These are Not the Homes of the Future

Forbes has a collection of futuristic house designs that Bethany Lyttle of picked up for Yahoo. Here are some choice excerpts from the Yahoo article:

But fast forward a few hundred years and the traditional four walls and a roof won’t be standard housing fare, according to urban experts. Climate change, population growth and geo-political shifts are already redefining the way we look at residential spaces of the future…

Architects and urban planners can’t pinpoint exactly when these concepts will become necessary–it all depends on how economic and geographic factors play out–but they’re confident the most effective ideas will rise to the top.

What a pointless exercise in futility! This collection, with the exception of the interesting, yet flawed, concept of putting homes over the street, should have been titled “Not the Homes of the Future”. This kind of distorted “cult of the future” actually offends me because it cheapens the value that architects can bring to real humans solving real problems. Nobody wants to live in the future these architects have envisioned. These fantasies lack any grounding in reality or the essential humanity that ties us to place and time.

We have seen this sort of thing before and the future that is predicted does not come to pass. Take one visit to the Epcot Center and you’ll see how accurate predictions of the future are. I prefer to focus on the real issues that face us now and not waste time contemplating a strange and alien future that will not arrive.