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Constant Nieuwenhuys
(New Babylon)
New Babylon is an anti-capitalist city perceived and de-
signed in 1959-74 as a future potentiality by visual artist
Constant Nieuwenhuys.Initially known as Dériville (from
“ville dérivée”, literally, “drift city”), it was later renamed
New Babylon. Henri Lefebvre explained: “a New Babylon
-- a provocative name, since in the Protestant tradition
Babylon is a figure of evil. New Babylon was to be the
figure of good that took the name of the cursed city and
transformed itself into the city of the future.”The goal was
the creating of alternative life experiences, called ‘situ-
ations’. Sarah Williams Goldhagen, explained: [In the
1950s, Constant] had already been working for years on
his “New Babylon” series of paintings, sketches, texts,and
architectural models describing the shape of a post-rev-
olutionary society. Constant’s New Babylon was to be a
series of linked transformable structures, some of which
were themselves the size of a small city--what architects
call a megastructure. Perched above ground, Constant’s
megastructures would literally leave the bourgeois me-
tropolis below and would be populated by homo ludens-
-man at play. (Homo Ludens is the title of a book by the
great Dutch historian Johan Huizinga.) In the New Baby-
lon, the bourgeois shackles of work, family life, and civic
responsibility would be discarded. The post-revolutionary
individual would wander from one leisure environment
to another in search of new sensations. Beholden to no
one, he would sleep, eat, recreate, and procreate where
and when he wanted. Self-fulfillment and self-satisfac-
tion were Constant’s social goals. Deductive reasoning,
goal-oriented production, the construction and better-
ment of a political community--all these were eschewed.