December 19, 2014

In 1808, in reaction to the failure of the French revolution and the emergence of new inequalities generated by capitalism, Charles Fourier developed a compelling utopian project called the Phalanstery, a community body composed of three hundred households coming from diverse economic and social backgrounds[1]. The phalanstery, inhabited by a community called the Phalanx, gathered in one single monumental building the different activities that regulated modern society. Seeking an egalitarian and cooperative society, goods produced by the workers were put in common and redistributed equally to the families rewarded “according to the three forms of property, capital, labour, talent.”[2] Fourier imagined a utopian way of life where labour, leisure and libertinage would intertwine in harmony, “a new society founded on the emancipation of the passions and proclaiming the triumph of sensual pleasure.”[3] Since Thomas More and Athanasius Kircher, even more so with Boullée and Ledoux, architectural and territorial form was becoming an important aspect of the utopian practice, an aspect in which Fourier definitely invested as a means for testing and proving his ideals. From its location to its physical form, this paper investigates the substance and discontents of the phalanstery as an architectural project, especially with regard to one of its main influences, the Parisian arcades, and to some of its subsequent translations into concrete living environments.

The birth of the Phalanstery

Etymologically, the word Phalanstery is a combination of Phalan- from phalanx, “A body of troops or police officers, standing or moving in close formation”[4] (They relied on each other, if one member left, the formation would collapse that is why they moved very slowly) and –stery from monastery. Architecturally, the reference to the monastery can be traced from the location of the phalanstery in a remote area to its enclosed perimeter framing central courtyards. Even though Charles Fourier’s primary investigation sat in the realm of social theory and utopia, the project of the Phalanstery attained a controlled and well-thought physical form. This investigation seems legitimized by the context of French architecture at the time, with Etienne-Louis Boullée and Claude Nicolas Ledoux works having put forth the possible coherence between social idealism and architectural form. In the same context, Jean Nicolas Louis Durand, Fourier’s contemporary, proposed typology as a key to the efficient development of Napoleonian France, and over the channel, in Britain, there was developing a study of utopian types.

In 1787, about 20 years before the publication of the Phalanstery, Jeremy Bentham developed a circular inspection house called the Panopticon, which would solve the general welfare by controlling spatially its inhabitants[5]. The building composed of a central watchtower surrounded by illuminated peripheral cells is often associated with prisons when it was primarily thought as a model for all types of for all kinds of institution in which the control of individuals or even animals was considered important; houses of correction, lunatic asylums, orphanages, nurseries amongst others.[6] In a similar manner, although based on a different ideology, Fourier’s phalanstery seems at first glance to inherently rely on its architectural form as much as on its social premises. He thoroughly designed a colossal project through plans, axonometric drawings and carefully detailed descriptions so it appeared as a complete architectural project, or at least a credible typological theorem.

An idealized vision of Arcadia

 In his description of the Phalanstery, Fourier insisted that the site should be carefully chosen and described the location as a parameter, which if not well respected, could lead to the failure of the utopian project. He first stated: “It is necessary for a company of 1,500 to 1,600 persons to have a stretch of land comprising a good square league, say a surface of six million square toises,”[7] which is equivalent to about 108000000 SF or 2500 Acres (which is three times the size of the actual park of Versailles). By solely pointing out the size of land, Fourier already emphasized the autonomy of the project. The colossal territorial machine should be implemented in specific natural surroundings: “The land should be provided with a fine stream of water; it should be intersected by hills, and adapted to varied cultivation; it should be contiguous to a forest, and not far removed from a large city, but sufficiently so to escape intruders”[8] Fourier describes an idealized natural context as one of the constraints for the phalanstery to work. The land can neither be flat nor dry and has to provide a varied landscape such as the surroundings of Lausanne.

The reference to Switzerland cannot be a pure coincidence since Jean-Jacques Rousseau spent a lot of time praising the qualities of Switzerland and especially the surroundings of Geneva where he was born and raised until he moved to Paris at the age of 28, which he thought was the ultimate incarnation of vice and corruption[9]. In his Rêveries du Promeneur solitaire, he claims: “Switzerland is the only place in the world that presents this mixture of savage nature and human industry. The entire realm of Switzerland is, in a way, nothing more than a great city, whose streets, longer and wider than the Faubourg Saint Antoine, are lost in the forests and cut by the mountains, and whose houses, scattered and isolated, are linked to each other solely by English gardens”[10] In other words, Switzerland epitomizes Rousseau’s, and by extension Fourier’s idea of the perfect balance between pristine Nature and civilization in which human beings should evolve. This romanticized vision of Nature surrounding architecture is characteristic of the Enlightenment, beginning with Laugier’s Primitive Hut as a straightforward description of men’s ideal social habitat to attain Harmony. Thus Fourier’s project appears to be rather an argument to support the close relationship that Men should cultivate with his natural surrounding rather than a realistic and pragmatic functional statement about how the phalanstery could work as an agricultural compound. This constitutes a potentially important shortcoming, in that it implies a complete redistribution of land according to generic criteria, and cuts the Phalanstery off from any territorial input or flexibility.

