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Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen goes back to the future of architecture |
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Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen travels through five decades of the House of the Future, exploring how British architects have responded to the promise - and threat - of new technology.
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Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen and designer Chris Wise with
a prototype walking building |
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 Listen again to the programme |
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Fifty years ago the Ideal Home Exhibition's House of the Future - set far ahead, in the year 1981 - was a vision in moulded plastic, complete with a couple relaxing in what seemed to be ultramodern underwear.
In House of the Future Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen looks back over half a century of such predictions of domestic bliss, tracking the rise and fall of faith in technology and its influences on futuristic visions of the home.
Radical architects in 1950s and 60s were inspired by space-age technology and their extravagant designs assumed unlimited oil and endless synthetic materials.
In the 1970s and 80s futurists worried that human activities threatened fragile planet Earth.
Environmentally-aware architects dreamed of fuel efficient, low-waste, sustainable homes of the future.
Digital technology reached our living rooms in the 1990s.
Computer companies offered us digital slaves but one architect fought a lone battle against Big Brother, rejecting new technology in favour of Victorian pulleys and periscopes.
Laurence discovers that the house of the future from each decade says more about the age in which it was conceived than the future it was conceived for. |
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RELATED LINKS |
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1956 House of the Future - Peter and Alison Smithson
1967 House of the Future - Archigram
1975 The Autonomous House - Brenda and Robert Vale
1986 - 91 - Biosphere 2 - Space Biosphere Ventures
1999 - The Clone House - CJ Lim
2005 - Walking Building & the 2020 House - Chris Wise
The Ideal Home Show
Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen
BBC Science & Nature
BBC Homes: Design
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