The Shape of Utopia: The Architecture of Radical Reform in Nineteenth-Century America

Best known for Race and Modern Architecture, the groundbreaking 2020 book she coedited with Charles L. Davis II and Mabel O. Wilson, architectural historian Irene Cheng has an established track record of provocative, resourceful, and intelligent scholarship.1 With The Shape of Utopia, she has now added an excellent and well-illustrated volume to the University of Minnesota’s growing list of books serving the field of utopian studies. This book began as her PhD dissertation of the same title, with which she completed her graduate education at Columbia University in 2014. The intervening years permitted her to make some refinements, the most significant being fresh language dedicated to Native American stakes in the places and times she covers. While recent scholarship on utopian architecture is, perhaps, less well integrated into the volume, The Shape of Utopia is nonetheless an extremely smart, elegantly written, and ultimately indispensable addition to the study of radical intentional communities of the mid-1800s in the United States.Focusing on the architectural and urban diagrams produced by utopian visionaries operating in the middle decades of the 1800s, Cheng offers significant insights into the ways that American reformers imagined, designed, and—most powerfully—communicated their aspirations for new economic, spiritual, social, and political orders. At first glance, these orderly but plain clusters of lines can appear flat, insipid, and even childish, but The Shape of Utopia convincingly brings these “geometric utopias” to life, creatively contextualizing them in Victorian mass media, visual culture, and contemporary scientific and political discourses to reveal the diagrams’ graphic urgency, useful pliability, and polemical power. These architectural proposals served as political emblems and as spatialized shorthand for reconstituted human relationships. They were never, of course, realized in the ways their propagators hoped, but taken cumulatively, they testify to a visceral need in Victorian America to use the forms of architecture and the medium of printing to test the necessity and permanence of chaos and conflict in the nation’s existing communities. They also, seen from one angle, appear as ominous manifestations of preexisting imperial impulses toward the exercise of total control over land and human lives, and they occasionally foreshadow the subsequent pseudo-scientific, white-supremacist modernism(s) that Cheng analyzed with such clarity in Race and Modern Architecture. Pointing toward the very real urban (and suburban) reforms of the 1900s and their own diagrammatic forms and methods, Cheng’s study thoughtfully concludes by reminding readers that Utopia—like all great nations, whether real or mythological—exerts an influence far beyond its own borders and the purview of its would-be governors. This influence has the power to shape dreams and to stir action, but like most powers, it is not necessarily benign.The Shape of Utopia is divided into six chapters, flanked by an introduction and an epilogue. Cheng immediately establishes the gravity of nineteenth-century American utopian discourse and its architectural manifestations with a discussion of Thomas Jefferson’s fascination with rational geometries and gridded landscapes as expressions of the ideal agrarian order of farmhouse villas and transportation grids that he worked to impose across the vast Western territory of the United States. Cheng effectively demonstrates that Jefferson’s quest for a pseudo-scientific, proto-modern architecture was animated in part by his belief that white men such as himself were predestined to drive philosophical and material progress into the future—he even directly disparaged African Americans’ capacity for geometry (41). Cheng missed an opportunity to point out Jefferson’s hypocrisy in charging a literate black carpenter whom he enslaved, John Hemmings, with the production of the complex architectural details of his octagonal villa at Poplar Forest.2 Also missing from this portion of the book is any reference to Jefferson’s reading of well-known utopian visions such as Plato’s The Republic, Thomas More’s Utopia, or Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s L’An 2440, or his connections to John Lithgow’s less famous utopian manifesto for a gridded American landscape of manufactories and farms.3 Indeed, there are few appeals to the larger history of utopian literature or architecture in The Shape of Utopia—even intuitive circular urban precedents like Plato’s Atlantis, Tommaso Campanella’s City of the Sun, or Francesco di Giorgio Martini’s diagrammatic fortress towns are left out of the conversation. This leaves readers to fend for themselves regarding any kinships or differences between previous utopian urban visions and the geometric utopias of mid-nineteenth-century America, which tend to be much more pastoral or suburban in character. What Cheng does offer, however, is a broad horizontal contextualization of her subjects in Victorian life that is often remarkable in its resourcefulness and immediacy. At times readers may feel that they can almost hear the crunch of the printing presses, see the flickering of