Among the targets of May '68 that fell within the crosshairs of student sloganeers, postwar avant-garde architecture seemed something of an unlikely victim. The aftermath of the Second World War had produced an architectural culture with a renewed social consciousness and a formal vocabulary inherited from early 20th Century Modernism. From Team X onward, architects approached the city with the intent to liberate the individual and craft spaces that encouraged new forms of social interaction. In practice, architects such as the Smithsons pioneered a brutalist approach to high-density housing with an unrelenting appearance every bit as jarring as the gritty street context from which it was derived. This type of urban realism, with its aims towards the megastructure ushered in a generation of utopian architectural proposals/fantasies that occupied the polar extremes of scale, from plug-in modules to linear cities that traversed the globe. Of course--as any lifestyle-enhancement product advertisement reluctantly acknowledges--actual results may vary, and, when there were results, they did. Utopia emerged as playful pop objects and monumental frameworks intended to engender infinite choice. Mobility and ephemerality, particularly in the work of Archigram, challenged the perceived stasis of the high Modernist aesthetic without abandoning the latter's claim toward a capacity for social transformation.

"Are we fighting for inflatables?" Such protest slogans summed up the attitude of student activists towards the endless "boudoir" experimentation of the self-anointed design visionaries. They signaled the end of the honeymoon phase of postwar utopian architecture--its positive, albeit rarified, ethic of critical social transformation replaced by a nihilistic critical impulse that either abandoned meaningful play or reduced play to a cynical game conducted with hollow images. Utopia instantly became suspicious of itself and architecture turned inward, shunning the contaminants of the social for the internal monologues of formal parlor games. Those post-modern architects who chose not to sever their ties to the outside world risked such engagement only through the mediation of a relentless irony that too often lapsed into mere parody or nostalgia.

In many respects, it is the Italian architects of Superstudio whose work marks this shift in the critical ethic of the era. Projects such as The Continuous Monument of 1969 and The Twelve Ideal Cities project of 1971 package fantastic images of the utopian city along with the paradoxically-horrifying mechanisms which underpin and sustain them in order to demonstrate--in a manner that parallels that of Plato's Republic--that the very pursuit of the High Modernist ideal is fraught with the conditions that ultimately undermine the possibility of its attainment. Perhaps the most striking example of such nihilistic critique can be seen in the 2000-ton city from Superstudio's 1971 project. In Superstudio's vision, citizens inhabit individual cubic cells from birth within a totalizing megastructure whose monumental lines cut across a desolate landscape. The organizational infrastructure of the city provides for the entire range of desires and physical needs of its supposedly perfect inhabitants, yet each cell is also equipped with a mechanism capable of crushing its inhabitant if the person chooses to rebel against the organizational apparatus. So, even though desire is wholly permitted, it is nevertheless contained within the legal and physical structure of the utopian city. Haunted by the spectre of coitus interruptus, the promise of infinite play and liberated choice is dampened by its embeddedness within a larger bureaucratic system of containment. Such themes also ran throughout the work of Constant. "Embeddedness" became something of a cause for critical paralysis in the architectural world. Critics such as Manfredo Tafuri were quick to lament the avant-garde's inability to avoid complicity with the forces of global capital. With the notion of choice now deemed to be in the service of commodification rather than liberation, architects and critics chose to celebrate meaninglessness, propose new meanings, delve into intense interior narratives a la Hejduk or, as in the case of Tafuri, switch to historical criticism in the hopes of finding an operative model with which to address the contemporary condition, only to find--as Berlin-era Bowie would perhaps put it--that architects are always crashing in the same car.

If Superstudio killed Modernism by playing out its endgame, surprisingly few seemed to take notice. The charge or promise offered by this act was rarely taken up by those who followed. Superstudio granted architects a new lease on life, but nobody (save perhaps the enigmatic/opportunistic Mr. Koolhaas) seemed to appreciate the sacrifice, preferring instead to dance with a rotting corpse. Ultimately, architecture's social and political role was to be damaged by those who sought to decouple form from content (Eisenman) as well as those who sought to conflate form with content (Venturi), diluting the meaning of both. Today, young architects approach the lingering images of utopia with an almost fearful fascination as they seek to wed their own masturbatory formal exercises to something resembling social consciousness. What is perhaps most difficult today is the question of the image and its power as an ethic. Clearly, the appropriation of utopian imagery, no matter how extreme, risks becoming an empty exercise in nostalgia, regardless of whether such tactics produce an aggregation of space-age modular pods or a pastoral New Urbanist village. Contemporary critics such as Robert Somol have seemingly reduced architectural practice to a choice between incommensurable stylistic language games, the outcome of which being the happily-ever-after heterogeneity of critical "problematizers" and go-with-the-flow "solvatizers." A more popular corollary could be the choice between the stuffy, old money, ornamental elitism of Architectural Digest and the soft, sleek, urbane, Whole Foods elitism of Dwell. Perusing the glossy, ad-soaked pages, one would suspect that utopia never seemed so accessible. And a profitable heterogeneity it is, judging by the outdoor lifestyle shopping centers springing up across the exurban American landscape--the terra-cotta storefronts of Pottery Barns standing in peaceful coexistence with the chiseled one-off Richard Meier-esque transparent furnishing fortresses of Crate and Barrel.

It is, of course, all too easy to point to the supposed impotence of critical discourse within the capitalist system. One should say, however, that the very notion of resistance, as loaded as that term may be, is every bit as utopian as that of transcendence. If anything, Superstudio's work implores us to abandon such terms without necessarily abandoning the positive political ethic from which they were generated. The right direction is not, as one might suspect, to abandon the reality of images in favor of something more abstract, but rather to take, as Sylvia Lavin has suggested, the "image as realpolitik" and develop more sophisticated ways in which to address the socio-political sphere through the use of forms and images.

Architecture's political capacity rests not in its ability to be political, but rather in its ability to produce forms, spaces, and images that generate political engagement. Few doubt the positive revitalizing economic benefits of iconic architecture after the success of Frank Gehry's Bilbao Guggenheim, but what remains to be seen is whether architects can translate this "Bilbao effect" into the political realm. As an aside, Barack Obama's candidacy seems to represent the fundamental problematic of the image--the man being at once a hip brand for the Starbucks crowd as well as an iconic symbol whose capacity to generate genuine grassroots activism may actually outperform his own substantive capability to create policy. At this point, one can only speculate as to whether positive symbolism, iconic imagery, and utopian fantasy can engender more than brand loyalty, but the political possibility would seem to be too compelling for architects to ignore, and thus with new eyes, we must return once more to that elusive image of utopia and move forward, if only because we have no choice.

Justin Fowler is the Architecture editor of The Utopian and a Master of Architecture candidate at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.