International Student Competition

Why talk about UTOPIA at a time when architecture and the building industry face urgent, real challenges that demand immediate response? Why venture into the realm of visions when Helmut Schmidt famously remarked back in 1980 that anyone with visions should see a doctor?

Since Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities—a novel whose blank-slate protagonist echoes the placeless cities described in Rem Koolhaas’s Generic City —we’ve understood something essential: “If there is a sense of reality, then there must also be a sense of possibility.” And this sense of possibility lies, in many ways, at the heart of our profession as architects.

Against this backdrop, we must confront the unsettling observation that Rutger Bregman, in Utopia for Realists, summarizes in essence as follows: We no longer have a new dream (…) because we can’t imagine a world better than the one we live in now.

This is a dramatic realization—especially since we know that the very creation of our almost fairytale-like prosperity has contributed to the multiple global crises we face today.

This urgency—the need to act now—was already reflected in the submissions for the most recent edition of UTOPIA. Despite Bregman’s gloomy prognosis, the competition entries clearly expressed both the desire and the freedom to imagine a better reality and to act in that spirit—echoing the idea of a “pragmatopia” that Andreas Ruby introduced in 2003 in the Metapolis Dictionary for Advanced Architecture.

The result is an architecture that combines vision with feasibility and
approaches today’s challenges with a blend of humor and social awareness.

Perhaps this aligns with the idea of UTOPIA as Thomas More first described it in 1516: not a moment in time, not the future or the past, but a place. A place of possibility. And that is exactly what UTOPIA offers: a place for visions, dreams, and utopias.

This competition centers on the urgent need to live and create utopias now—without waiting for a better “later” or a better “elsewhere.”

Is there a utopia that does not project a distant future, but instead reflects the architectural conventions of the present—and, in doing so, sets the present in opposition to itself?

Can a utopia be imagined, built, and lived—here and now?
What is your vision of such a place? What is your “UTOPIA : NOW !”