Civilia: Utopia in the Age of Photomechanical Reproduction. Architectural (Photo)copy as (Re)invention

Abstract

In June 1971, The Architectural Review featured the culmination of Townscape, a campaign that the issue’s author, as well as the magazine’s editor and owner, Hubert de Cronin Hastings, promoted for decades. Civilia, The End of Suburban Man was a monograph that described a fictional English New Town, illustrated through an extensive collection of views of its urban scene made from hundreds of photographs of buildings, many of which had appeared in the pages of the different publications of the Architectural Press in the preceding decades. Civilia did not manage to provoke the debate that Hastings desired, remaining a mere curiosity wrapped in a spectacular visual apparatus that has hardly been analyzed. However, the striking vedute of Civilia hide an elaborate exercise in the generation of architectural form. Its collages include an extensive catalog of architectural strategies and forms in which buildings are appropriated through their photographic images, to engender a series of distorted copies, new architectural personae which simultaneously alter our perception of the originals by either enveloping them in new narratives or revealing their hidden qualities.