Douglas Murphy - Last Futures

Nature, Technology and the
End of Architecture

Douglas Murphy

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 didnt 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.