Last Futures: Nature, Technology and the End of Architecture

INTRODUCTION

This book tells the story of the near futures of a past era and what became of them. The late 1960s and early 1970s were a time of rapid change, and last chances. How did this affect architecture, the form of cities and the lives of their citizens? It was a time when radicals of previous generations found themselves at the heart of the establishment, while a new generation challenged the foundations of that elite. What united them all, however, was a belief that the future was up for grabs, that changes in the very patterns of life were possible – in fact that it was inevitable that, the way things were going, life itself and its physical surroundings would soon be utterly different.

In those days of the Cold War and the space race, it was common to imagine the future in terms of visually striking advanced technology of a massive scale. This was the era of space rockets, giant satellite dishes, radio transmitters and TV towers, and these artefacts of high technology were reflected in the architectural predictions of the time. Innovations in construction led many to believe that buildings of the near future were going to be larger and more complex, with forms that would express the increased social complexity of the late twentieth-century world. Many designs of the era appear fantastic and implausible to our eyes now, yet at the time were often considered only a few years away from implementation, inevitable developments considering the speed of urban change at the time.

The world exhibitions and the culture surrounding them were some of the clearest examples of this way of thinking, and architects and planners were heavily involved. Nation states and corporate organisations invested enormous sums in promoting their values and ideologies through architecture and technology at these international events. Looking closely at this culture allows us to see not only the official stories that those in power told about themselves through architecture, but also the fears and struggles that quietly informed these pageants’ political aesthetics.

The rate of social change then apparent influenced whole generations of architects and planners to imagine how the city could be made to be more responsive and flexible, in the process inventing a kind of anti-architecture, against monumentality and against permanence. In some ways the resulting investigations attempted to turn housing into another form of white goods, like refrigerators or washing machines, but in others they asked profound questions about how people might live in cities in the future, and about what relationship they might have with transience in their built environment. The image of the nomadic subject moving freely through a city constantly fine-tuned to their requirements was one that haunted the dreams of the age.

While many embraced the promise of change, the strains of this transforming world were everywhere apparent. One reaction in this time of upheaval, which encompassed the Vietnam War and other proxy battles of the Cold War, the nuclear age and the military-industrial complex, was to attempt to escape from modern society entirely. The communes and other countercultural movements of the era were forced to innovate architecturally in their attempts to create new forms of social organisation, and at the time their rudimentary experiments, often imitations of the most sophisticated contemporaneous technology, attracted great interest. They inspired many to consider ways in which the city of the future might be remade from scratch, in the service of completely new ideas of what constituted the good life.

This was also the era of first-wave environmentalism, when the global side-effects of the Industrial Revolution and the exploitation of hydrocarbons first began to enter public consciousness. Architecture found itself having to understand its role in the systems of the planet, the limits of which were becoming more apparent by the day. On the one hand this unleashed a flood of pessimism, as population growth, pollution and resource depletion all appeared to threaten the existence of human society, even long before climate change became an issue. On the other hand, the new sciences that had fed this environmentalism, the holistic studies of systemic behaviours known as cybernetics and ecology, inspired architecture to change. The apocalyptic rhetoric that took hold at the time had a profound effect on how people thought architecture would be made in the future.

Throughout the era, again and again the notion of the spherical environment, the dome or the bubble, came to represent the new-found sense of the earth as a small, vulnerable globe in the vastness of space, and the quest, for some, was to expand that protective interior zone to encompass ever-greater aspects of life. Over a century before, the first industrially produced buildings – the Crystal Palace of 1851, the arcades of Paris – had stirred the public imagination and suggested a future world under glass, where everything was comfortable and harmonious. The massive interior environments of the time, both imaginary and in some cases built in germinal form, were some of the purest architectural visions of social and natural harmony conceived in human history.

But these futures failed to arrive, and as time moved on, a different world of high technology coupled with social and aesthetic reaction set in. The city of the future went from being an imminent prospect to become instead a thing of the past. In the US and its sphere of influence, extreme economic liberalism combined with social conservatism, and facilitated by the development of computing and digital technology, the existing order began to ossify. By the time the Cold War ended, radical change of any sort began to seem ever more distant.

There are many reasons these futures didn’t arrive as expected. As with all innovations, designers met with many problems when they attempted to incorporate major change rapidly, and a number of accidents and disasters, both isolated and system-wide, occurred when new technologies went badly wrong. The political reaction against futuristic architecture came on a number of levels, from designers and planners who became disillusioned with the optimistic rhetoric as the political context changed around them in the 1970s, to a public who grew weary and distrustful of so-called expert and professional opinion. Ideologically, many rejected the egalitarian impulses of these visions of the future, and with a rise in individualism, they reacted aesthetically and politically on a number of levels, with the purpose of obliterating the potential for architecture to be seen as a tool in the service of social change. In many cases, the boldness of the social vision of these last futures was matched by the severity of the reactions to them later.

