CASA TOTALE/NEW UTOPIA

Many ask whether there is any sense in talking about utopia today or, more generally speaking, whether it is worth reflecting on the word “future”. Of course, present unrest and uncertainties make it hard to think of a future project. Nowadays, the awareness that we are undergoing years of profound transition and of a silent «cultural revolution» adds to traditional difficulties due to social complexity and fragmentation. In other words, we are re-locating from one century to another, from one ideological period to another post-ideological time, where ancient certainties find it hard to resist. «It is a time of unrest, as we leave the twentieth century and get our heads around the thought processes and ecology of the mind of the 21st century», said Antonio Nanni. The historic cycle linked to modernity and post-modernity has finally come to an end, to open up new paths towards virtual communication and technological innovations. However, this process is unnoticeable, as it belongs to a symbolic, cognitive and immaterial order and is, therefore, difficult to decode. In the era of the website, the meaning of our world is always produced by using instruments, platforms and infrastructures linked to the Internet. The network is modifying relationships between people considerably. In particular, the ways in which emotional relations begin between individuals are changing with the Internet. This phenomenon on the one hand causes a depersonalisation of the individual, and on the other, due to our daily use of the Internet causes a transformation of social relationships into virtual entities. Spiking in terms of space we are unwittingly witnessing a gradual, imperceptible annulment of the traditional distances between our living, work and spare time, which for Corbusier represented the functional and spatial categories given in the Athens Charter and which were part of the principles and rules to construct the future city. Similarly, the distances between public and private space are continually decreasing, and the place in which this can be seen is the living space. In my opinion, the house will become the protagonist of the new utopian scene and transform into a space for work, leisure and life, into both a public and private space and, therefore, into a “total space”, in which everything will be automated and perfect: our bodies, our objects and our furnishings.