Architect Andrés Jaque on Archigram, utopia and permanent connectivity

Andrés Jaque, the Spanish architect who founded the Office for Political Innovation and now leads Columbia University's architecture school, starts from an awkward observation: utopias tend to get duller once they come true. His example is Archigram, whose playful visions of mobile buildings, constant connection and cities freed from fixed institutions he counts among the last century's most energising ideas.

The trouble, he writes, is that something like those dreams has arrived. Work follows us everywhere, platforms promise choice while gathering power, and the language of flexibility sits alongside a housing crisis displacing millions. He is careful to say that blaming Archigram would be absurd, but finds the resemblance unsettling: a utopia, in his view, does not carry its politics intact into the future.

From there the essay turns to what architects might do now. Housing, climate, biodiversity and warfare, he argues, are not separate problems but tangles of computation, biology and economics that exceed what we can sense. Experimenting means stepping into those conflicts rather than sketching alternatives from a safe distance, and changing who gets to produce knowledge and steer decisions.

It is dense, theory-heavy reading, part of designboom's Posthuman Utopias series, and best suited to anyone who enjoys architecture as argument rather than as pictures.

Our summary of a story from designboom, published 4 November 2026. Read the original

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