Build It And They Will Come Utopia: In Search of the Dream

Utopia. That good place.

A hope, a dream,

always tantalisingly just out of reach.

Utopia has been imagined a thousand different ways.

Yet when people try to build a utopia,

they struggle and very often fail.

I want to explore why.

We'll encounter experimental communities

searching for greater meaning in life,

utopian ideologies and plans for the masses

that didn't leave space for the individual.

And utopian architects with a faith

that humanity's lot can be improved through better design.

To practise architecture, you're planning for the future,

you're looking far ahead.

This is about how utopias either adapt or else they crumble.

It's about the clash of grand utopian visions and very human flaws,

our craving for community versus our desire to break free.

It's about what happens when you dare to turn utopian dreams into reality.

The term utopia, meaning no place or good place,

was coined by the Tudor statesman and philosopher Thomas More.

In 1516, More dreamt up a fictional society where there was no private

property, an early welfare state, and communal meals.

More's utopia is ambiguous and satirical,

but also decidedly monkish.

MONKS SING

More suggests that an ordered way of life is an important part of utopian living.

Here at Belmont Abbey near Hereford, this search for harmony is captured,

it seems to me, in the repetitions of the monks' plainsong.

MONKS SING

For us, a monastery is a good place in which to live,

and in which to really attempt

the ideal of monastic life.

And we aim for that.

And then very often there's the reality,

which is not quite on the same level, as it were.

We struggle.

HE SINGS

18 Benedictine monks live here with a code that lays down all the

fundamentals of how they live their daily life.

The big decisions are made for them,

freeing up their minds to think and to explore deeper questions

about existence and meaning.

We spend a great deal of our time reading

and meditating the Scriptures, praying,

and trying to live according to the teaching and the example of Jesus Christ.

And, of course, Thomas More

would've done the same in his own way, in family life.

For him, the family was like a small monastery - living in community,

sharing everything, loving one another.

A communal way of life, sharing space and food and wealth.

By extolling monkish equality as the key value

of a radical new society,

More was being incredibly political,

in an age of kings and queens.

In the years that followed,

other religious thinkers came up with new ways of living and put them

into practice in the real world.

Persecuted in Europe,

many radical Protestant sects found a more welcoming home for

their communities in the wide expanse of the New World.

From the Mayflower pilgrims to the Quakers,

America became a testing ground for their utopias.

I've come to Canterbury, New Hampshire.

Believe it or not, this was once a home to America's most radical utopians,

an extraordinary experiment that ultimately failed.

Hard-working and hard-worshipping,

the Shakers got their name as Shaking Quakers

because of their ecstatic movement and dancing during worship.

Canterbury, like other Shaker villages on America's east coast,

is now a living museum,

a place for a fun family outing.

Yet the Shakers' way of life could hardly be more alien

to modern American values of aggressive individualism.

The Shakers were pacifist and communalist,

and - way ahead of their time -

believed in equality between the sexes.

They were founded in the 18th century by Ann Lee,

who had a vision that Christ would reappear in female form.

At their peak in the mid-19th century,

some 18 Shaker communities like Canterbury

were home to over 5,000 converts,

sharing open space, good food,

accommodation and education.

I think that two of the words that guided them

were union and order.

And by union they meant the idea that,

as we would put it today,

everyone's on the same page.

And then the idea of order.

You can see that the buildings are lined up in orderly rows.

They had a set of rules -

the time that they rose in the morning,

the time for their meals,

the time that they had lights out at night.

They had rules for almost everything, as a way of producing

a calm and orderly life.

In an attic of one of the old Shaker dormitories,

a well-used rocking chair reveals much about the Shaker mind-set.

You know, to modern eyes this looks beautiful -

simple, but beautiful.

It's got something Bauhaus about it.

But to Shakers that would've been a nonsense.

They'd say, "We're not interested in beautiful,

"We're interested in useful.

"That's all we're really interested in."

If you make something absolutely useful,

it's just a coincidence if it happens to be beautiful.

It's like an aesthetic that doesn't care about aesthetics.

It's wonderful - simple, airy, lightweight, super-practical,

easy to stow away

and, just coincidentally, delicious to look at.

Nice chair.

It's a huge irony, of course, that the clean-lined, minimalist

Shaker aesthetic has influenced commercial kitchen design

and flat-pack furniture the world over.

Because while their furniture conquered millions of homes,

the Shakers are no longer here.

The reason lies back in the founder Ann Lee's story.

Her four children died in infancy.

