Design: Whatever Became of the Future?

At Aspen, a search for an alternative to the modernist vision

In 1951, when many of the world's leading designers and architects gathered in the Colorado Rockies for the First International Design Conference at Aspen, they exuded confident pride in a functional, streamlined vision of the future. At the 33rd Aspen Conference last week, the theme was "The Future Isn't What It Used to Be."

It sure isn't. While abstraction still survives in art, the vision of the city as an abstract work of art and of houses as "machines to live in" is widely ridiculed and rejected today. Shivers went through Aspen's packed music tent last week (and not only because of the 30° F weather) when Peter Blake, chairman of the department of architecture and planning at Catholic University of America, showed slides of the future as envisioned in the past. The "ideal cities" of Leonardo da Vinci or Etienne-Louis Boullée, although devoid of people, were at least images of fantastic beauty. The modern future, as imagined by Antonio Sant Elia in 1914, Ludwig Hilberseimer in 1928 and Le Corbusier in 1934, has a nightmarish, totalitarian quality, akin to George Orwell's 1984 foreboding of a boot in the face. It seems incredible that many of the most talented and renowned designers in the Aspen tent had once believed in and fought for these visions.

What turned them—and countless laymen—against such a future is that so much of it was realized. In St. Louis all 33 buildings in the unlivable concrete Pruitt-Igoe housing project were deservedly demolished in the mid-1970s. The sudden popularity of historic building preservation is, in large measure, a rebellion against modern design. "Don't tear it down" more often than not means "Don't build it up!" The phenomenal increase in handicrafts is to a certain extent a reaction against the design of industrial products. The most successful feats of contemporary urban design are not the vacuous boulevards of "the city of tomorrow," like the Albany Mall, but teeming festival markets, like Boston's Faneuil Hall. Such high-tech architecture as the Beaubourg cultural center in Paris may make a nice place to visit, but who wants to live there?

Some of the 1,200 architects, film makers and graphic and industrial designers who assembled at Aspen are leaders in an emerging, spontaneous coalition of preservationists, ecologists and artisans who are making our cities more livable and human. Peter Blake, for example, wrote a much noted polemic against the modernist vision. Benjamin Thompson is the architect of Faneuil Hall and other festival markets. Israeli-born Canadian Architect Moshe Safdie is a pioneer in the search for a new architecture of humanism. "Out here in this wonderful countryside," Safdie said last week, "I don't feel that I want to change the ways of nature. I hope I can keep that feeling in my architecture." But the Livable City remains a vague, wishful notion.