Speaking with a group of architects in 1967, Michel Foucault distinguished heterotopias, actually existing ‘other’ or ‘different’ spaces, from ‘fundamentally and essentially unreal’ utopias. This talk will revisit that figure—heterotopia—as a boundary problem, of which the modern research university is an important instance. Mapping the limits of the university as both a utopian ideal and a historical reality reveals a ‘heterotopology’ that extends the critique of power initiated by Foucault—including that critique’s utopian dimensions, which are more relevant than ever today. To do so, the talk will sketch an architectural genealogy of the American university and through it, of ‘America’ itself, in the process of becoming hegemonic. We will pay special attention to the ‘frontier’ and its horizons, which emerged as a ‘symbolic form’ reorganizing the topologies of knowledge at the very moment that art history discovered a related function for perspective and its vanishing points.
Heterotopologies: Frontier as Symbolic Form is part of