Hermetic form

 Formally, when Fourier takes the role of the architect, he inscribes his project in the lineage of utopian projects that emerged during the eighteenth century as one of the first versions of paper architecture. Very much like Boullée or Ledoux, Fourier designed an absolute and hermetic form whose radicalism seems to be the underlying driving force.

The project takes the form of a colossal perimeter generating multiple courtyards. It is composed of a central core and two wings: the central part being dedicated to “peaceful uses, and contain the dining-halls, halls for finance, libraries study, etc”.[11]One of the wings contained all the noisy workshops “such as the carpenter-shop, the forge, all hammer-work (…) and all the industrial gathering of children”, while the other enclosed ballrooms and the caravansary “appropriated to intercourse with outsiders.” [12] The project is uniform and enclosed in order to generate concave spaces removed from the outside world. Inspired by the Palais Royal in Paris, the continuous covered gallery would allow circulation from one program to another in an artificial climate without ever-encountering rain or wind. The idea of this uninterrupted gallery appears as a fundamental element of the project; it is a limit, a boundary that folds on itself to create a distinct space, an inhabited space. Thus the gallery becomes the threshold between exterior and interior. It stands as a place of social interaction, which combines the urban quality of exterior public places to the comfort and warmth of the interior. In the phalanstery, the social condensation fostered by the galleries bears the same qualities of Ledoux’s porticos as brilliantly stated by Anthony Vidler: “The portico no longer simply embellishes, nor does it serve merely to shelter the citizen from the rain- it is a positive instrument for encouraging social activity, much in the way that Fourier was to conceive it in the year of Ledoux's death”[13]. Therefore, Fourier’s gallery becomes the manifestation of an idea about communal interaction rather than a simple architectural device that transports you from a place to another.

Defining the phalanstery as a hermetic enclave delimited by porticos or galleries directly refers to the architecture of the monastery which Fourier expresses: “If, for the purposes of experiment, only an inconsiderable Harmony of 200 or 300 members, or a hongrée of 400 members is organized, a monastery or a palace (Meudon) could be used for it”[14] Indeed the notion of monastery does not only appear in the name of the project, it also shows in its physical materialization. Then, one can be confused by the use of the monastery as one of his primary reference since it incarnates par excellence an ascetic lifestyle of repetition. In this, Fourier’s ideal of a harmonious society based on the proliferation of passions seems to reveal its tendency for functional overreaching. It is very difficult to imagine the reconciliation between the need for variety within the phalanstery, which would have people changing their task in labour and pleasure regularly, with its complete antithesis, the routine imposed by the monastery.

The basis for Fourierism

 Fourier influenced a wide range of later projects, which consciously claimed their allegiance to the initial idea of the Phalanstery; however, none of them fully embraced its location, scale or architectural form. Both in its territorial strategy and its proposal of type, the phalanstery presents important incoherencies that would subsequently become the main challenges for any effort of bringing the project to life. On one hand, Fourierists were required to study and understand the use of land at such a scale, given they could overcome the mere scarcity of such vast stretches of territory in Europe at the time. Secondly, establishing a phalanx required an interpretation of architectural typology and scale and an important amount of additional invention in order to allow for the functionalities and the freedom promised by Fourier. This was very difficult in the case of new settlements, in the American continent or in Israel, where material and knowledge was lacking for complex formal experiments. These experiments actually continued almost uninterruptedly in Europe until as late as the 1960’s, showing how difficult the resolution of this typological equation was, especially against the rapid evolution of the phalanstery’s capitalist counterpart; the contemporary metropolis.

Physical applications: some early examples

As early as 1820, Fourier’s contemporary Robert Owen developed a utopian project entitled the Parallelogram in reference to its 1650 feet long square, inhabited by the Harmonious community, which had nothing to do formally with the concrete projects he was involved in such as New Lanark in the south of Glasgow or New Harmony in Indiana. Even Owen himself, once involved in physical projects, never fully realized his paper architecture. However, he was instrumental in exporting his own and Fourier’s combination of social, territorial and architectural ambition to the hopeful settlers of the American continent.

