I saw a quote once, in an old isse of 'OMNI' magazine:"The Past is gone, the Present lost as it arrives. There is only the Future."
When I was seven, I once remarked to my schoolmates that I was going to be an astronaut when I grew up. I would get married at 24 and have two children and drive an E-Type Jaguar (at the time one of the most streamlined streetcars available). Forty years on, I cant drive at all, will never reach space and have the smallest practical car to carry my loving wife and two children. At that time, I looked forward to a future of glass and steel, monorails and aerocars and world peace. I think I must have bumped my head on the desk at some point, as I was obviously hopelessly myopic.
Everything in the sixties promised a new Space Age - it was a time of plastic and funky design, bright colour and limitless imagination. Designers and engineers sold us a slick, streamlined world of open highways, clear skies, velvet reaches of space and the means for anyone to travel them.
As I write, the building im working in shakes, quite violently sometimes, as the old hospital site adjacent to it is torn down. My office is in a building which has stood here since the 1950's alongside the old hospital where my daughter was born 12 years ago. Very shortly, the site will be clear and work will progress on the new development.
Shall I expect to see golden towers of plexiglass and arcologies of spun steel ? Will the future hold nanomachines silently busying themselves over the construction of organically styled homes as hypersonic jets leave doughnut shaped vapour trails in the blue sky overhead ? Somehow, I doubt it.
For the foreseeable future, I think the only space age I will enjoy will be made of plastic, but on a considerably smaller scale than I first thought in 1969.
When I was seven, I once remarked to my schoolmates that I was going to be an astronaut when I grew up. I would get married at 24 and have two children and drive an E-Type Jaguar (at the time one of the most streamlined streetcars available). Forty years on, I cant drive at all, will never reach space and have the smallest practical car to carry my loving wife and two children. At that time, I looked forward to a future of glass and steel, monorails and aerocars and world peace. I think I must have bumped my head on the desk at some point, as I was obviously hopelessly myopic.
Everything in the sixties promised a new Space Age - it was a time of plastic and funky design, bright colour and limitless imagination. Designers and engineers sold us a slick, streamlined world of open highways, clear skies, velvet reaches of space and the means for anyone to travel them.
As I write, the building im working in shakes, quite violently sometimes, as the old hospital site adjacent to it is torn down. My office is in a building which has stood here since the 1950's alongside the old hospital where my daughter was born 12 years ago. Very shortly, the site will be clear and work will progress on the new development.
Shall I expect to see golden towers of plexiglass and arcologies of spun steel ? Will the future hold nanomachines silently busying themselves over the construction of organically styled homes as hypersonic jets leave doughnut shaped vapour trails in the blue sky overhead ? Somehow, I doubt it.
For the foreseeable future, I think the only space age I will enjoy will be made of plastic, but on a considerably smaller scale than I first thought in 1969.
Well, one out of three isn't bad (wife & kids); and you probably got the most important of the three.
ReplyDeleteBut it has to be said that the future has been a big disappointment. Am I the only one who feels short-changed? The frustrating thing is that it really could have happened the way it's shown in those designs from the fifties and sixties. How sad that the only way to see the future is to look backwards - Back to the Future!, one might say. Reminds me of the lyrics to the likely lads: the only thing to look forward to is the past.
Do kids today dream of a future of personal robots and hover cars? I bet they don't. Probably too damn frightened the world's going to end in a blaze of heat, or that the financial world will collapse completely ... or, worst of all, that they might loose their mobile phones.
A wonderful post on a subject close to our hearts. If you'll forgive me a tiny bit of self-pluggery, last year I wrote a couple of posts on this topic over at my own blog here and especially here. The first post was inspired by the use of some World's Fair iconography in the Venture Bros cartoon series -- a show which is secretly about the early-Sixties utopian future never arriving, and how our generation is affected by that -- and the second post has motion pictures from the future in it.
ReplyDeleteRAB - ive got that same book and the same views - great article!
ReplyDeleteKIM - very true, i do feel like we've turned the wrong temporal corner somewhere - people nowdays dont seem to project any further than a few hours into the future, or to the next release of the latest mobile fone. sad.