Constant Nieuwenhuys’s New Babylon is presented as a transdisciplinary urban project in which architecture becomes the material condition for a new form of life. Developed between 1956 and 1974, it proposed a global network of elevated sectors, movable partitions, bridges, ladders, shifting atmospheres, and labyrinthine routes, intended for a society liberated from labour by automation and reconstituted around play, mobility, and collective invention . Its intellectual force lies in its refusal of the modern city as a machine for production: instead of fixed homes, property, orientation, and functional zoning, Constant imagined a nomadic habitat for homo ludens, where inhabitants would continually remake their surroundings. The project’s origins in his 1956 design for a Gypsy camp at Alba are crucial, since nomadism, improvisation, and life beyond territorial permanence became both symbolic anchors and spatial principles. A specific case study is the New Babylon sector itself: an open communal structure raised above existing cities, technically feasible yet deliberately indeterminate, allowing users to construct situations rather than occupy predetermined forms. Its models, maps, photomontages, slide shows, and labyrinth installations operate less as architectural blueprints than as mental provocations for social transformation. Ultimately, New Babylon’s significance resides in its unresolved tension between utopia and critique: it exposes the poverty of work-centred urbanism while asking whether freedom, once spatialised, might become playful, collective, and perpetually unfinished.
