Brainstorming:
I recently went to Finland, and went to a museum exhibition about unfinished architecture. One of the pieces was really interesting to me; a “futuristic” house, designed in the 1960’s, that was meant to resemble a spaceship. The Futuro houses were prefabricated and a little less that 100 were built, but the design never really caught on like the designer had wanted. Using this as inspiration, I want my project to center around designs that predicted how the future would look, and compare and contrast those with how the future is starting to actually look.
I would like to exhibit what has been happening in history since the Futuro houses were designed, and how that has changed our idea of what the future is going to be like. People speculated a lot around this time period, and designed many things to look futuristic, but I think it is going in a different direction than they expected. I would like to explore this by combining this Futuro houses with something modern, or maybe something from this time period that also predicts what the future will be like.
I got my main inspiration for my Time Capsule project from the Futuro house that was designed in the 1960’s by Matti Suuronen. The home was designed to resemble a spaceship, and followed the futuristic design movement that had become popular. Seeing it got me thinking about how the future that past generations theorized about is very different from how it has actually turned out. When the Futuro house was created, the design world was fascinated with outer space, technology, and designing with a view of the future. Now, looking back on these ideas, it’s interesting to see that we’ve evolved, yet not in the way that people had imagined. We are polluting our planet at a rapid rate, while continuously building and developing a never ending stream of products. I wanted to portray this in my project, by placing the Futuro house in a setting where it hadn’t been pictured; on a heaping pile of garbage created by humans. Humans had high hopes about what the future would bring, but couldn’t always envision the consequences that the future would bring.
The Futuro houses were prefabricated, and some were actually built, like the one I used in this project. I thought this was interesting because I feel in terms of design, we have moved into an era of prefabrication and mass marketing. We want everything built as fast, and as cheaply as humanly possible, and our society cannot sustain itself this way. We aren’t face to face with landfills every day, so it’s easy for us to ignore. I added a watchtower in the background to exhibit the idea of “big brother is always watching” but watching the wrong thing, because I think it’s interesting that surveillance has become a huge part of our culture. I think this is ironic because our society often ignores the vulnerable position our planet is in, and choose to do nothing, while at the same time putting valuable resources and money towards surveillance, and sending mass numbers of people to prison. This isn’t the future that was imagined at all, and I wanted to portray this in my project.
The houses all look the same, but I scaled them differently, as well as adjusted to brightness based on how far away the houses are. I tried to keep an asymmetrical balance by placing the houses across the composition. I really liked the background image because all the garbage is very straight and balanced across the page, and the garbage is piled within nature, so it made a good stage to layer the Futuro houses. You get a good sense of distance from the background image, which allowed me to add several houses and create perspective, so the image becomes less flat.
