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Something is Missing is a quote by Bertolt Brecht used by Ernest Bloch when talking with Theodor W. Adorno about the practicability of the concept of utopia in modern times. For sure technology makes us living in the best of all possible worlds, and the utopias of the XIXth century seem to be largely realized. That being said, in the “repetition of the continually same ‘today’” there is something missing.

Marco De Michelis refers to the quote in this lecture, which retraces the path of utopian architectural thought throughout the XXth century and analyzes the urgencies of reconstruction of western culture after the abominations of the world wars, that also were the endpoint of that same culture. Reviewing the ideas and the projects of artists and architects such as László Moholy-Nagy, Robert Smithson, Aldo Rossi, Marjetica Potrč, Rem Koolhaas, Rirkrit Tiravanija and Yona Friedman, and analyzing their strategies of production and manipulation of public spaces, De Michelis underlines that, in the contemporary context of fast-growth megalopolis, spontaneous architecture and post-socialist cities, the unique utopia cannot offer more than a certain sense of imperfection of the world. For the rest, the tactics of progress deal with the widespread coexistence of specific utopias and are produced by localized communities, which turn the global city into a web of urban villages and which face in a more focused way the issues concerning them.

Marco De Michelis (b. in Venice, 1945) is an italian architecture historian and professor. He is lecturer in IUAV of Venice, where he directed the faculty of arts and design. From 1999 to 2003 he was Gropius-Professor in Bauhaus-Universität of Weimar and he was a visiting professor in several international institutes, such as Beckett University of Leeds, Columbia University of New York and Hochschule der bildenden Künste of Hamburg. Among his interests, modern theory in architecture, Berlin’s and USSR’s urbanistics between the twenties and the thirties, the connections between architecture and visual arts. From 2009 to 2013 he was the scientific director of the Fondazione Ratti.