Convinced their deaths were divine punishment for sins of the flesh,

a personal tragedy doomed this utopia.

She bound the Shakers to one very fateful rule -

celibacy.

They were saying, "If you follow us,

"we are offering you a path to a life free of sin,

"a heaven on earth."

And their prescription for doing this

was to give up the traditional bonds of matrimony

to live as brothers and sisters.

The rigid rule of the group clashed with natural sexual urges

and individual choice.

Perhaps even more significantly,

the vow of celibacy meant that the Shakers were unable to bring up

their own children in their faith.

Like monks, but without the weight of Catholic tradition behind them,

the Shakers relied on new recruits,

taking in orphans and teaching them their way of life.

After the mid-19th century, cities began to grow.

They were very attractive, especially to young people.

So, with opportunities to live a more modern life,

and, of course, for young people, the opportunity to marry,

to have a family of their own, became more and more attractive.

The Shakers clearly had an amazing vision for their time.

This focus on gender equality, well over 200 years ago,

it's extraordinary. But, on the other hand,

there's a kind of flaw in the weave.

This obsession with celibacy means that they can never reproduce,

that the community is surely, inevitably, just going to collapse.

The tension between the utopian ideal and hard reality,

the collective vision and individual freedom,

has been played out in communities all across the world.

In rural Virginia, an eco-commune has become one of America's

longest-enduring experimental communities.

Over 50 years, Twin Oaks has learned to adapt to balance

the needs of the group versus the individual.

Like monks and Shakers before them,

the 106 people who live here share everything -

food, housing, and in Twin Oaks' case,

childcare and sometimes sexual partners.

Unlike the old religious utopias,

the founding principles at Twin Oaks were secular and highly rational.

The psychologist BF Skinner is remembered today for

his controversial experiments on pigeons.

His life's work was an attempt to establish that free will is

an illusion and that behaviour can be modified by systems

of reward and punishment.

In 1948, in his novel Walden Two,

Skinner dreamed up a utopian community where people

are nudged towards living in harmony,

being productive and happy through behavioural engineering.

-"What is love..."

-Skinner writes.

"..except another name for the use of positive reinforcement?"

In 1960s America, amid anti-war protests,

the beat poets and the emerging counterculture,

people were dropping out to seek alternative answers to life's big questions.

Psychology books setting out new ideas of the self boomed,

and Skinner's behaviourist fantasy started to be read all over again.

My mom and I were living in Los Angeles,

and she read Walden Two and she just sort of looked up and said,

"Does this exist? This is what I want."

In 1967 Josie's mother, Kat Kinkade,

helped to found the Twin Oaks community.

She was a low-level secretary with no college, a single mom.

She had no prospects for a good career,

so she wrote to BF Skinner and said, "So where is it? I'm ready."

And of course he wrote back and said, "Well, sorry, there's no such thing."

Then she saw an ad in a magazine that said,

"Forming Walden Two community."

And the next thing I knew,

within two or three months we had packed up all our earthly goods

and come out on a train.

Well, people aren't equal, we don't pretend that they are.

The idea of equality, we define it as,

no member envying or having cause to envy another member.

Twin Oaks is one big experiment.

Basically, Twin Oaks is setting out to do two things.

One of them is to create a society fit for humans to live in.

The other one is to create humans fit to live in that society.

What was it like in the early days?

It must have been incredibly hard work.

You know, I mean, Twin Oaks ran out of money in its first two months,

and people had to travel 50 miles to go get jobs in order to bring enough

money in. A whole bunch of people were leaving because there had been

interpersonal difficulties, and how is the group going to survive?

And I know my mother would just worry and worry.

So, it wasn't love and sunshine every day,

but there was so much purpose that it was absolutely engaging and inspiring.

Work isn't just an aversive thing,

work is something that people really enjoy.

There was Walden Two, and it laid out the template.

And so, Twin Oaks, to this day, as far as I know,

has the planner manager system.

So the planners were the official decision-makers.

They would ask for input from the group,

there would be several meetings about it,

then they would put out that decision onto the bulletin board

and then comments would be written about that.

And then, if there weren't too many objections,

then it would become the decision, the made decision.

It sounds dangerously like democracy actually could work.

JOSIE LAUGHS

Well, certainly in small groups.

One of those main decisions early on was to abandon behaviourism,

which had soon become a dirty word amongst Twin Oaks' more hippyish residents.

Yet, look more closely behind the laid-back exterior here today,

and you find many leftovers from Skinner's systematic,

scientific approach.