After at least a generation of stasis, however, it now appears that we again stand at the edge of massive transformations in human society. Rapid climate change, however severe, and however we are able to avoid or mitigate its effects, is likely to have – at the very least – a profoundly negative effect upon agriculture and thus the human food supply, while also rendering some parts of the world practically uninhabitable. As a result, mass migration at a level never before seen, and a concomitant increase in political and social instability, war and famine, seem inevitable. Apocalyptic rhetoric in the public sphere has reached a point not seen since the oil crisis of the early 1970s, but this time the signals are less a forewarning than first symptoms of a catastrophe already occurring.

For some, as before, technology offers an escape route out of the crisis. Rapid developments in energy production (including renewable and zero-carbon energy production), medical technology, finance and telecommunications media all seem to offer glimpses of some kind of route through the unfolding crisis. Unlike in the past, however, many of these routes simply offer the preservation of current wealthy lifestyles for as long as possible, rather than the possibility of remaking human relations entirely.

Once again, great powers are moving against each other in a multi-polar world, while a massive wave of popular disgust at elites continues to unfold. As global economic inequality widens, revolutions and unrest have erupted against establishments across the world. After generations of being told ‘there is no alternative’, it seems that change – of one kind or another – is definitely coming.

In the experiments in architecture and urbanism of the post-war era, we see that many of the abandoned and defeated futures that the era dreamed resonate strongly with our current experience, at times giving us a sense of political déjà vu. These previous attempts to deal with the various challenges caused by technological, environmental and social change, the paths suggested but untrodden, deserve our attention, since they may offer us ways of working through current crises.

Many of the subjects in this book are familiar from architectural histories of the period, but many have quietly been dismissed as germinal forms of what led inexorably to present conditions, or as failures whose flaws are self-evident from today’s perspective. Others have been understood as radical in formal and expressive content, but with their social implications considered naive or irrelevant. By situating them within a context of architectural radicalism on a longer timescale, I hope to show that there are still glimmers of potential and that by looking to the past, strategies for the present might become clearer.

The attitude of this book, however, is generally anti-utopian. Against common interpretations, many of the architectural experiments and proposals of the time are poorly understood by stories of human and social perfectibility. Much that I will discuss often appears to today’s eyes to be part of a period of naive utopianism – a belief that good design would improve its users and that ordinary human beings were material to be moulded in the service of a grand vision. This is largely myth, retroactively applied, and in the following chapters I hope to provide a more sophisticated view of various cultures who understood that they were going through a period of rapid change, with a great many serious challenges to be addressed which could not be ignored, and the ambitious ways that they attempted to work through them.

This book does not presuppose expert knowledge of architectural history, and it is not a comprehensive historical guide to the architecture or literature of the era in question. Indeed, like many germinal forms, much of the design discussed within is often of dubious quality when evaluated according to established standards. But what shines through is the fact that the experiments and visions of this period were far more sober attempts to address the challenges of the times than the apparently more sensible world that came afterwards, a world whose continued existence since the last decade’s upheavals has raised the ominous prospect that it may well be too late to change.

In short, this book is an attempt to contribute to the understanding of some of the most vital and difficult challenges that humanity faces in general, not by making a direct argument about today’s world, but by looking back a few generations and telling a story of what we can only hope were not the last futures.

Chapter 1

The Museum of the Future

A visitor stepping out of Jean-Drapeau metro station in Montreal, Canada, is confronted with one of the oddest sights in all of architecture. Through the branches of the trees in this island park rises a strange silvery object. It is transparent, dissolving against the sky, a fuzzy haze that hardens towards its perfectly circular profile. If the visitor walks towards this odd vision, the beautiful and delicate lattice of its construction is revealed, along with the platforms and buildings within its spherical shell. A closer look shows that this filigree dome is welded together from innumerable short steel bars, as plain as scaffolding poles. Surrounded by greenery in summer and encrusted with icicles in the winter, the dome seems to melt into the sky, a huge object with almost no presence.

