The influence of domestic utopias in the book Fast Forward

The twelve sample projects, chosen and analysed in depth thanks also to the power of redesign, have seen a range of outcomes – some buildings, such as Wolfgang Feierback’s Kunststroffhaus FG 2000, for instance, are still in use, while others, such as the Monsanto House of the Future commissioned by Walt Disney and designed by the architects Richard Hamilton and Marvin Goody and the engineer Albert G. H. Dietz from MIT, were pulled down after just a decade, whereas others have remained strictly on paper or were part of a wider programme that never saw the light of day. All, though, can be regarded as true “habitable time machines.” “The people who lived in these houses would have been projected into a credible future, because they would have had access to totally cutting-edge technology: electronic devices, cable video phone systems enabling them to communicate with the outside world, kitchens with highly evolved equipment. Some already had microwaves in the early 1940s or early 1950s. There was also a notion of spatiality tied up with a new concept of sociality, with extremely flexible, open spaces that could be shared with other families or used for a variety of other purposes,” says Giberti. While the visionary architects seem to have aced it as regards some of the aspects of life in the future – not all the prophesies came true quite so precisely. Plastic, for example, has slid down the building and furnishing scale since the spotlight was turned onto its environmental impact, while technology, despite being omnipresent, now tends to blend into the domestic space. “The idea of a dashboard or control tower, crammed with switches, lights and  buttons that turned the housewife into the captain of a spaceship has gone completely, none of us would want to live like that. With Alexa, Siri and the other voice command systems, we can speak to our homes regardless of where the devices are located. In this sense, the language of the future no longer exists, we live in houses in which there’s no longer a connection between technology and its representation,” Giberti continues. What does resonate with the present, though, and somewhat surprisingly, is the fact that many of these houses were designed to be able to cater for potentially lenthy confinements: “Obviously no-one was thinking about a possible pandemic, but there was the atomic threat and people saw the outside world as potentially dangerous. The thought of self-segregation was fairly widespread, these houses were designed like survival capsules and had to contain everything required to sustain their inhabitants.”