So this is the...

Paxus has lived at Twin Oaks for 19 years.

This space, which is where the community had its community meetings

for the first 15 or 20 years, in this pit,

but then we got too big.

He explains the role planning and work have played

in helping this utopia to both tick over and adapt to change.

One of the things I wanted to show you...

This is...

This is the people finder.

Every person who is in the community has a labour sheet

for the work that they're doing.

These labour sheets are part of the clockwork nature of the community.

We have a bunch of policy.

We have a bunch of systems that are in place.

One of the advantages of being in a clockwork community is lunch

is available at noon, dinner is available at six,

and it takes 88 shifts to run a tofu production week.

That gives us reliability, and a kind of internal structure

that makes doing some of the more complicated things

that we do here possible.

If Twin Oaks holds something sacred, it's its labour system.

This is a community with a work ethic.

Each resident is required to contribute 42 hours a week,

choosing tasks ranging from farming to cooking...

cleaning and work in the commune's thriving tofu-making

and hammock-weaving businesses.

Running alongside this communal graft,

the residents use their power as a group

to save money and pool resources.

So this is one of my favourite institutions

inside of the community.

This is commie clothes, or community clothes.

It's simple and surprising.

-This is awesome.

-Yeah.

So this is a free collective clothes library,

where everything is sorted by type and by size.

And everything up here is clean.

Paxus explains how this lending library for clothes

discourages the Twin Oaks residents from seeing

clothing as personal possessions.

It's nurturing the resources by not focusing on private ownership

and rather on services.

-It's a commons.

-Yes, right.

As long as the commons are not forced on people,

but the commons are something that people participate in in a way that works for them,

then you get people saying,

"Oh, yeah, I don't feel oppressed by the commons,

"I don't feel like I'm forced to share.

"I feel like sharing is a benefit to me."

When I fully grasp that the residents share even their clothes,

it strikes me just how radical Twin Oaks is

in turning normal assumptions about ownership on their head.

We're a deviant culture, right?

Like, in the mainstream, there's all this crime.

There isn't any crime where I live.

We made the choice to give everybody equal access to all of the stuff,

so almost all the property crime just vanishes.

We change the relationship that the people who are here have

with material goods.

Because we're able to use dramatically fewer cars and because

we're sharing clothes and bicycles and all of the rest of this stuff,

we have a tiny carbon footprint.

We also have a tiny per-person annual taxable income.

My taxable income for last year was 7,000.

That's like two-thirds of the poverty line.

But I've got a sauna, and I've got a weight room, and I've got a musical instrument library,

I've got 450 acres of land, I've got organic food being cooked,

being harvested and cooked on the site, prepared for me every day.

I don't cook very well.

This is a really good circumstance, right?

It doesn't feel like poverty.

Twin Oaks appears to be an extraordinary alternative to consumerist,

capitalist America.

Hi, can I join you?

VOICOVER: But isn't it hard to share everything all the time?

What do residents have to give up in this utopia?

So, I can see a lot of the upsides,

but are there any downsides that you would be prepared to share with me?

The fact that I could go decades without, you know,

building long-term savings for myself, if I were to ever leave,

is pretty nervous-making.

Like, there's not...

The community has a really powerful safety net.

But once you leave, you know,

then you're out there in the mainstream again.

Instead of dating someone and moving in,

you already live with them.

So relationships progress fairly quickly,

and whether they're romantic or not.

You're just in there with people

and you cannot avoid building relationships through conflict

with lots of people, very complicated relationships.

We are definitely interested in a better place,

but I care more about fairness and sustainability,

designing new culture

than I do about creating something that's perfect.

And if you're focused on something that's perfect,

then that's taking you away from

these other things that are actually much more accessible.

Twin Oaks has worked against the grain of mainstream American life

for half a century now.

I can see why it survives.

There's lots to be said for the flexibility of work,

the liberation of sharing,

the plenty of beautiful land and food,

and a strong internal organisation

around which the community mutates and flexes.

But the turnover of a fifth of residents every year shows how hard

it can be to give up privacy and individual choice

for life in the group.

It isn't easy to fit into utopia, even for the founder's daughter.

Josie Kinkade left the community as a young woman.

Twin Oaks, for me, is partly, you know,

being surrounded by love and a beautiful place,

and partly having to work it out with everybody.

Like, when you live in a marriage you, you know,

where does he put his shampoo and who drops her socks on the floor?

You know, that sort of thing you work out with two people.

