Houses of the Future are always good for a chuckle, retrospectively. The technology that promised to do revolutionary things — the 1933 Century of Progress Exhibition’s House of Tomorrow featured a residential airport hangar in place of a garage — ricochets in another direction (you can’t get much more earthbound than a Hummer) or turns out to be a dead end. (Remember jet-propelled backpacks and the domestic robot?)
With its special section in the May issue, House Beautiful isn’t taking many chances with being far-fetched. Its “Houses for the Next Millennium” are guaranteed not to raise goose bumps from future shock. In a reprise of the famous Case Study House project initiated by Arts & Architecture magazine in the 1940s — a program that resulted in residential icons that still stand for progress, optimism and the hope of a better future — House Beautiful commissioned 10 high-profile architects to design a house beautiful for 2020.
“I look at so much housing that’s retro or overbuilt,” said Louis Oliver Gropp, the editor in chief of House Beautiful. “We thought we ought to take a look at where housing is going.”
Lest subscribers to the rather traditional chintz-and-plaid magazine experience vertigo from peering too far ahead, the results are being published over six months. The first installment of three houses, by Larry Booth, James Cutler and Peter Forbes, is telling.
Booth of Booth/Hansen in Chicago anticipates that, along with an exodus back to the cities, there will be a return to spiritual matters. His 5,000-square-foot house features a meditation chapel (reminiscent of a Richard Serra sculpture) suspended over a glass-enclosed interior courtyard. “In the next 100 years, people are going to address the spiritual component of their lives in their own way,” Booth prognosticated.
Also poised to revolutionize home design, in Booth’s opinion, is the residential elevator. “They’re so inexpensive now, anyone can consider them,” he said. The architect designed an elevator for his seven-story tower, with one bedroom to a floor.
“It frees up the rest of the lot for gardens, and it’s ideal for the multigenerational family of the future,” he explained. His imagined extended family includes grandparents — “because their Social Security only pays for food” — as well as exchange students.
On the West Coast, James Cutler of Seattle has already seen what the future may bring through his work on Bill Gates’ techno-palace on Lake Washington, near Seattle. Surprisingly perhaps, Cutler’s design for House Beautiful is more about saving trees than digital display. Made entirely of recycled wood (as is the Gates house) and featuring a wall of south-facing windows to take advantage of the sun’s heat, Cutler’s house is determinedly low tech.
“Technology is always interesting, because it’s the flashy next thing,” Cutler said from his car phone in Seattle. “But the issues of the next century are going to be environmental as a matter of survival.”
Hariri & Hariri, an architectural sister team based in New York, have looked the furthest forward (their design will be published in October) with a house where every glass wall is also a liquid-crystal-display screen. The wall screens allow rock videos to be blasted along the spiraling ramp of a stairway, or a recipe to be displayed on the kitchen walls or even a billboard-size “Time to come home, Billy” message shouted from the building’s exterior.
“The furniture is very minimal, and the actual rooms very small, because in the future the physicality of rooms won’t be very important,” Gisue Hariri said. “Friends won’t really come to dinner, they’ll appear and interact from the screen. So how many chairs are you going to need?”
Those who want to know the answer can browse through a CD-ROM walk-through of the Hariri house that will be available soon, along with 360-degree views of the other houses at www.housebeautiful.com.
