Dystopian Sites

The image of the as yet unformed dystopia, geometrically divided into ‘zones’, eventually dispensing with place-names altogether is a familiar one. The transition from place to homogenous site is logical and irrevocable. Once the particularization of place gives way to the homogeneity of site, then the character of the previous place disbands permanently. This is why the fear is central to works of prophetic fiction. Often, the dynamic between site and place is experienced at more prosaic levels. Communities concern themselves with the future development of a mass produced architecture which threaten to undermine the particular quality of their previous place by rendering it universal. In turn, we fear that everywhere will look the same. The fear is warranted: despotism and dystopia are synonymous with one another and the annihilation of not only architectural place-names but human ones too is a necessary consequence.

Architecture lingers whilst we – the individual – live in its shadow. Example: as communism withers (and continues to vanish), so the buildings which once brought about its persistence endure without their spiritual and political content. Like all political exaggerations, a monument such as the Warsaw Palace of Culture is either derided for its historical connotations (as a gift from Stalin) or otherwise stripped of its past and so reduced to a kitsch artifice. Hangovers from a previous incarnation invariably lend themselves to justified debasement. Often the aestheticization of an ideology is enough to constitute this humiliation. If that ideology was already iconic in terms of aesthetic formalities (i.e. as propaganda), then outright aestheticism (in other words, kitsch) is possible as ideas and form separate absolutely. In principal, post-modernism was right to destabilize temporal references and so attempt this derision. That it undermined itself by covertly aspiring to a temporal emplacement in history does not matter. Post-modernist architecture is already being treated with nostalgia.


For those who resist the growth of site and who regard the loss of place as instrumental in the development of the homogenous landscape – and I am certainly not of this persuasion – there is some consolation in the ruins of communism. In the aftermath, it might be imagined that contemporary sites will also undergo a process of ruination. The levelling down of insidious political routines constitutes a growth that is able to instigate an annihilation of that memory. Thus: the palace losses its quality as the place of power and instead adopts the form of memorial site. When I last visited the Warsaw Place it was being used as a conference hall for academic publishing houses. Opposite, a sprawling shopping mall, on the other side a hypermarket dwarfed the independent grocers beneath. Meanwhile, department stores served up fried latke with sour cream whilst down below generic Western shops – GAP, H&M, etc – had colonised the universality of the previous ideal. It was a victory, not of capitalism, but of homogeneity becoming a new form of individualism.