Constant's New-Babylon Review

First,from the manifesto: New Babylon: Outline of a Culture 1965, we want to highlight the three key points of the social model it deploys:

Automation: of all useful, repetitive activities frees, at the mass level, an energy that can henceforth be directed towards other activities
Collective ownership of the land: and the means of production, and rationalization of the production of consumer goods, facilitates the transformation of this energy into creative activity
With productive work disappearing, collective timekeeping has no more raison d'etre; the masses will, on the other hand, have a considerable amount of free time.

In 1980, when the project was abandoned Constant says that all the key question that made sense to New Babylon are not present in 1980: enormous energy is being withdrawn from the labor process and it finds no other outlet than in aggression prompted by dissatisfaction. The possibilities that allow a project such as New Babylon have disappeared, the prospect of social revolution are obscured by nuclear fear, the idea of collective creativity is no believeable nowadays.

Taking into account the reason that made Constant not to continue with his project, we try to re-assess its relevance in a contemporary architectural context.The Utopian collectivity describe by Constant in his two decade project is very evocative for a new scenario inside the office. The assessment of New Babylon stems from a contemporary approach that reject and re-propose:


- The goal for history, the believe that history has an unavoidable end does not correspond with the current post-modern approach, so this dialectic approach that Marxism took from Hegel is used by rejecting the so-call end of history.

-According to this we look for Utopia as a means and not as and end and that has to be explicit in the project.

- The universal attempt of a world covered by a mega-structure is rejected and instead a particular structure is required. This universal attempt is also reflected in the collectivity that we are going to deliberately avoid using just an individual, a social abstraction of a world inhabited by a unique person, our character in the office

- The ambiguous and non determined life inside New Babylon should be highly defined. The infinite world inside Constant's grid is very particular and belongs to the subjective world of the character inside her office, this is, her material world.

- The superstructure, this is, the ideology that govern the space is re-used but a detournement of the current capitalist stage could be implemented as a subversive attitude to criticise its monopoly.

- The New-Babylonian sector could be implement just in the specific economic sector in which my project is based, the financial capitalism in the City of London