Approaching the dome along a pathway bordered by shallow ponds, the visitor will find that there is a small gap at the very bottom of the dome through which they can enter, and in passing through the threshold, a remarkable thing happens. Although the external world remains completely visible, all of a sudden the dome seems to vanish, its boundaries disappearing as the visitor moves inward. At the same time, the entire sky becomes marked with the grid of fine elements, in every direction; the triangles and hexagons of the structure seem as far away as the stars, ethereally etched against the sky above. The visitor feels as though they are both inside and outside at the same time, and that there is the most featherweight of protective boundaries around them at an almost indeterminate distance.

The geodesic dome of Buckminster Fuller’s USA Pavilion

This remarkable structure was once the USA Pavilion at Expo 67, one of the most iconic works of Richard Buckminster Fuller, the Cold War world’s most visionary designer.

Expo 67 was one of the most popular world exhibitions in the entire 150-year history of the cultural form. Awarded to Quebec in the early 1960s by the Bureau Internationale des Expositions, in part to mark the Canadian Centennial, over fifty nations took part and many millions of people passed through the park in the six months that it was open. It was situated on two artificially constructed islands in the St Lawrence River and linked to the rest of the city by new metro lines, bridges and a monorail. It involved the construction of hundreds of buildings, gardens and amusements, most of them temporary, some permanent, and some that were among the most important works of architecture of the 1960s.

It’s easy to forget now that world’s fairs were once highly significant events, pageants of progress, displays of industrial, technical and cultural power. Stranger still, they were entertaining, the sort of event where half a million people could pass through in a single day, with families travelling across countries, even from around the world, just to attend. Odd relics from an age where material culture was still the scene of the greatest achievements of progress and development, where new technology was large, visible and worth travelling to see, expos were a cross between amusement parks, political rallies and museums – museums of the near future.

The history of world’s fairs is inextricably tied into the history of global capitalism. Distant relatives of the old trade fairs that occurred throughout pre-industrial history, world’s fairs appeared almost fully formed with the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London. This was the very first event in the world with a self-proclaimed global scope, inviting the nations of the world to come together and celebrate the new cultures of industrial production. Conceived in a genuine spirit of optimistic fraternity, but also as a spectacular patriotic event designed to help alleviate the social pressures that had led to revolutions all over the world in preceding years, it attempted to show that all people had a stake in the new world of capitalism and global trade.

It was also in the less noble interests of the UK to host the Great Exhibition as a demonstration of their might, given that at this point they still dominated the global economy, indeed were at the very zenith of their power. But there was also a chance for the USA and other countries to demonstrate their own achievements, which in many ways were beginning to threaten British supremacy. Within the exhibition the workings of industrial capitalism were put on public display. Arranged as a series of exhibits divided thematically and geographically, the millions of visitors who passed through encountered displays of raw materials, machinery and industrial equipment, and a bewildering range of products and manufactures. From furniture to textiles, from sculpture to the brand new media technology of photography, the Great Exhibition was a comprehensive introduction to the modern capitalist world.

The success of the Great Exhibition led to reiterations of the event in New York in 1853, Paris in 1855 and London again in 1862, before expositions spread across the world over the next fifty years. Early on, a pattern was established regarding the conventions of an expo, a pattern that involved massive, overwhelming collections of industrial machinery, raw materials, products, design, craftwork and fine art. Each World’s Fair was intended to display the achievements of industrial capitalism and give prominence to the power of global trade. Thus the nineteenth-century crowds who attended these events were educated in the world of commodities and exchange, as every conceivable object (including human beings) was on show, subject to the same regime of examination and economic comparison.

Fairs were dreamlike events, in many cases the visitors’ first experience of the fantastic qualities of capitalism, its aspirations and its tendency to abstract objects, processes and labour into an intangible realm. Furthermore, over the first half century, as the expositions became larger, they reflected growing waves of nationalism. In the process they became ‘safe’ spaces, akin to the Olympic Games, in which national tensions could be worked out visually and spatially, and where different ideologies would compete to stake their claim to offer the best future for humanity.

Architecture was absolutely integral to world’s fairs from the very beginning. From the fragile sublime of the Crystal Palace in 1851, the resounding entry of industrial engineering into an architectural world that was groaning under the weight of academic traditions, a pattern was set up of gigantic iron and glass palaces, vast single internal rooms filled with exhibits, veritable cornucopias of objects. This format – the giant hall stuffed with displays – reached its apotheosis with the 1889 Universal Exposition in Paris, where the Eiffel Tower and Galerie des Machines created technical achievements in industrial architecture that remained unsurpassed for another forty years afterwards.

