There are certain exhibition topics that always seem to be a sure hit. Polka-dot-based artwork, for instance, or starry night skies. Much other artistic production, regardless of quality, isn’t as easy a sell for a general audience. In architecture, the closest curators tend get to a full house, aside from instantly recognizable big-ticket names, is when they turn toward utopia: Olalekan Jeyifous won the Silver Lion at the last Venice biennale not least for the refreshingly cheerful futurism of his Pan-African spaceport.

This year alone I’ve seen several shows celebrating similar retro-aesthetics of 60s and 70s pop art, inflatables, zines, fetishes, adult ball pits. The Kunsthalle Tübingen currently also mines the seemingly inexhaustible vein of past artistic forays into pop culture with a show entitled “Schöner Wohnen. Architectural Visions from 1900 to Today” (Living beautifully). It assembles some of the greatest hits of architectural drawing, collage, modeling, and interior design of the 20th century. The original works on paper are beautifully staged in Abbe Schmid’s airy galleries (themselves a product of a bygone utopian era, the late 60s). Blow-up photos of buildings and full-scale interior mockups anchor delicate watercolors and garishly fun cut-out magazine graphics. From Archigram to Frederik Kiesler to the psychedelic visions by Itzehoe-based Wenzel Hablik, there is a smorgasbord of iconic-canonic imagery.

For a show that sets out to examine the beauty of representational novelties in architecture and their power to elevate our imaginary of future living, it ends rather bleakly. As you walk up the gentle promenade architecturale toward the back room contemporary artists take over. They seem to insinuate that the ink for architecture’s outstanding utopian thinking dried up ca. 1990—a statement that is incomprehensible considering the rich utopian (and dystopian) production of the boom and bust years of the early 2000s alone. You’re left wondering whether computers have killed the visionary in this retelling of the story of utopia. Or, whether the visionary itself has become reactionary by equating beauty with the well-known gesture of a hand on paper and not a screen?

tf.