Utopia London with A Necessary Music

Event information

Utopia London-
Today, London's architectural icons are banks and office blocks that radiate their wealth. But there was once a group of idealistic architects who wanted to shape an egalitarian society through a concrete utopia. Now many of their buildings are being left to decay or are slated for demolition, but they remain extraordinary testaments to an attempt to an idealistic if controversial attempt to change the way people lived in our city.A Necessary Music is a science fiction film about modernist social housing. A musically conceived piece, referencing the video operas of Robert Ashley, the film explores the social imaginary of a utopian landscape through directed attention to the voices that inhabit it.

A Necessary Music-
Roosevelt Island is a small sliver of land situated between Manhattan and Queens, intersected by the Queensborough Bridge. Formally known as Welfare Island and originally home to New York's largest insane asylum, a small pox hospital, and a range of other 19th century municipal facilities for incarceration, it now houses one of the cities most visible, yet little-known modernist social housing projects. The subject of several architectural competitions during the 1960's that employed the island as a laboratory site, proposing a range of re-imagined futures, from a floating casino, to a Museum of Egyptian Artifacts, to a cemetery, to a Disney-like water and entertainment park, its current status is the result of the winning entry of Philip Johnson. Johnson's master plan proposed a mixed income, enclosed utopian community; a bucolic concrete enclave, divided into three residential developments.