Can Architects Predict the Future?
Is avant-garde architecture truly a harbinger of buildings to come? Will the urban landscape of 2100 be filled with whirls of titanium? Nope, says architect and professor Witold Rybczynski in Slate. “Even if a building succeeds in breaking the mold, that is no guarantee that it is showing the way, for innovative buildings rarely anticipate the future,” he writes.
While noting some exceptions (such as Frank Lloyd Wright‘s Usonian House foreshadowing ranch houses of the ’50s and ’60s), he offers a nice hey-I’m-still-waiting-for-the-life-promised-by-The-Jetsons roundup of the avant-garde architecture that never really caught on, including Le Corbusier‘s U-turn from white boxes to raw concrete and the architectural flash in the pan that was New Brutalism.
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