Constant nieuwenhuys biography sample format

Constant Nieuwenhuys "was one of the founders of the experimental art group Reflex, which later became part of the international CoBrA movement. Until his resignation in , he would play an essential role in the formulation of a Situationist perspective on the contemporary city and a critique of modernist urbanism.

Psychogeography

In , Constant started a visionary architectural project that would stretch out over twenty years. A utopian city that went by the name of New Babylon , it consisted of an almost endless series of scale models, sketches, etchings and collages, further elaborated by manifestos, lectures, essays and films. New Babylon is the project for a city in which people will be able to live.

For to live means to be creative. New Babylon is the product of the creativity of the masses, based on the activation of the enormous creative potential which at the moment lies dormant and unexploited in the people. New Babylon assumes that as a result of automation non-creative work will disappear, that there will be a metamorphosis in morals and thinking, that a new form of society will emerge.

Constant envisaged a society where automation had realised the liberation of humanity from the toils of industrial work, replacing labour with a nomadic life of creative play outside of the economic domain and in disregard of any considerations of functionality. Homo Faber, the worker of industrial society, was to be succeeded by Homo Ludens, the playful man or as Constant stated, the creative man.

Psychogeographic map

This was the inhabitant of New Babylon that thanks to modern architectural techniques would be able to spontaneously control and reconfigure every aspect of the urban environment. The work of Constant thus combined an aversion for modernist functionalism with an intense appreciation of the emancipatory potentials of new technology. The work of Nieuwenhuys would have a direct and major influence on the rise of youth movement Provo.

Norwegian List of Constant's publications , incl. Catherine de Zegher, Mark Wigley eds.