Well, here you work that out with 50 or 60 or 100 people,

and, for me, I just wanted a little bit more autonomy.

The utopian dream is that people CAN work it out,

they CAN exist in harmony,

if together they build and continually tweak

the right environment and the right rules by which to live.

But this is a dream that is,

of course, not limited to small communities.

The idea of the perfect society has long been a political project,

directed from above.

The 20th century, in many ways,

can be viewed as a period of historic struggle between utopian ideologies -

Nazi, Soviet and capitalist -

all with a very different view of how people should live.

-ARCHIVE:

-"This year, too, all the German youth will participate enthusiastically

"in gathering the crops," is the commentator's introduction.

"To serve in gathering the crops is to serve the people."

In the early 20th century,

utopia became a social experiment on a mass scale,

often with unforeseen consequences.

In 1930s America, as city populations swelled,

the government imposed a top-down solution for housing the poor.

Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal declared a war on slums,

conceiving vast housing schemes in the inner cities.

Places of hope and new opportunity.

This was the birth of the projects.

-ARCHIVE:

-Unsightly buildings, dangerous and unsanitary,

come crashing to the ground as the works programme clears the way for

a great housing project.

Named for Chicago's beloved Jane Addams,

this housing development will lead the way to better living conditions

for families of low income.

Keith Magee, founding director of the National Public Housing Museum in Chicago,

takes me into a public housing block that still survives today.

Taking their name from a local philanthropist,

32 Jane Addams homes like this were built in Chicago's West Side

in the late 1930s.

So this would've been an apartment...

Almost 1,000 individual apartments, in which many residents would have

experienced running water and indoor bathrooms for the first time.

Here was an environment designed to create conditions

for social cohesion and harmony.

Keith, this is such an evocative space.

What do you think it would have been like living here back in the '30s, '40s, '50s?

In the '30s, '40s, '50s

I think you would've imagined or experienced the diversity of people

who are poor and working-class people.

In one apartment you may have smelled kosher food,

but across the hall you would smell fried chicken.

And so it was the people from down south,

immigrants who came to America,

who are all finding a place to settle and to ultimately call home.

This is a melting pot.

It sounds so full of promise.

What happened to make this block a derelict shell?

The planners had overlooked the tension

between the group and the individual.

Unlike the egalitarian communities of monks, Shakers and Twin Oaks,

these blocks began to have huge disparities of wealth.

As money from drugs offered a few an easy way to get ahead

and crime soared,

public housing became part of the problem,

rather than the solution.

You could have, in one apartment, a working-class family, a janitor,

a nurse and four children, and a pretty stable family.

Next door to that you could've had someone that was

totally depending on social services.

Perhaps across the hall

you could've had someone that was selling drugs,

and they were probably faring best out of everyone in the community.

But the impact of it all devastated public housing.

By the 1970s,

Chicago's housing projects were no-go areas controlled by gangs

like the Black Gangster Disciples.

And, ironically, Keith believes it might have been the very strength

of community ties that aggravated the descent into dystopia.

Because it was a community, people looked out for each other,

not realising the level of devastation that drugs were having

on the community, the selling of drugs.

I mean, if you look here,

over this wall would have been a dresser or a wardrobe

that covered this,

but when the police would come looking for the drug dealer

they shifted it so that you could escape your apartment

and go to the next apartment.

Well, that would seem to be a great idea -

to look out for your community -

but what was it absolutely doing to the community?

It was tearing it apart.

In the 1990s, the city authorities had had enough -

they dispersed residents into mixed-income neighbourhoods

and tore down the projects.

This last derelict block will be converted into a national public-housing museum.

What an incredibly atmospheric place this is.

To think that it was once such a good place to so many people,

people coming in from all over the States to join a community.

But it wasn't, by all means, just a good place,

it was a place with its problems and with its challenges.

Some of them insurmountable.

The projects were utopian

in their attempt to take people of very different backgrounds

out of poverty.

But a good place of public housing simply couldn't address all

of the social issues of a complex and changing inner city.

But at least the intention here was benevolent.

What if the utopian ideology is not so well-intentioned...

..if it's all turned on its head

and the utopia is dreamt up by a megalomaniac individual

with a rigid view on solving all social issues

in the most brutal and final way possible?

There's no doubt it's somebody's utopian vision,

but it certainly isn't mine.

It's vast, it's ambitious,

but I can't help but wonder, where's the human in all this?

Where's the human scale?