One of the first attempts of realized Fourierism happened in the United States with projects such as Brook Farm founded by George Ripley in 1841.[15] This American phalanx occupied a 175 Acre Farm located in Massachusetts. This abundance of land, pushed Ripley’s phalanx towards a territorial interpretation to the proposal, overlooking or reshuffling completely its typological base. According to the young Lewis Mumford ” The Brook Farm experiment in America was a fumbling attempt to plant a phalanstery without paying any attention to the conditions, which Fourier would have rigorously imposed”[16] Indeed, in 1843, Albert Brisbane, one of the key figure of American Fourierism, commented on the shape of the phalanstery: “The square and oblong form should be avoided, as it is both monotonous and heavy.” He supported the idea that the central part of the building should be the “most striking and elegant” part of the edifice and that the church should be a separate building. [17] Through this critique of Fourier’s formal determinism and without a valid counterpart of the same radical nature, the early American phalanstery thus became a mere proposal for the collective functioning of a farm, deprived of any spatial or typological specificity.

A few decades later, back to the other side of the Atlantic, the French industrialist Jean-Baptiste André Godin erected a social community called the “Familistère” or “social palace” in reference to the “Phalanstère.” From 1859 to 1884, Godin realized his version of Fourier’s utopia next to his factory in Guise[18], a city of 2000 inhabitants dwelled in 500 apartments organized around giant interior courtyards protected by a a glass and iron-roof. In the Familistère, the thin interior passage-ways/ balconies have replaced the gallery-streets of the phalanstery, but without loosing their main purpose which was to forster social interaction. The Familistère’s architecture definitely emerged from a critical interpretation of the phalanstery and in that it seems to be the most faithful to Fourier’s original idea. However, it did not succed in transcending its initial program, to house the workers of a steel factory, and never attained the complex economical and social condition that Fourier dreamed of. This is perhaps because of the impossibility to find appropriate land to allow for the self-sufficiency of the Familistère, and its completion with an agricultural function and a tangible arcadian environnement.

The Kibbutz

Even later, one can look at the Kibbutzim and Moshavim in Israel, founded under the impulse of European immigrants to Israel, formerly Palestine, in the early 20th century, and inherently responding to a need for self-sufficiency, because of the arid and untamed aspect of the land they occupied. The Kibbutzim were initially supported by the personnal efforts of the settlers and the funding they received from their relatives in Europe and the United States, who expected nothing in return, much like the visitors of Fourier’s caravansary. Similar to the american takes on the phalanstery, the Kibbutz left aside the formal definition of the Phalanstery, which would be absurd in such a climate. While very varied in typology, the Kibbutz are mostly characterized by a dispersed system of small volumes, assembling the rooms for the individuals, arranged around one or several common buildings. In their social structure they are closest than ever to what Fourier described, applying some very radical and previously unseen solutions such as the separation between parents and children. In the constitution of their architecture, the Kibbutz initally demonstrated a very high amount of invention and ability to resolve the spatiality of such a new social organization. The common spaces where characterized by a high amount of flexibility, not unlike the cafeteria space at Gropius’s bauhaus[19], and where early to apply solutions such as flexible, openable roofs and removable façade panels. They were also efficient in putting forward the arcadian aspect of the project, often overlooking green valleys of olive groves and framing a sublime view of the productive landscape around them.

In the Kibbutz and the Moshav then, Fourierism seems to find an appropriate environment for implementation, with concrete solutions, sufficient land and enough independence from central power to allow for its fertile development. Nevertheless, its initial driving force, the relation to an ambitious and educated population of immigrants, arriving specifically to fullfill their dream of another society in Eretz-Israel, was the final reason for the downfall of the project. With the political evolution of the status quo, the Kibbutz received an increasing pressure from inhabitants with very different visions for the land, and ofcourse the growing, and now well-known geopolitical pressure to the same territory. Even within their own boundaries the Kibbutzim suffered from the dilution of their ambition, with immigrants from central Europe seeking to find the nostalgic reminiscence of their rural life back home rather than commit to the new ideal that they were proposed. This started changing the face of some Kibbutz, thus undermining them from within and slowly preparing them for their sidelining and transformation to tourist resorts.

Conclusion

 Ultimately, one can use some interesting parallels between some of Fourrier’s own choices and subsequent theoretical work, notably on the monastery by Lewis Mumford and on the arcades by Walter Benjamin, to try and understand the interaction between the Phalanstery’s naïve idealism and the continuing evolution of the metropolitan condition. This study is then in a way a partial negative image of the gradual extension of the capitalist metropolis.

Fourier proposes a complete recombination of social ethos, territorial economics and architectural form as a counterpart to what was already happening within the capitalist society, a project of an amazing efficiency and power that he witnessed himself at one of its 19th century cores, in the city of Paris. In the parisian galleries, he though he had found an architectural tool for the embodiment of his ideal, transposable to another social system; “The actual society he saw in the galleries was not his object; it was the principle of social condensation exemplified by the galleries intimated the potential of architecture to reform the social world” [20]This initial hypothesis is somewhat correct, but the extraction of the arcades from the metropolitan condition in which they were born is where it all goes wrong. As Walter Benjamin implied it later[21], the parisian arcades where much more than a mere architectural vessel waiting for content, they were rather an extremely important tool for the evolution of the metropolitan condition, where the realisation of the modern conception of leisure could be realised.

