In Tomás Saraceno's studio, spiders collaborate on urban planning. The networks created by multiple species all weaving their webs in close proximity inspire connective structures for future cities.
In Saraceno's vision, these civilizations won't be limited by standard constraints such as asphalt, citizenship, or even gravity. Saraceno is designing for the Aerocene era, a speculative future in which human habitats float like clouds and spontaneously cluster in all three dimensions. By situating his spiders inside open polyhedra and rotating them regularly to simulate independence from terra firma, he's able to explore architectural and social phenomena within his idea of utopia.
Tomás Saraceno: Stillness in Motion—Cloud Cities; installation view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, December 17, 2016–May 21, 2017; photo: © Studio Tomás Saraceno.[/caption]
Granted, there are many questionable assumptions underlying Saraceno's utopian propositions. While he's succeeded in launching a floating structure lifted solely by heat from the sun, his airship has only supported a single person, and only for the briefest timespan. And then there's the niggling issue that spiders are unlike people – psychologically, socially and physically.
Saraceno's artistically-inclined approach to large-scale architecture – elements of which are currently on view in an engaging exhibit at SFMOMA – can come off as laughably impractical, and his mixing of metaphors is frequently hazy. However his work represents a notable departure from the utopian dreams advanced by many of his architectural progenitors – such as Constant Nieuwenhuys and Archigram – because Saraceno combines the seemingly disparate practices of fantastical planning and messy experimentation.
Tomás Saraceno, Cloud Cities Thermodynamics of Self-Assembly/005, 2015; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Accessions Committee Fund purchase; © Tomás Saraceno; photo: courtesy the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York.[/caption]
Saraceno identifies strongly with the 20th century architect-inventor Buckminster Fuller. In a 2011 interview, he explicitly positioned his Aerocene architecture in terms of "what Bucky was doing" in the late '50s, when Fuller proposed a speculative floating city dubbed Cloud 9. There are meaningful similarities between the two men, not only in their aspirations to improve the human condition but also in their tendency to explore hypothetical futures through what Fuller referred to as "artifacts".
A major difference – which is reflective of their respective eras and also indicative of why Saraceno's work isn't merely derivative – is the shift in emphasis from product to process. Fuller made artifacts for purposes of research and development (or in the service of his relentless salesmanship). The whole point of his practice was to implement whatever he was prototyping. For Saraceno, the act of experimentation appears to be sufficient, insofar as it encourages new ways of thinking about social structures, citizenship and belonging.
