopianism, in imagining a better way to be and do, inherently criticizes and undermines the dominant social order. In his latest book Paul Dobraszczyk explores examples of what he calls building without authority, building in a new and often startling fashion, typically contravening established architectural conventions, even if not always skirting laws and zoning codes.The book consists of some sixty well-illustrated case studies, most of them exemplifying what could be called varying styles of architectural and social dissent. The scope is worldwide; the largest numbers of featured structures and concepts are situated in Europe, but several are in North America, and a few are in South America, Asia, and north Africa. Most involve actual buildings or gatherings of people committed to a common vision, but a few are visionary plans that were never enacted and a few more are ambitious plans partly enacted, but far from finished. Still others are creative projects that were once quite alive but have since vanished due to action by public authorities or abandonment on the part of those who created them.The best way to comprehend what is in this remarkable volume is to sample it. I will here provide short glimpses of a few of the featured projects, chosen to illustrate the diversity of what the book covers.Possibly the best-known anarchist intentional community in the world is Christiania, located right in the middle of urban Copenhagen, Denmark. It is essentially a large, sprawling squat that had its beginnings in the takeover of an abandoned military base in 1971. Some of the 900 or so residents of the illegal village have refurbished buildings already present, but many more have built a wide variety of domestic structures, some of them floating on Christiania’s lake.As Christiania was gathering momentum, another squat, or group of them, was in decline on the mudflats on the fringes of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, which were not under the city’s jurisdiction. By the 1930s, or perhaps earlier, people were living on boats and in self-built shacks. One group lived at Maplewood mudflats, finally being evicted in 1971. The pictures here, of badly decaying shacks built from salvaged materials, show the imagination of the spirit that these societal dropouts embodied.Grow Heathrow started as a protest camp in 2010, its residents resisting the construction of a new runway at London’s Heathrow Airport. Gradually the campers began to erect, mostly from salvaged materials, a variety of buildings—not only houses, but a guest house, a shower block, and even a communal library and meeting space—on a four-acre site amid the sprawl of one of the world’s busiest airports. Despite a partial eviction in 2019, Grow Heathrow was still there when Dobraszczyk finished his book two years later.Among the visionary schemes that were never enacted was New Babylon, envisioned by Dutch artist and author Constant Nieuwenhuys, who spent the better part of two decades in the 1950s through 1970s making drawings and models of pieces of what Dobraszczyk calls “a future city of liberated inhabitants” (186), an ever-evolving city that would be constructed by those who lived there. By its nature the project could never be completed, but finally Nieuwenhuys’s enormous corpus—drawings, models, paintings, and more—was acquired by the Haags Gemeentemuseum in The Hague, and there his dreaming continues to inspire new generations of visionaries.One work of anarchist architecture that no longer exists deserves mention here because of its formative influence of the countercultural 1960s era in the United States, Europe, and beyond. Drop City, located near Trinidad, Colorado (US), was a happening (or a dropping, as its founders called it) started in 1965 by artists of powerful vision and energy but virtually no money. Its builders used salvaged materials—short scraps of lumber—to put together frames of geodesic domes, and covered them with tops chopped from cars in nearby junkyards. The colorful result became a pilgrimage site for early hippies. It lasted for eight years before disagreements and disagreeable “members” brought it to an end, and for years afterwards the incredibly creative structures gradually returned to the earth.These thumbnail descriptions of a few of the creations described and depicted in carefully chosen words and gorgeous pictures in this remarkable book hardly do justice to all that is contained here. Featured projects include Auroville in south India, junk playgrounds in many places, the Calais Jungle in France, the Villaggio Matteotti in Italy, and dozens of other built and imagined constructions, as well as several monumental gatherings, including Burning Man in the United States, the Kumbh Mela in India, and the Tahrir Square protests in Egypt.Utopian visions can be embodied in writing, in film, in the theater, and in an array of other venues and media and formats, but Dobraszczyk reminds us forcefully that we overlook the architectural side of the genre at our peril. His book has broadened my own thinking about utopianism, and I hope it finds a wide readership.

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