Fourier is unlucky in another one of his architectural choices. The monastery, laboratory for the development of routine and the rhythmical, complementary economical roles between individuals[22], is difficultly compatible with his leisurly model. Importing the arcades into this seems like a promising idea to overcome the problem, but both of them cannot really fullfill their role out of their specific context. It is no surprise then that the compact and rigid architectural form of Fourier is rarely taken literally, especially in front of a 2500 acre territory, prerequisite to the existence of the phalanstery, that seems able to support any form of sprawl.

Speaking of territory, it is in this that the utopian project finds its largest obstacle. Finding and occupying a very large piece of land being already difficult, Fourier’s proposal proved unable to cope with the rapid evolution of territorial politics and the pressures inflicted by the horizontal expansion of the productive activities. In front of wars, migrations, evolutions in agriculture and industry and the general saturation of land use in the western hemisphere, even the most accomplished example of Fourierism, the Kibbutzim, succumbed to this tremendous amount of pressure.

It can then be concluded that the study of Fourier’s idea is a reverse way of proving the most important component of the capitalist metropolis; the enormous ability to integrate and recuperate any external dynamics, including to some extent Fourier’s own initative, and transforming them into tools for further expansion.

[1] Charles Fourier, “Selections Describing the Phalanstery,” in The Utopia Reader, ed. by Gregory Claeys and Lyman Tower Sargent (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 192

[2] Ibid. 192

[3] Frank E Manuel, “Foreword,” in Design for Utopia, selected writings of Charles Fourier, ed. by Charles Gide, (New York: Schocken edition 1971), 3

[4] Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 20 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. Also available at http://www.oed.com/

[5] Jeremy Bentham, “Panopticon, or the Inspection House” (1787), excerpt in Liane Lefaivre and Alexander Tzonis, The Emergence of Modern Architecture: A documentary history from 1000 to 1810 (London/New York: Routledge,2004), 444.

[6] Robin Evans, "Bentham's Panopticon: An Incident in the Social History of Architecture," Architectural Association Quarterly, 3 (Spring l971), 21

[7] Charles Fourier, “Selections Describing the Phalanstery,” in Design for Utopia, selected writings of Charles Fourier, ed. by Charles Gide, (New York: Schocken edition 1971), 138

[8] Charles Fourier, “Selections Describing the Phalanstery,” in The Utopia Reader 193

[9] Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions, bk, IX, 375

[10] Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Seventh promenade,” Rêveries du Promeneur solitaire (Paris, 1778), 146 quoted in Anthony Vidler, “The Scenes of the Street: Transformations in Ideal and Reality, 1759-1871”, On Streets, ed. Stanford Anderson (New York: The Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies/The MIT Press, 1978), 28-111; reprinted in Vidler, The Scenes of the Street and Other Essays (New York: The Monacelli Press, 2011), 39.

[11] Charles Fourier, “Selections Describing the Phalanstery,” in The Utopia Reader 195

[12] Ibid., 196.

[13] Anthony Vidler, “The Scenes of the Street: Transformations in Ideal and Reality, 1759-1871”, On Streets, ed. Stanford Anderson (New York: The Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies/The MIT Press, 1978), 28-111; reprinted in Vidler, The Scenes of the Street and Other Essays (New York: The Monacelli Press, 2011), 59.

[14] Charles Fourier, “Selections Describing the Phalanstery,” in The Utopia Reader 195

[15] John Smith. Encyclopaedia Britannica, 8th ed., s.v. "Internet." Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2009. http://www.britannica.com

[16] Lewis Mumford, The story of Utopia (New York: Viking Press, 1922), 75

[17] Albert Brisbane, “Association,” in The Utopia Reader, ed. by Gregory Claeys and Lyman Tower Sargent (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 200

[18] http://www.familistere.com

[19] The link between the two is drawn in the documentaries of Amos Gitai, the Israeli film director who was trained as an architect, such as ‘’Lullaby to my Father’’ and the ‘’Architecture in Israel’’ series.

[20] Anthony Vidler, “The Scenes of the Street,” 46

[21] Walter Benjamin, “Paris: Capital of the 19th Century,” Reflections (New York: Schocken Books, 1978. “In the arcades, Fourier had seen the architectonic canon for the phalanstery. Their reactionary transformation at Fourier’s hands was characteristic: while they originally served social ends, with him they became dwelling-places. The phalanstery became a city of arcades”. 

[22] Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. 12-18