Architecture Drawing Competition

The island: between utopia and metaphor for reality

The island summarises the double value inherent in the utopia:
- On the one hand "it generates tension towards news horizons, an aspiration that is well suited to the mentality of the utopist in conflict with his world" (Fortunati 1995a: 199-205).
- On the other hand, in its realization, closure and limitation: metaphysically, and ontologically, everything is contained in the island, a space that always refers to itself, and thus becomes an obsession.
At the base of the utopian construction there is a double movement, of opening and closing, of dilatation and contraction, which Tournier compares suggestively to the diastole ans the systole of the human heart.