Architects have always dreamed big. Some of their ideas came to fruition and others were lost to the annals of history. But Brown University graduate student Nathaniel Walker thinks the ideas of the past are not just a curiosity, but worth studying.
On Saturday, he opens his exhibit “Building Expectation: Past and Present Visions of the Architectural Future” at Brown’s David Winton Bell Gallery in the List Art Center. Walker recently took some time to discuss the exhibit, which is free and open to the public. The exhibit closes Nov. 6.
PBN: Can you tell us a little about the exhibit? Was it required for your academic study?
WALKER: This exhibition will, hopefully, do a couple of things. Number one, we want to explore some questions about the past and present creation of “futures.” For starters, since nobody has been to the future, how do people, individually and together, decide was does and does not look “futuristic?” Also, we want to explore a number of different motivations for speculative design. Futuristic visions have been created, for example, to illustrate political ideals, to entertain people, and to sell products like whisky, motor oil, cigarettes and margarine.
The second thing we hope to accomplish is a little more difficult, I think. We hope to demonstrate that the future is not required to look a certain way. The future is ours to make as we will. It doesn’t have to be full of skyscraper mega-cities and endless mega-highways if we don’t want to build that stuff.
Was the exhibit required for my academic study? In a word, no. I’m not getting any credit for this, strictly speaking. You might even say I did it for kicks.
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PBN: Wait, you did it for fun! How did you find the time? Did you find the project helpful to your academic studies?
WALKER: Well, finding the time was a no-brainer. It is not every day that a graduate student is given the chance to curate his own show in the David Winton Bell Gallery. As soon as the opportunity opened up, I leapt for it, as I knew it would be a fantastic experience that would help me grow as a scholar in countless ways.
The topic of futuristic speculation is, happily, directly related to my doctoral studies, which focus a bit more specifically on visions of architecture in Victorian science-fiction. So there is no doubt at all that the questions we formulated for the exhibition will help me write a better dissertation. And of course, the research for this show will go on to bear fruit in my further studies for years to come.
PBN: What do you think about the items in the exhibit? Did any of the predictions about the future of architecture come true?
WALKER: There are some pretty wild and wacky items in the exhibition, such as a 1930s proposal for an enormous skyscraper with a outdoor spiral ramp that winds all the way to the parking garage on its top. Can you imagine the carsickness? Or the consequences of brake failure?). There are others, which are vaguely maniacal, like a deeply serious proposal that every person in North America should be relocated to a new corporate-industrial city by Niagara Falls and stuck in a steel beehive apartment tower.
Many other visions are a little more down to earth. There was a futuristic city designed for a 1930s motor oil advertisement campaign in Life magazine, for example, that suggested America would soon flatten its historic districts and replace them with skyscrapers and freeways, the better to accommodate suburban commuters. If this sounds familiar, it is, of course, because in many cases it came true–although the glorious results promised by its Modernist advocates and corporate sponsors were not exactly delivered.
PBN: What about the ones that never came to fruition? Do they play an important role in the history and development of architecture?
WALKER: It is my argument that for the past two centuries futuristic speculation has played an important role in helping to determine what human beings understand as desirable, and even as possible. For this reason, visions of tomorrow’s cities do not have to be fulfilled to be relevant, they merely have to convincing or inspiring at the time they are made and shared.
The fact that futuristic speculation has had a small but incredibly dominant number of recurring themes and tropes –technology-centered, machine-centered, skyscraper-centered, automobile-centered–should maybe concern us: why is it that we agree the future “looks” a certain way? Are these somewhat narrow, repetitive visions having a stifling influence on our imagination? Why is the future so often depicted as devoid of simple, warm pleasures like cottages, cobblestones and candles? Why can’t we have cobblestones in the future? Is it because they aren’t “in theme” with iPads? This is quite strange, I think, and maybe deserves some thought.
PBN: So the dreams we have today about architecture – will much of that land up in an exhibit like yours a century from now?
WALKER: I certainly hope so.