To walk down this avenue

would make you feel tiny, almost irrelevant,

constantly flanked by these overbearing buildings.

You get down into this ceremonial plaza

with these vast superhuman figures

towering over you,

gather with 180,000 people,

in the biggest building on earth to hear one voice.

Utopian vision, but at what cost?

HE SPEAKS GERMAN

Adolf Hitler dreamed of making Berlin the capital of the world.

Welthauptstadt Germania -

a grand metropolis centred around the 7km avenue

running north to south,

with the vast Volkshalle at its end,

its dome 16 times larger than Saint Peter's in Rome.

Hitler obsessed over the models, based on his own sketches.

Throughout the war, as Allied bombs flattened the real city,

he'd make torchlight visits at night to pore over his utopian toy town.

Meanwhile, tens of thousands of prisoners

died in SS-run labour camps,

quarrying the granite needed to build the Nazi fantasy capital.

For years after the war,

local residents were unsure what this block of concrete was doing

amid a quiet Berlin suburb.

But geologists knew -

here was a strange remnant of Hitler's utopia.

These are the final material remains of a Nazi vision of a Germania

that was going to last for 1,000 years.

12,000 tonnes of concrete towering over you

like a nightmarish tombstone.

Built by forced French labour,

it runs deeper underground than it does above.

It was intended to test the ability of the soil of Berlin

to bear the weight of the biggest triumphal arch ever conceived.

A triumphal arch for a utopian vision that thankfully failed.

The other great utopian experiment of the 20th century

was Soviet communism.

This ideology had its origins in Karl Marx's utopian vision

of a workers' revolution and common ownership of the means of production.

The Soviet utopia also attempted to reprogram society

through design and architecture.

This is Lithuania.

What's fascinating, I think,

about the Soviet-era buildings left here is what they reveal about

the regime's preoccupations about how the individual should live

and what they should care about in a socialist utopia.

From the 1970s, we get this.

A futuristic, exuberant statement in concrete.

The Palace of Concerts and Sports is a landmark of Communist modernism,

shouting about the virtues of fitness and health as ways to perfect

the Soviet citizen.

It's a bit bonkers, but I like it.

There's something incredibly organic about this Brezhnev-era building,

this temple to sport.

You've got these kind of gills down the side of it

made out of this textured concrete.

It's like coral.

The broken panes of glass are almost like shed fish scales.

You've got organic marks left by the wood shuttering

to build the concrete structure.

It's like a creature rearing out of the sea,

a massive celebration of the monumental achievements

of Soviet athletes.

Outside Vilnius, in a small town called Druskininkai,

lie the ruins of another Soviet utopian project.

In this place of spas and sanatoria,

workers could come for treatment, paid for by the state

that wanted to keep them productive - and probably happier - for longer.

The abandoned Spa Nemunas dates from the 1980s.

It would once have accommodated thousands of guests.

Across the Soviet Union, there were hundreds of these spa towns.

This particular spa town in Lithuania

used to get almost 500,000 visitors a year.

There is something somewhat pathetic about this place today,

but it's not a massive leap of imagination to picture it

teeming with families enjoying their summer holidays.

Those who had come here having worked in arduous industries like mining

might get a fortnight away to enjoy the Black Sea,

mud baths and the saunas and the whirlpools.

The fruits of a Soviet utopian vision of working together,

but also playing together.

Housing the workers was another key drive of the Soviet project.

This is the Lazdynai estate, on the outskirts of Vilnius.

In creating this complex of three-bedroomed apartments,

the local Lithuanian architects expressed a little freedom

from central Russian control...

..innovating the site of blocks to fit around the local woodland.

The estate went on to win the 1974 Lenin Prize for Architectural Design

for the whole of the Soviet Union.

They called estates like this micro districts,

as they had all the facilities of a town in one place.

They were also known as sleeping districts,

as this was where workers came to sleep

before getting up and going back to work.

So the main idea was,

in order to feel comfortable, besides apartment,

you need a school, you need a kindergarten, you need a playground,

you need a swimming pool, cinema, shops and so on.

So it sounds wonderful, but when people moved in,

did they find that living here was quite as perfect as the architects

might have imagined?

People were quite astonished, you know,

"Why is it located so far away?"

It is in the middle of nowhere,

so it was a problem to get to work.

As well, as the time was passing,

people were disappointed with the quality.

Like the walls were not straight,

the windows were very bad,

the whole construction wasn't regular.

There was even a joke that it was really a difference

if the building was built in a summer or in the winter.