By the start of the twentieth century, expositions became so large that they spread across a selection of pavilions, each one assigned to a country or industrial corporation. This had the effect of multiplying the different voices expressed through architecture and allowed for the statements to become more complete. For example, Le Corbusier’s Esprit Nouveau pavilion in Paris’s 1925 L’Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs et industriels modernes displayed his polemical proposals for high-rise living in Paris. The Plan Voisin was one of the most infamous architectural proposals ever made, with its depiction of a series of gigantic tower blocks smashed through the centre of Paris, for better or worse one of the most influential urban visions of all time.

At the same exposition, Konstantin Melnikov built the Soviet pavilion, a bold timber structure arranged across a diagonal axis, which today is one of the best known works of Russian constructivism, eulogised for its expression of the dynamic and hopeful energy of the early Soviet Union before Stalinism. The 1929 exhibition in Barcelona saw the construction of Mies van der Rohe’s German Pavilion, a deliciously refined series of polished steel columns and walls made of waxy travertine, demonstrating his vision of a luxury avant-garde – austere, technocratic, universal, yet classically minded – which would eventually evolve into the American post-war corporate style. At the 1937 Paris expo, Le Corbusier’s Pavillon des Temps Nouveaux casually introduced a technologically advanced steel-framed aesthetic that would go on to become incredibly influential for following generations, but this achievement was completely overwhelmed by the Soviet and German pavilions, both totalitarian, both classical, both headbangingly regressive.

The last expo before World War II, the New York World’s Fair in 1939, marked the transition from displays of industrial and cultural achievement to loud proclamations of the direction the future would take. Entitled ‘Dawn of a New Day’, it featured Futurama, an immersive exhibit created by titans of American industry General Motors, where visitors endured massive queues to be taken on a kind of futuristic ghost train. Inside, they sat in cars and were carried through a model environment depicting a near-future America of superfast highways, industrialised agriculture and bucolic super-suburbs. Today, Futurama appears something like a cross between Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and a fairly quotidian depiction of the skyscrapers and motorways that would later become so utterly familiar. It offered a corporate future based entirely around the motor car, with a germinal splash of the aesthetics of the atomic age. For the American visitors of the time, still smarting from the Great Depression and aware of – if not yet involved in – WWII, it presented an attractive image of the American future.

The primary architectural vision of the New York fair was a variation on the moderne style: streamlined and industrial but not too avant-garde. Its defining images were the Trylon and Perisphere, which were an obelisk and globe, white, near featureless and poised in such a way that they made for fantastic photographs, icons of their time. The Perisphere contained an exhibit, Democracity, which was another immersive vision of the future, conceived by Edward Bernays, nephew of Sigmund Freud and ‘father’ of public relations. Again, behind this gently optimistic view of the future was the power of the American corporations, who were subtly but aggressively attempting to stake a claim on the hearts and minds of the public as the politics of the New Deal threatened to sideline them from power.

It was not until thirteen years after WWII that there was another official world’s exhibition, Expo 58 in Brussels. At this point, one of the conceptual problems that would beset futuristic architecture over the second half of the twentieth century was already becoming apparent: in a world of atomic manipulation, of increasingly miniaturised electronic technologies, how best to display these new forms of technology in a spatial setting? This first post-war expo offered one the most blindingly obvious attempts to work this problem out. The Atomium, built for Expo 58 and still standing today, rises over 100 meters above Brussels and is a literal, inhabitable representation of an iron molecule. Nine large spheres – the atoms – are linked by structures representing the atomic bonds, which hold lifts and elevators that carry visitors to a viewing platform on the top floor.

A more successful attempt to deal with the new world of mass consumption and multimedia once again came from the studio of Le Corbusier. The Philips Pavilion, built for the electronics manufacturer, was almost completely unlike any other building in Le Corbusier’s oeuvre. This is due to it being largely the work of Iannis Xenakis, a Greek engineer working for Le Corbusier who, after an acrimonious split with the master relating to credit for the pavilion’s authorship, went on to become a renowned composer of experimental and stochastic music. For the pavilion, Le Corbusier (occupied somewhat with the building of the city of Chandigarh in India) sketched out a floor-plan that was a vague diagram of a stomach with two narrow entrances at either end. On top of this Xenakis set a series of hyperbolic paraboloids, saddle-shaped surfaces that curve in two directions, meeting at the edges to create a tent-like enclosure, which were realised as pre-fabricated concrete panels held in place partially by cables tied across the ruled surface.

Inside the Philips Pavilion, hundreds of loudspeakers and projectors were embedded into the walls for the purposes of displaying Poème électronique, a multimedia display featuring electroacoustic music by Edgar Varèse and a short film by Le Corbusier. Visitors were brought into the darkened hall before music and images emanated from all directions. Varèse’s composition is a near-collage