The Future is bright, the Future is...

( Pruitt-Igoe in the process of being torn down)

When you say the word future are you talking about tomorrow or 100 years from now? How far can we look into the future, as designers? Fashion changes every season, yet we have fashion designer who think they can design styles that would be worn until the end of time. Meghan asks in her blog the ultimate question, ‘can we design the future?’

Everyone has their own idea as to what the future will be like. When many look into the future they see the world 50 or so years from now. Seeing flying cars and vacuumed packed food. This is the type of future that has been designed for us, do we then comply by its rules of development? We as designers should know that to design for the future is not as simple as product development but also human development.

One example of product development without thinking about human development is the 33 tower public housing Pruitt-Igoe project, in St Louis Missouri. The buildings were designed for a space that was predominantly inhabited by black people. The designs originally had a notion to divide the blacks from the whites. Maybe if Le Corbusier had considered a way of slowly collaborating black and white people in one space before the project, it may have lasted longer. There were other reasons as to why the project was unsuccessful, according to Alexander von Hoffman the project was destined to fail. “From 1950 to 1970, the city's population fell by 234,000 people, and its share of the St. Louis metropolitan area's population plummeted from 51 percent to 26 percent. This sad fact adds what may be the largest failure to the formidable list of failures associated with Pruitt-Igoe: even if it had been built as proposed, Pruitt-Igoe, the child of a grandiose vision that failed, probably would have failed anyway.” (Alexander von Hoffman, Why They Built the Pruitt-Igoe Project). Maybe if Le Corbusier designed more for the future of the space that the future of architecture the project may have been more successful, later in the future.

As designers we should steer away from this futuristic brief of design and focus more on what is here today. As Meghan says in her blog post, “designers could not absolutely blueprint the future they can use the shortcomings of the past to aid them” (Meghan, shock generator, 2007).

Bibliography

Meghan, shock generator, 2007

http://www.soc.iastate.edu/sapp/PruittIgoe.html

Tony Fry, A new design philosophy, 1999