Because in the winter it is cold,

so architects and the builders were working very fast,

so the quality was much lower.

So sometimes in the West there's a bit of a reductive view of the Soviet Union -

it was all bad, everything was awful.

But actually, for the people who lived here,

what do you think their view might be today?

The life was simpler, we can say.

You could imagine, a person finishes school - school is free.

A person goes to university - university is free.

A person is getting free health care.

And then he gets married

and he has work, so he is given an apartment for free.

So it's not like now -

you spend all your life earning for the apartment.

But you have already apartment and you can earn for something else.

What is a utopia?

Is it no place?

Well, this was definitely someplace.

The architecture, OK, it's looking a bit tired,

but it's southward-facing balconies,

it's a short walk into the woods,

there's little community notice boards outside each block.

You get the sense that this is a vibrant, alive community, still.

Today, some might say that to be utopian means to be naive.

Utopia is an impossible and noble dream.

We look back on previous utopian escapades, like Soviet communism,

and conclude that they were just pie in the sky -

possibly well-meaning, but staggeringly open to manipulation.

But is there a danger in taking such a view?

Utopian visions rise and fall,

but what makes them interesting, I think,

and perhaps valuable,

is their ability to inspire radical and innovative new design.

On a pilgrimage to find utopia,

sometimes you find staging posts in the most unexpected places.

Attempts to build something better that might not have worked in

themselves, but the drive behind them can still be celebrated.

They might not look like much,

clustered here in a disused army base in New Jersey,

but these are the ruins of an idea from a utopian architect

who designed some of the most revolutionary and efficient structures of the 20th century.

I'm an explorer in structures.

I'm interested in the fundamental principles

by which nature holds her shapes together.

Richard Buckminster Fuller was, to put it mildly, unconventional.

He was kicked out of Harvard twice, he went bankrupt in his 30s,

and, reeling from personal tragedy -

the death of his infant daughter from spinal meningitis -

he devoted himself to an extraordinary experiment -

how much could he contribute to changing the world

and helping humanity in the life left to him?

-ARCHIVE:

-This genius led to many early disappointments and frustrations...

Fuller was horrified by newsreel of the London Blitz in 1940,

and he dreamt up a whole new way of housing the displaced.

Passing a Midwest grain silo one day,

he had a eureka moment,

and built what he called the Dymaxion Deployment Unit,

or DDU, to rehouse a family of up to four people.

Fuller coined the term dymaxion, a combination of dynamic,

maximum and tension, to sum up what he wanted to achieve -

maximum gain of advantage from minimal energy input.

These DDUs are imaginary leaps into the future.

How do you house people who've been bombed out of their homes?

You put them into these miniature grain silos.

And the detail is amazing.

It's sort of machine-age stuff.

These portholes, amazing design,

Bakelite windows,

like something from a spaceship or possibly a submarine.

And then this layer of insulation all the way round the building

and through the roof,

built-in shelving units.

You've even got a built-in electricity system.

It's astonishing.

And the gorgeous roof, it's like a flower opening.

And there used to be a self-regulating air ventilation system.

It's a beautiful and useful solution.

To get the military on board,

Fuller supposedly parked one of these outside the Pentagon in 1941.

The military did buy a few hundred.

There are said to be mysterious tin sheds in disused American bases

all over the world.

These tired but beautifully organic buildings

have these lovely little details,

like almost human eyes with little eyelashes.

But they're mass-produced goods,

hundreds of them manufactured quickly and cheaply.

They could be erected in a day by two people,

flown in anywhere in the world.

Minimum resources for maximum impact.

For years, nobody knew what these units here were.

The scorched ones were used for munitions testing.

A sad end for this project, perhaps,

but Fuller had many other influential ideas.

Buckminster Fuller's utopian legacy has been profound,

shaping architectural thinking today,

in particular with his concern for the preciousness of the planet's

resources and space.

-ARCHIVE:

-Buckminster Fuller's revolutionary super-city

is a huge but graceful angular floating platform.

Like most of Fuller's ideas, it has a mathematical feel about it.

This is designed so that we can take a whole

complex out of the little mobile homes,

and a giant crane would pick these up off the water,

and they could be slid in here.

This is the Triton City project.

Yeah, this is the Triton City project.

The architect Shoji Sadao

was a long-term collaborator with the man he affectionately calls Bucky.

It would require about 5,000 inhabitants

to really form a community.

