Whatever happened to the future? It’s still around, of course, mostly in Europe and Japan, but over the years the Fantastic World of Tomorrow’s gotten … cheaper, simpler, and — most tragically of all — the future’s gotten too damned small.
Luckily there are a few visionaries left who aren’t frightened of a future that doesn’t fit in your pocket, a tomorrow with a vast scope, a monstrously dramatic scale, a time of awe-inspiring dimensions: they’ve dared to look over the horizon and visualize a truly big tomorrow.
That’s the introduction to an image-filled post about Paolo Soleri, the “Father of the Arcology”. Ever since I first heard of them I’ve been strangely fascinated with arcologies. Strange, because I wouldn’t want to live in one myself. When I was a kid I thought living in a giant tower that had everything you would ever need seemed like a fun lifestyle but now I want my own private space with plenty of distance between me and the neighbors. However, there are a lot of people who don’t mind – who even enjoy – living crowed together with other people and if all those people lived in arcologies there’d be more room for the rest of us.
August 26th, 2008 - 2:41 pm
Living in a beehive-like apartment would be fine, save for the fact that people do not all agree on what constitutes undesirable noise, what quiet hours should be, and what kinds of cooking smells are unwelcome.
Of course, in the future they might be able to build hive-blocks with noise- and sound-cancelling technology, which would make them a lot better….
But still…I’d miss nature around me. I’d miss having an actual lawn instead of some little welcome-mat-sized piece of syntho-turf.