"...Homes like
these, at the ugly edges of urban
sprawl, the search for a home nestled in nature, often ends in the empty
repetition and tasteless sterility of a suburban tract development. Instead of
delighting in natural beauty, urban sprawl defiles it. ..What is the future of the
single family home? 'There’s no future
to that, because the cost of services to the house is growing by such leaps and
bounds, that the taxes on it can no where near pay for the services that the
town has to put there, the water, the sewer, the roads…what is interesting is,
the push to the city.'”
The conclusions of a Vibrant NEO 2040 forum of the NEOSCC?
Nope. Try the 30 year forecast of renowned architect Phillip Johnson, talking
with Walter Cronkite, in 1967.
Watch the entire video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__MGYrcapdk
if you have the time. Many of the predictions are laughable, as these usually
are from the safe distance of nearly half a century. Even the ones that are almost dead on miss the
mark because they fail to take other future developments into account (see the
part about the home office for a good example.)
The point is that straight line projections based on past
performance are always flawed, especially when human nature and technological
developments are involved.
I'm not advocating that we not look forward - just that we not selectively use the past as our only predictor for the future. That's why work like NEOSCC/Sasaki's is lazy and politics driven. Like architect Johnson in the video promoting his ugly high rises of the future (pictured below) or the other guy with his cold concrete adobe bunkers from Expo '67, they are promoting their visions of the way things ought to be, and then making the facts fit that outcome.
They have been predicting the decline of the single family
home, the unsustainability of suburbs from an environmental and economic
perspective while forecasting the rise of the cities for almost fifty years!
They can't predict it with any more certainty now than they
could then. The only difference is a political agenda that is creating the
"urgency" now.
If you don't have time for the entire video, the money
quotes are at 2:00 and 23:00.
Johnson gives us a candid assessment of the urban future he
saw for us as shown: "you spend all your days working in a labyrinth, you see,
you're going to spend all your nights there, too. We're just going to make it
as tolerable as possible."
Onward, to a "tolerable" future!