candles nearly exhausted, and smell the ink that is being rolled onto diagrams as these utopian radicals print their fevered dreams in homes and offices.Chapter 2 discusses a movement among a New York-based group of workingmen to provide “land for the landless” by passing democratic laws redistributing fertile agricultural territory among citizens in a perfectly equal grid. They published diagrams of their ideal subdivided region and orderly farmhouse village. Cheng reveals how these illustrations were printed with bits of lead or brass type rather than being drawn and engraved, with the results being an ensemble of thin, cheap line drawings that, a century later, might have been rendered by a patient if artless clerk on an Etch-a-Sketch. By comparing these, however, to the graphic character of political pamphlets, mass-produced maps, journals, newsletters, and, most convincingly, the vast and diverse array of sparse, matter-of-fact scientific (and pseudo-scientific) diagrams then proliferating in mass media, Cheng arrests any temptation to hastily dismiss the workingmen’s diagrams as amateurish scribbles. Their printed landscapes of line and type offered social and economic equality at-a-glance, so to speak—appearing logical, practical, and commonsense in their ease of conception and, theoretically, of implementation. Their simple, clear forms also struck a visceral contrast with the illegibility and chaos of the American city as it was then rapidly developing. Furthermore, while the diagrams made “concepts as inherently abstract as economic inequality and property into concrete images,” they also remained “vague enough to draw together communities of viewers whose precise individual viewpoints” on architectural details, such as aesthetics and materials, “might differ” (78–83). The Shape of Utopia is consistently strong in considering how these utopian visions impacted readers, analyzing both what reformers clearly asserted to the public and what they left to individual imaginations.In chapter 3, Cheng presents the definitive study of a unique American architecture phenomenon: the octagonal house. This weird building type was promoted primarily by Orson Fowler, a publisher, showman, and pseudo-scientist who carried the earlier ideas of Jefferson forward into the bizarre but extremely important realm of Victorian phrenology. The Shape of Utopia attributes the brief but intense nationwide trend to build octagonal dwellings to Fowler’s promises in regards to their utilitarian functionality, their suitability to ideal personality types—as indicated by a different sort of geometry, namely that of the human skull—and their alleged ability to enclose more space for less money. Most previous studies have, Cheng correctly points out, smiled and dismissed the octagonal house as a fad and a failure, but she argues that the building type is significant as “an episode in the unfolding phenomenon of geometric utopianism, an artifact of the period’s faith in architecture as a tool of reform” (100). Indeed, Cheng argues that the octagonal house sensation is worthy of study precisely because it was such a flash in the pan, and therefore can shed light on how and why large groups of people are sometimes willing to adopt radical, untested ideas overnight, empowering rapid change. Fowler deliberately pushed his concept of the octagonal house precisely in these terms: It was a revolutionary, modern break with staid old architecture traditions. Racial superiority would be indicated, and socioeconomic liberation would be achieved, Fowler declared, by investment in his new, phrenologically informed, anti-establishment architectural plan. Hundreds, if not thousands, of Americans believed and built. His nationwide utopia, it seemed, would be raised one octagonal house at a time—until it became clear, as Cheng elegantly recounts, that the octagon did not keep its heady domestic promises and could, in fact, be deeply unsatisfying.Octagonal and circular utopias could be diagrammed for a wide variety of political purposes, Cheng reveals, as chapters 4 and 5 trace the dreams of radical vegetarians and anarchists, respectively. Just as Thomas More specified that the cities of Utopia never permitted the slaughtering of animals within their limits due to the pernicious effect of butchery on the character of citizens—one of many literary references that, it must be said, would have been useful in The Shape of Utopia—Cheng explains how a band of anti-slavery vegetarians linked the killing and eating of animals with broader systems of personal and political violence (142–43).4 She then provides a meticulous, lively account of their successful efforts to publish and gather interest in tidy, plausible diagrams of an octagon-based vegetarian city of bliss and birdsong to be raised on the Western frontier and their utterly doomed efforts to build it. Along the way, Cheng insightfully compares their graphics to the broader visual culture of Western real-estate speculation, including maps and bird’s-eye views of new cities that were either nonexistent or exaggerated to the point of absurdity. She also reveals the vast gulf between the vegetarians’ utopian diagram and the realities on the ground in Kansas, which at this very moment was, in fact, soaked in