It was a project based on the fact that

most of the large urban cities in the US

are near large bodies of water,

and rather than trying to build on the land

around these bodies of water,

you create your own land by these floating platforms.

This is a very young you and Buckminster Fuller.

Yes, this is Bucky and me in front of the Southern Illinois University Religious Center.

The Southern Illinois University Religious Center is a classic example

of Buckminster Fuller's most famous invention -

the geodesic dome.

This is the architectural structure that can enclose the most space

with the least material,

and it's conquered the world.

Domes dot the globe,

including the monumental US Pavilion at Montreal's Expo 67,

and the aviary at Queen's Zoo in New York.

Shoji explains the engineering principles.

What you're doing is you're making equilateral triangles here.

If you have five triangles around this vertex...

If you have six it'll be flat

and it won't form into a sphere,

but by using just five around the point

you begin to make a spherical shape.

Ah, so once you've done the first row it kind of builds itself.

Keeping these vertexes always at the same distance from the common centre,

we begin to get then spherical triangles.

The triangles are, Fuller realised, strengthened, not weakened,

by adding more.

They interlock and support each other.

The triangle is a structurally stable shape,

whereas a square can be distorted, you know.

By triangulating, you built a very strong structure.

Here you are.

-Very nice. Wow.

-Yeah, you built a sphere.

It's so strong.

It is, yeah.

Strong and efficient.

Fuller's concept of the geodesic dome is now being considered

as the basis for habitats on the Moon and Mars.

Norman Foster's architectural practice

has been deeply involved in these dreams of the future.

He met Buckminster Fuller in the 1970s,

was captivated, and eventually employed him.

Even at the point just before his death,

he was one of the youngest people that I've ever met,

in spirit, in thinking.

He drew attention to the fragility of the planet.

He's arguably the first green architect,

before green was ever invented as a kind of, you know, buzzword.

I think I detect a little bit of influence

of the geodesic dome elements of some of your buildings.

-Is that fair?

-The one over there has...

-THEY BOTH LAUGH

The idea of using triangulation, of distributing forces,

of creating light and lightness,

touching the ground lightly,

using materials more economically,

to create something which is inherently more beautiful

and inspired by nature.

And, actually, paradoxically, looks quite fragile,

but is stronger, and doing more with less.

You seem to share this interest in waste not, want not.

That you can make efficient use of material.

Yes. I mean, you have 1.6 billion

without access to clean water, energy, power -

how do you address these issues?

If you take a city,

you've probably got one department

which is devoted to waste and possibly

using landfill to get rid of the waste.

You've probably got another division of the city about generating energy.

Really, if you put those two things together,

you can burn the waste to create energy.

And it's kind of Bucky-style thinking.

Foster & Partners has designed hundreds of futuristic buildings

and structures across the world.

From the Reichstag Cupola

to the Millau Viaduct,

and a new Apple campus,

grand utopian dreams are very much alive here.

I think, to practise architecture, you're planning for the future.

You're looking far ahead.

So you're trying to work with an environment, anticipating change.

So, in that sense, you have to be an optimist.

So optimism, utopianism, I mean,

the words overlap.

We find that way of thinking much more in Asia now.

I mean, if you take Hong Kong,

the airport is embedded in the middle of the city.

It's folklore, you know, the aircraft are coming in

scooping washing off the balconies.

And they've got no land, they've got sea,

so they take an island, chop it down,

get the biggest dredging fleet in the world,

make a site bigger than Heathrow and do an extraordinary airport.

That is the kind of thinking that was perhaps exported

from here from the 19th century.

And that 19th century was a utopian vision because there was

a belief in a better future.

While the utopian architect envisages extraordinary transformations,

grand plans on a global scale,

I still wonder which utopia works best to actually live in every day.

Where can we best navigate that tension between the big vision,

the rules of the group and the freedom of an individual?

Who knows?

Might the answer lie in a place that many of us routinely dismiss

as dull and suburban?

Perhaps it's time to put aside prejudices and look afresh

at a garden city in the English Home Counties.

Could this be the unlikely utopia that has it all?

The garden city movement was the brainchild of Ebenezer Howard,

a 19th century visionary who came at the questions of how we should live

by rejecting the overcrowding and pollution of big-city life.

In the process, he helped give us the roundabout...

..and the cul-de-sac.

Howard had experienced country life in rural Nebraska

and the difficulties of the city when,

as a reporter, he'd watch Chicago recovering

from the great fire of 1871.

In his book, Garden Cities Of Tomorrow,

he envisaged new places to live,

where people would be attracted by the magnet of the best of town

and country mixed in one place.

