Leisure in a time of Utopia

While writing Où vivrons-nous demain?, a book on l’architecture de l’avenir – in 1963, even before he had started the Groupe International d’Architecture Prospective (GIAP) – Ragon was wondering about the forms of the city of the future: forms marked by nightmarishly large numbers, by huge mutations, by the rise in urban concentrations, by the problem of traffic, by secondary residences. After the Second World War, with prosperity reaching large sections of the population and under the constant threat of the atomic bomb, utopian or dystopian visions of the future spread among numerous observers, including writers and artists as well as architects. The latter, Ragon remarked in his essay, were suggesting an infinite number of possible solutions in extraordinary drawings and proposals, ranging from the industrialization of homes to the creation of “sculpto-architecture”. Almost all of them laid claim to a new concept of leisure as well as, of course, everyday lifestyles. Such a theme was so characteristic of a Zeitgeist dominated by the radical critique of society and of advanced capitalism, that it had been widely touched upon by a number of leading practitioners from a variety of disciplines under the influence of the Frankfurt School. It was not an accident that the Société du Spectacle prophesied by Guy Debord was coming to light thanks to the growing “civilisation des loisirs”, to quote the title of a study by Georges Hourdin, a civilization which had made possible the evolution of the concept of work and of non-work, as well as a new perception of art, while also—in the analysis of other scholars—enabling the post-war crisis to be overcome. Leisure and holidays for all, now within everyone’s reach, were no longer an illusion, and the future would hold the possibility of turning into reality the dream of living in fantastic cities where work, thanks to technological innovation, would be seen as liberation. On a number of occasions, from public debates to exhibitions, this new idea of leisure was seen as a political issue as well as an aesthetic one. The myth of play and young people, considered a new socioeconomic subject, went hand in hand with the myth of creativity on a daily basis. Building on the leading sociological work of Henri Lefebvre, the “critique de la vie quotidienne”, the demand for a new reality joined the need for play and recreation to the practice of revolutionary fight. Alienation in society was dealt with by denouncing the conditions for the very existence of capitalism, first of all the illusion of plentiful consumption, the idea of turning life into spectacle, and the dominant, repressive urbanism. The newly envisaged life was instead to be based on the total liberation of human desires, in opposition to the conditioning of induced needs. In France and in Italy, the Situationists’ movement was among the most active in denouncing the culture of advanced industrial civilization, which led to functionalism in architecture and the consumerist mass manipulation of leisure. The essay analyzes the phenomenon of leisure time, in the period of the economic boom, comparing theories, architectures, and utopian projects.