It may sound surprising to people not engaged in architecture, but there exists a whole plethora of experimental projects so detached from the laws of physics that it’s fundamentally impossible to realize them in real life. Is it a mistake, a lack of technical knowledge, or were those designs simply ambitious to the point of absurdity? As a rule, their creators never intended for those designs to be built. They were envisioned as pure thought experiments from the start.

Architectural utopias often explore some futuristic vision or represent real-world architectural challenges in a concentrated form. Such forward-looking insights inspire unexpected solutions to the current conflicts in ecology or the politics and economy of space.

Last but not least, avant-garde utopian projects provide a valuable information source to architecture scholars. It is because the history of architecture is not just a timeline of buildings but a history of ideas about the production of space.

The contemporary tradition of surreal utopian architecture can be traced back to the 18th-century work of French architects Claude-Nicolas Ledoux and Étienne-Louis Boullée or the famous Italian artist Giambattista Piranesi. Those visionaries created grand designs of colossal neoclassical superstructures that were supposed to house the population of emerging nation-states.

Visualization: 18th-century utopias: Ledoux, Piranesi, Boullée.

The golden age of architectural utopias fell in the beginning and the middle of the 20th century. The range of avant-garde visions stretches from the early 20th-century Soviet Constructivism or Italian Futurism to the mid-century urban planning escapades of Le Corbusier and Oscar Niemeyer to the technocratic hellscapes of the 1960s Archigram and Supersudio.

Visualization: 20th-century utopias by Alexander Vesnin (1924), Le Corbusier (1930), Superstudio (1969).

With the advent of digital technology, architects started designing utopias that were intentionally and unequivocally virtual. They were celebrating the new reality which – as the 1990s futurists and sci-fi writers made us believe – could once fully replace the material world. The most well-known examples of enthusiastically virtual data-driven environments were the “Fluxspace 1.0” (2000) and the “Virtual Trading Floor” (1997) by digital design pioneers Asymptote Architecture or “Metacity/Datatown” (1999) by MVRDV.

Visualization: a virtual utopia of the 1990s: “Virtual Trading Floor” (1997) by Asymptote Architecture and “Metacity/Datatown” (1999) by MVRDV.

In the 1990s, avant-garde digital projects were often represented as intentionally primitive 3D models without shades, mass, depth, or an illusion of matter. Virtual architectural utopias drove the aesthetic of the early digital era to its maximum. They often felt even less feasible than sets of the earliest 1980s cyberpunk movies like Tron (1982).

Airy and immaterial virtual space was supposed to contrast the physical barriers of reality. But those early experiments never truly challenged one of the most visible constraints of space as we know it – the three-dimensionality – even though the necessary technology for such experiments had already been available.

One specific trait of architectural utopias drives them uncannily close to archviz. As utopian projects remain unbuilt, their visualization is an integral and often crucial part of the design. In the most basic sense, a utopian design cannot exist outside its medium: if a rendering is gone, so is the subject of this rendering.

However, the integration of avant-garde architectural vision and archviz goes much deeper. In utopian architecture, the project and its representation form an inseparable whole from a design, artistic, and conceptual standpoint. The experimental visualization style reflects the exploration of shapes, layouts, and modes of habitation within a project.

Visualization: “No-Stop City” (1969–1972) by Archizoom Associati. The idea of an endless and uniform urban sprawl is presented through a pattern-like ever-extending grid of separate living modules.

Archviz facilitates the preservation and popularization of an avant-garde design that exists only in paper drawings. As technical drawings and hand-drawn renderings are hard to read for the general public, a 3D animation can make utopian design easier to discern and more relatable. A good example is a short 2017 animation of Archigram's “The Walking City” (1964) made by a group of architecture students from the University of Kent.

Visualization: “The Walking City” (1964) by Archigram and a screenshot of its animated version (2017).

By the mid-2010s, there were two established digital utopian architecture representation styles: glossy photorealism and post-digital (neo-analog) graphics.

Both techniques have their benefits and limitations. Photorealism might be easier to understand, but it is also too precise and down-to-earth to represent an abstract superhuman vision that breaks the boundaries of the physical environment. Post-digital and neo-analog graphics, on the other hand, may become too abstract to be meaningful to anyone but architects, so their public outreach gets reduced.

Visualization: a hyperreal architecture fantasy – 'Solum' by iddqd studio.

The hyperreal approach may solve the issues of both photorealism and post-digital graphics. It is not necessarily three-dimensional, as hyperreal images often combine different projections in one collage. Nor is it too precise, as hyperreal renderings exercise a visual hierarchy of elements. The expressive use of shades and colors helps to transmit the mood the utopian space must evoke. It makes hyperrealism a prospective approach to the visualization of architectural utopias.

Hyperreal visualization also contains an extra layer of data about the design concept. Thanks to its artistic qualities, it captures the tiniest changes in the dreams, moods, and aesthetic aspirations of the period of its creation, preserving the spirit of the place and time.

Header illustration: a screenshot of a 2017 animation of “The Walking City” by Archigram (1964).