Chimera: The Architecture of Contemporary Utopias

What if the most urgent task for architecture today is to reclaim the work of imagining? In a present shaped by predictive models, climate dashboards, and platform logics that cast the future as already known—appearing to foreclose not only the possibility of transformation but the very meaningfulness of pursuing it—this issue of Architectural Design A–D, guest-edited by Elena Manferdini and Damjan Jovanovic, argues for the continued necessity of utopian thinking within and against the systems that constrain us. As we face the multiple urgencies of our capitalist present—and sense the darkening shadows of dystopic futures—the interventions staged in these pages propose not the neat solutions of blueprint utopianism, but strategies that reopen the field of the possible, burnishing our desire for alternatives without prescribing what the future might be. Crucially, this utopian imperative is recast in chimeric terms: as a hybrid, bricolaged, and provisional practice that acknowledges our complex entanglement within the planetary fabric. Running refusal and imagination together, the contributions featured here engage playable simulations, AI-mediated environments, feminist techno-futures, mobile infrastructures, and grassroots “practopias” whose insurgent energies reframe utopia as a shared improvisation in the present. Together, these contributions resist the dual temptations of nostalgic idealism and resigned realism, testing how architecture might negotiate, inhabit, and contest existing systems, bending them toward more enabling, equitable futures. They help us envision utopia not as a closed destination, but as a mode of speculative worldmaking: a living, ongoing process of chimeric invention.

Contributors:

Adil Bokhari, Federico Campagna, Robert Cha, Jennifer Chen, John Cooper and Krish Dittmer, Graham Harman, Damjan Jovanovic, Neil Leach, Elena Manferdini, Alina Nazmeeva, Antoine Picon, Carlo Ratti and Marco Santambrogio, Paulette Singley, Neil Spiller, Andrew Witt, and Natasha Wanganeen and Liam Young

Schedule:

March 26, 2026, 6pm-7pm (off-site)

Italian Cultural Institute of Los Angeles
1023 Hilgard Ave
Los Angeles, CA 90024

6:05pm: Welcome by Emanuele Amendola (IIC LA Director)
6:10pm: Introduction by Elena Manferdini
6:15pm: Carlo Ratti (MIT, PoliMI)
6:55pm: Q&A
7:00pm: Reception

RSVP

March 27, 2026, 5pm-7pm

SCI-Arc W.M. Keck Lecture Hall
960 East 3rd Street
Los Angeles, CA 90013

5:05pm: Welcome by Winka Dubbeldam
5:10pm: Introduction by Elena Manferdini and Damjan Jovanovic

5:30pm: Panel Discussion 1
Moderator: Damjan Jovanovic
Panelists: Adil Bokhari (ETH), Robert Cha (B.Arch ’09), Jennifer Chen (SCI-Arc), Graham Harman (SCI-Arc) + Jack Olivia-Rendler (B.Arch ’17), Elena Manferdini (SCI-Arc)

6:20pm: Panel Discussion 2
Moderator: Elena Manferdini
Panelists: John Cooper (SCI-Arc) and Krish Dittmer (M.Arch ’25), Damjan Jovanovic (SCI-Arc), Liam Young (SCI-Arc), Andrew Witt (WashU)

7:00pm: Reception