Building Expectation: Past and Present Visions of the Architectural Future
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building expectation PAST AND PRESENT VISIONS OF THE ARCHITECTURAL FUTURE COVER Katherine Roy, View of Industria, 2011 This illustration, commissioned for the exhibition, depicts the great city of “Industria” as described by Comte Didier de Chousy in his 1883 novel Ignis. David Winton Bell Gallery. LEFT Margaret Bourke-White, Futurama Spectators, ca. 1939 Visitors to the General Motors pavilion in the 1939 New York World’s Fair are gently whisked past the Futurama in a track-based chair ride designed especially for couples. Courtesy of the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. Nathaniel Robert Walker Curator and Author David Winton Bell Gallery, Brown University CONTRIBUTORS to THE CATALOG Brian Horrigan UTURE F Dietrich Neumann Kenneth M. Roemer CONTRIBUTORS to THE EXHibition Archives and Special Collections Library, Vassar College Australian National Film and Sound Archive Avery Architectural and Fine Art Library, Columbia University Libraries RCHITECTURAL RCHITECTURAL A Dennis Bille Brandeis University Library HE T Brown University Libraries F Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society O Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company General Motors LLC, GM Media Archive Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin Historic New Harmony, University of Southern Indiana Brian Knep expectation Maison d’Alleurs (Musée de la science-fiction, de l’utopie et des voyages extraordinaires) Mary Evans Picture Library Jane Masters Katherine Roy ND PRESENT VISIONS ND PRESENT b u i l d i n g François Schuiten A Cameron Shaw Christian Waldvogel PAST PAST Pippi Zornoza INTRODUCTION t has been said that the past is a foreign country — but it is the future that remains It is now plain and clear that neither undiscovered. Despite the obvious truth that no one has past nor future are existent, and Ibeen to the future, that no one has that it is not properly stated that there even seen a photograph of it or heard are three times, past, present, a credible eyewitness account of it, the last three centuries have wit- “the future”? Is it merely a process and future. But it might properly be nessed the rise and dissemination of of extrapolation, in which we said that there are three times, a body of visual codes and tropes attempt to imagine the fulfillment the present of things past, the present that are commonly seen and under- of trends and patterns that are stood as “futuristic.” These “progres- gaining power in the present — of things present, and the present sive” or “forward-looking” attributes or is something more subjective, of things future. These three are in the are derived from an entirely imagi- more arbitrary, more rhetorical, soul, but elsewhere I do not see them: nary landscape, indicative of a dest- and/ or more creative taking place? ination that is impossible to visit. Yet Building Expectation also the present of things past is in memory; nearly everyone can recognize the hopes to suggest ways of thinking the present of things present is in place where no one has been. about how popular expectation intuition; the present of things future Building Expectation: Past and shapes what human societies under- Present Visions of the Architectural stand as desirable, even as possible, is in expectation. Future offers a glimpse into this in the real world of the here-and- The Confessions of St. Augustine Book 11: undiscovered country, presenting a now. Can speculative design liberate? Time And Eternity, 398 AD collection of historic and ongoing Can an agreed-upon “futuristic” visions of the future, expressed in aesthetic also restrict and confine? architectural and urban terms, from These questions may seem particu- the nineteenth century until the larly pressing in the portion of present day. The focus of the show the exhibition which is dedicated is less on canonical designers or to contemporary visions of the future, LEFT art-historical movements and more as many of these installations may The Neopolitans, The New City…, 1938 on broadly based, popular specula- not qualify as “futuristic” by the This pamphlet, published in Seattle by a group called “The Neopolitans,” advocated an tion in the public sphere. It aims to standards which emerge as domi- “American alternative” to the fascist and communist recipes for social evolution: lever- ask a number of basic but important nant, even as a sort of orthodoxy, aging the power of corporate industry to remake society into one single political and questions: what do people stand in our retrospective consideration economic organization, thereby eliminating to gain from designing “futures”? of past futures. wasteful competition and the vice and 3 poverty it breeds. New planned cities such How do people, individually and as “Neopolis” would be central to the scheme, and these would adopt a radial Garden collectively, decide what does City-like layout “Americanized” by stand- and does not look futuristic, what alone, step-back