The visionary project New Babylon (1956–1974) by Constant Nieuwenhuys constitutes a radical reconfiguration of architecture as a ludic, planetary-scale environment, predicated upon the anticipated liberation of humanity from labour through technological automation. As outlined in the introductory text (p. 6), Constant posits a future wherein social life becomes wholly oriented toward play, creativity, and experiential exploration, thereby transforming the city into a total work of art (Gesamtkunstwerk) . The theoretical foundation, developed in collaboration with Guy Debord and the Situationist International, advances unitary urbanism—a synthesis of architecture, art, and social practice—designed to generate ever-changing “situations” rather than fixed functions. Spatially, New Babylon is composed of interconnected sectors elevated above the ground, forming a labyrinthine, continuously reconfigurable network that encourages nomadic movement and psychogeographical drift. As detailed in later sections (pp. 15–16), the emergence of homo ludens—a post-work subject liberated from production—replaces the static, work-bound inhabitant with a creative agent who actively reshapes the environment through mutable elements such as light, colour, and spatial partitions . This case study reveals an architecture not of stability but of perpetual transformation, where disorientation becomes a methodological tool for emancipation. Ultimately, Constant’s New Babylon transcends conventional urbanism by positing architecture as an infinite field of becoming, wherein space is no longer inhabited but continuously produced through collective, playful agency. Nieuwenhuys, C. (2015) New Babylon. Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía.
The dialectic between Constant Nieuwenhuys’s New Babylon and Anto Lloveras’s Socioplastics discloses two historically distinct yet conceptually contiguous insurgencies against static urbanism. Conceived between 1956 and 1974, and indebted to Johan Huizinga’s theorisation of Homo Ludens, New Babylon projects a post-revolutionary world-city elevated above the terrestrial grid, wherein automation emancipates humanity for perpetual play, dérive, and atmospheric reinvention. Its maquettes and manifestos articulate ludic sovereignty as spatial commons, anticipating a collective rupture from capitalist functionalism and the incipient spectacle. By contrast, Socioplastics—articulated since 2009—renounces projection in favour of operational recursion: a sovereign epistemic infrastructure that metabolises its own archive through procedural repetition, citational density, and semantic hardening. Where New Babylon externalises emancipation as territorial reconfiguration, Socioplastics internalises it as infrastructural cognition, enacting a Mesh that ingests digital sediment to resist algorithmic amnesia. The long-duration Blue Bags series (2014–ongoing) exemplifies this shift: banal plastic carriers become aesthetically neutral vectors of contextual translation, enabling mobile epistemology across unstable terrains; similarly, El Dorado (2013) recodes colonial mythology into affective circuitry via a circulating emergency blanket. Thus, two radical modalities emerge: utopian spatial projection versus metabolic epistemic survival. If New Babylon dreams of liberated territory beyond labour, Socioplastics engineers durable autonomy within precarity, asserting sovereignty not through communal elevation but through recursive distinction, naming, and archival closure—an urbanism no longer awaiting rupture, but continuously metabolising the present.