As the Times wrote in a review of the book,

"The only difficulty is to create such a city."

But that's a small matter to utopians.

So this is one of our stores where we keep most of our plans.

Vicky Axell is curator of the Garden City Collection.

Oh, wow.

So, following on from Howard's influential book,

the first garden city estate starts to be built.

You can see that it's a very green space,

and everything is based around sunshine and light.

It should be harmonious and organic.

Howard was extremely precise in his vision of the garden city.

6,000 acres of rural land was to be purchased,

with 1,000 set aside for the city

and the population was not to exceed 32,000.

The roads would be wide and laid out in a radial pattern.

So here we have the plans so far in 1910.

So it's seven years into the garden city.

The striking thing is all the roundabouts.

By not having a grid layout,

essentially when lots of roads meet they need something that's going

to help manoeuvre traffic and people around.

So they come up with the roundabout,

and early on they have to have signs to remind people to keep left,

because people are either driving straight over the top

or going the wrong way round.

Letchworth was part of the enlightened late-19th-century trend

away from terraced housing, because one of its planners, Raymond Unwin,

calculated that back-to-back terraced streets

were not an efficient use of space.

Why so many cul-de-sacs?

It's based on Raymond Unwin's paper,

Nothing Gained By Overcrowding.

It says if you have just one road that enters

then you can have these lovely radial gardens

in that same square acreage,

and you can fit more houses and more garden space and therefore

get a better quality of life out of the same space.

And that's so counterintuitive -

the cul-de-sac allows you to make more use of your real estate.

And it's all about the gardens.

And the workers can grow food and they can help support themselves.

How wonderful.

We might be used to it now, but in its early years,

Letchworth was more than an innovative built environment -

every new citizen was a shareholder,

and self-sufficiency was prized.

This was seen at the time as a utopian experiment,

promoting new-fangled ideas and bohemian lifestyles.

The majority of people come here for jobs.

But there's a small minority of people, I can illustrate here.

Some people just wanted to follow that utopian vision

and create a new way of living,

and they were the simple lifers, they were known as at the time,

but known also as cranks - not my term.

People who were rational dress wearers

and vegetarians and socialists, and sometimes all three.

And they were attracted by this new utopia.

Caricatures like this depict the cranks as objects of fascination for

sightseers from London, coming up for the day to gawp at them.

How astonishing to think that 100 or so years later

a lot of these sort of at the time cranky behaviours

are really quite normal.

To be a vegetarian is totally fine.

-That's right.

-To be radical politically is acceptable,

but the diversity of voices that are tolerated here actually allows

-this utopian vision to survive?

-Yeah, that's right.

I mean, I think it was a place where people could speak out and not

be afraid to say what they believed in.

Where Letchworth led, others have followed.

There have been more than 30 similar community cities built in Britain

from Wythenshawe to Milton Keynes.

Ebenezer Howard's utopian vision of Letchworth, over 100 years old,

is still kind of evident here.

These intimate streets that flow off grand avenues,

with their beautifully tended gardens,

seem to suggest that this is a community that really cares

about its environment still.

A survey that was conducted in 2015 found that only 3%

of the population were unhappy.

Maybe their lawn mowers were broken.

As utopias go,

perhaps garden cities set a lower bar than the strictures of monastic life

or mass housing projects,

be they socialist or capitalist.

Yet garden cities might provide a kind of utopia

that works on the human scale,

helping to build a sense of community

while still offering privacy, freedom and space.

And they do seem to have been flexible enough

to adapt to changing times.

But the question remains,

could garden cities ever really be built

on the scale that would meet the need for decent housing for all,

so often felt most acutely in towns and cities?

What's struck me on this journey through some of the built utopias

of the world is how attractive some of the values are of those

who've fought for them and lived in them.

A rebuke to our atomised, fast buck, me first capitalist culture.

Many are communities with ideas about sharing,

looking out for the environment and working together

in a common endeavour.

Even amid the failures,

there's something noble about this striving for utopia.

It seems to me to show off a better side of our humanity.

In the next episode...

I'm going to go see the northern lights.

..the search for the utopia within.

Oh, that's beautiful.

Authenticity...

Qawwali music is a cosmic quest in search of the beloved.

..the craving for perfection...

I think it's really beautiful.

You could call it the ah-ha moment - that moment when you go "wow".

..the moment of transcendence.

If I'm reading the crowd I can build, like, an entire emotion.