blood—not only that of animals but also of people, including recently dispossessed Native Americans and active combatants in the local civil conflict over slavery that raged in the territory before the full eruption of the American Civil War.Josiah Warren, a refugee from Robert Owen’s failed socialist utopia, launched his attempt at an anarchist utopia after inventing a small, affordable printing machine that could be put in the hands of an average middle-class family, thus making public mass media more democratic than ever before. The hexagonal utopian diagrams that he printed and spread across the land resembled, Cheng explains, the reformed music notation systems and labor-based experimental currencies that he had printed in years prior, as part of a lifelong campaign to free individual working people from large publishing companies, newspapers, banks, and other ostensibly tyrannical institutions. In one of the most brilliant insights offered in The Shape of Utopia, Cheng shows how his choice of the hexagon as the basis for his ideal community, rather than the more typical octagon, guaranteed that his anarchist settlements could replicate and be fitted closely together without leaving any extra bits of land to be held and governed in common. Every citizen would live on a geographic island of suburban autonomy and all association would be strictly voluntary. This perfect crystallization of anarchist regional planning reveals the power of the cheaply printed line diagram to encapsulate, or at least denote, an entire political ideology.While octagons and hexagons captured the imaginations of workingmen, phrenologists, vegetarians, and anarchists, only the circle and the oval, it seems, could seduce the spiritualists. In chapter 6, Cheng does a phenomenal job of reconstructing and clarifying the opaque and obtuse world of Victorian spiritualism, explaining how they imagined a universe full of invisible fluids and energies that, if properly harnessed, could put the living in congress with the dead and lead to splendid, cosmically tuned technological and scientific achievements on earth, with enormous implications for transport and architecture. They diagrammed small and large houses, commercial buildings, and whole settlements. These all consisted of circular forms that were proposed as the most conducive to the smooth, organic processes of highly sensitive minds, the holding of hands and seances, and the projection of communication across interstellar fields of ether. In the fair and orderly processes of the sacred spiritualist economy, circular merchants’ exchanges would facilitate “frictionless commerce” (232). These curvilinear architectures would also, as Cheng points out, help shape the cosmic hierarchies of spiritualist society, as despotic but peace-loving magnetic authorities radiate order and unity from the center of all circles, while those on the periphery orbit in ecstatic subservience. Cheng explains how these utopians built more than a handful of buildings and assembled a few ridiculous machines in vain attempts to summon their new society into being. They had enough mathematical and scientific pretensions to compete with, and at times to overlap, phrenology, but the gentle curves and sensual lines of their diagrams attest to how they also had a “uniquely enthusiastic embrace of the atmospheric and aesthetic aspects of geometric architecture” (240). They believed—and their gathering of followers suggests that they were correct in believing—that emotion and faith held power to touch and motivate human beings in ways that were different from, if still entangled with, the firm lines and hard angles of calculated reason.It is at the confluence of a reasonable assessment of the problems of the present and a fervent faith in the possibilities of the future that all of these geometric utopians aspired to fix their diagrams. They believed, Cheng shows us, that the first step to the place called utopia was the turning of a printed page and the tracing of a black line that promised to draw new connections between untold numbers of people. Their visions failed without exception, but their methods proved much more durable. Cheng brings us to their diagrams because they were the architectures through which many Americans shaped and communicated their pleas for change, and they evolved to help transform the world we inhabit today. Ebenezer Howard’s famous and influential Garden City movement began, as Cheng reminds us in her Epilogue, as diagrams—social hieroglyphs that were intended to provide an instantaneously comprehensible view of the harmony and order promised by his vision for the abandonment of dense urban centers, with the visceral clarity and apparent logic of geometry. As the influential architect and urbanist Daniel Burnham declared at the dawn of the twentieth century: “Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably will not themselves be realized. Make big plans, aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever growing insistency.”5 Every scholar of utopian buildings, as well as of modern architecture and urbanism, should pace the grids, octagons, hexagons, and ovals of The Shape of Utopia. They encapsulate, as real buildings so often do, many beautiful dreams and many fearful lies.