Constant’s New Babylon envisions a global, mutable city for homo ludens, where automation enables play, creativity, and perpetual spatial transformation.

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. 

Cook’s Plug-in City envisions a flexible megastructure where modular units evolve through replacement, embodying adaptability and collective urban agency.

The speculative project Plug-in City: Maximum Pressure Area (1964) by Peter Cook, member of Archigram, articulates a radical departure from late modernist functionalism through the proposition of architecture as an evolutionary infrastructural system. Conceived as a vast, scaffold-like megastructure, the project replaces the notion of permanent buildings with a hierarchy of temporal components, wherein residential, commercial, and institutional modules—each calibrated to distinct lifespans—are inserted, replaced, and upgraded within a durable craneway framework. This strategy foregrounds planned obsolescence not as failure but as a generative principle, enabling the city to respond dynamically to technological innovation and shifting social demands. The theoretical development resonates with contemporaneous cybernetic discourse, insofar as the city operates as a feedback-driven organism, continuously recalibrated by its users’ needs and collective will. As a case study, Plug-in City synthesises infrastructural permanence with architectural ephemerality, prefiguring later discourses on high-tech architecture and metabolist urbanism. Its visual language—dense, mechanical, and infrastructural—materialises a city in perpetual assembly, where circulation, services, and habitation coalesce into a single operative system. Ultimately, Cook’s proposition advances a decisive conceptual inversion: architecture is no longer an object to be preserved but a process to be sustained, wherein adaptability, replacement, and user participation redefine the ethical and temporal horizons of the built environment.

Archizoom’s No-Stop City theorises an endless, uniform urban field where architecture dissolves into infrastructure, exposing capitalism’s spatial logic.

Archizoom Associati’s No-Stop City (1969–72) constitutes a seminal act of critical architecture, wherein the city is reconceptualised not as a composed artefact but as an infinite, isotropic field governed by the logics of production and consumption. Emerging from the Italian Radical Architecture movement, this project radicalises modernist tendencies toward standardisation by extrapolating them to their terminal condition: a continuous, climate-controlled interior where distinctions between centre and periphery, public and private, architecture and infrastructure are entirely effaced. The visual material on page 1 foregrounds this ambition through the depiction of a boundless gridded plane labelled “climatic universal system,” while subsequent pages reveal repetitive modular layouts and interior scenes populated by interchangeable objects, emphasising the seriality of space and life . Within this paradigm, architecture ceases to produce meaning through form; instead, it becomes a neutral support for consumer behaviours, mirroring the homogenising tendencies of late capitalism. The meticulous plans on pages 2 and 4 illustrate an urbanism devoid of hierarchy, where circulation, habitation, and production are subsumed into a single infrastructural matrix, while the staged interiors on page 2 ironically dramatise the absurdity of limitless flexibility and choice within a system of total uniformity . As a case study, No-Stop City does not propose a buildable utopia but rather a dystopian mirror, exposing how modern urbanism, when driven by market rationality, tends toward spatial indifference and existential monotony. Ultimately, Archizoom’s project operates as a theoretical extreme, revealing that the disappearance of architectural form is not liberation but the culmination of a system in which space itself becomes a commodity, endlessly reproducible and devoid of qualitative distinction.