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CABINET / Utopia on Ice

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As is well known, the architectural fulcrum of Fourier’s social system was the Phalanstery. Home to his associational community tethered together through the bond of “passionate attraction,” it was a people’s palace that assumed the form of—in Walter Benjamin’s characterization—a “city of arcades.”3 Importantly, however, it was also a climatological mechanism that took its place within Fourier’s larger providentialist schema, which envisaged the transformation of the global climate through human cultivation.4 This was, in other words, a vast—but divinely ordained—project of planetary air-conditioning. In his treatise The Theory of the Four Movements (1808), Fourier depicted the aurora borealis as a seminal effusion that could not enter into creative conjunction with its southern counterpart until humankind fulfilled the requisite preparations. These involved increasing the global population to two billion, and the subsequent cultivation of land as far as 65° north. This achievement, Fo

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