Techno-Utopias, Architectures and Reality

Speaker: Paulo Eduardo Fonseca de Campos

Monday, May 24 10:00 am - 11:00 am

Under the sign of technological innovation oriented to mass housing construction, a productivist vision was imprinted to the reconstruction of Europe in the second post-war period. The already widespread criticism of this model, which links serial prefabrication with rigidity and uniformity, falls, above all, on the intrinsic issues of architecture (or lack thereof) and its relationship with the urban environment, the city. 

With the recent spread of digital fabrication technologies, new techno utopias have been associated with the theory and development of contemporary non-standardized production in Design and Architecture, with an emphasis on flexibility and variety. 

It remains to be seen how digital fabrication tools can help the social processes implicit in the resolution of real city problems, which are, to a large extent, linked to territory and local scale, generally in opposition to different types of innovation related to a wide range of utopian images, but also to ideologies that are not always very perceptible. 

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