skyscrapers. On loan from the John Hay Library, Brown University. is and is not permitted to inhabit THE HISTORY OF THE FUTURE REFORMING THE FUTURE he “World of Tomorrow” has usually been number of future-makers who understood imagined first and foremost as a place, in architecture in this way — who saw it as a one sense or another — as the new Promised tool to articulate, frame, and advocate Land, the Millennial Landscape, as Utopia. cultural and political development along And architecture, cast since the Enlightenment as the scientificA and technological lines — are presented in T calling card for cultural and technological periods in the the first section of Building Expectation. Their futures “grand narrative” of human development and progress, were constructed for political goals, designed to literally has always been one of the future’s most revealing and remake the world in the scientific image of industry. recognizable features. The British industrialist Robert Owen (1771 – 1858) It would probably be impossible to locate a single is a very early example of a techno-utopian reformer, moment as the birth of “progressive,” future-oriented and the designs he created and commissioned speak architecture, but one would perhaps not go too wrong volumes about the ways in which the early-nineteenth starting such a search in the eighteenth century. century imagination thought a progressive and futuristic During this time in France, for example, the influential world might take form. Owen was a highly successful architect, writer, and educator Julien-David Leroy factory manager who despised the effects that industrialism (1724 – 1803) formulated a vision of history that used was having on traditional British society. He believed architecture to trace what he believed to be the rising that “the character of man is formed for him, and not trajectory of human progress. As Barry Bergdoll by him,” and that Britain’s typical polluted factory town recounts in his book Leon Vaudoyer: Historicism in the was exactly the kind of place that formed bad character. Age of Industry (1994), Leroy separated architecture For these reasons Owen began to fashion an alter- into two distinct components: the science of structural native paradigm for living in what he saw as the inevitable technology and the art of articulation and ornament. and desirable rise of the industrial age. Rather than The quality of art might go up and down according to reform industry, he sought to reform society: the factory the health of any given society, argued Leroy, but science town was transformed into a new sort of village estate, only accumulates and improves over time. Eventually, with the kind of architecture that would facilitate a totally at least in the view of many of Leroy’s revolutionary new social fabric emphasizing equality, fraternity, compatriots, science would lead to a human triumph healthiness, and a new set of scientific values to replace over nature, even over human nature — its story was “backward-looking” institutions such as the family and the a story with a destiny, with an ending. church. He designed a number of different versions of Architecture, as a combination of both art and sci- these factories-for-living in Britain, but his ultimate ambi- ence, was from Leroy’s time increasingly seen by many tion was to start afresh somewhere completely new: as the best indicator of historical period, of evolutionary the United States. Owen hired architect Stedman Whitwell spirit, and of ultimate destiny. Such thinking begs to delineate for him a visionary town named “New the architect to understand his or her work not as merely Harmony.” A model was constructed and exhibited in the art or as science, but rather as an indicator and /or White House. After Owen outlined his plans to a joint FIG 1 FIG 2 harbinger of its “time,” or its slot on the ladder of human session of Congress in 1825, he took scores of settlers to Robert Owen (author), Stedman Whitwell (architect), F. Bate (artist and engraver), Stedman Whitwell (architect), 4 Engraving of [new buildings for the site of New Harmony] from A Bird’s Eye View of a Community as Proposed by Robert Owen, 1838 evolution. This framework for understanding cultural begin building New Harmony in southern Indiana. The Co-operative Magazine and Monthly Herald, January 1826 The later scheme for Owen’s ideal future town has kept the development as a series of movements, each unique but The community failed and his scheme was never A walled garden makes up this factory-for-living, with a central original conservatory and smokestack-sporting communal buildings, glass conservatory surrounded by four industrially-tuned but the details and ornaments have been strangely transformed connected in a grand narrative, is called historicism, and realized on the American frontier, but Owen continued communal buildings and Gothicized “cloister” walls of residences. from a Gothic cloister garden into a Mughal paradise garden, On loan from the Archives and Special Collections Library, including great domes, Persian or Indian arches, and roof terraces.