Whatever Became of the Future?

By Wolf Von Eckardt

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 30DEG 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 Boullee, 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.

The Aspen conference would seem to be an ideal place to focus this notion into a vision. It was started by Walter Paepcke, chairman of the Container Corp. of America, as part of an effort to turn the half-forgotten Rocky Mountain mining town into a chic culture and vacation resort. Paepcke was one of the few U.S. industrialists who believed in design excellence in architecture, industrial products and graphics. With Herbert Bayer, the Bauhaus designer, he created the corporate image of his company and set the tone for the Aspen conference. Imperceptibly, the conference, in turn, set the tone for modern design in America.

With its heady discussions in the music tent, on flowery meadows, along mountain walks, on riverside picnics and in the bar of the Jerome Hotel, the conference has become an institution, a sort of Academy. Students and young practitioners come with their cameras and tape recorders, spouses and babies; besides sitting at the feet of such design luminaries as Saul Bass, Ivan Chermayeff, Niels Diffrient, Milton Glaser and George Nelson, they turn the Academy into a happening, flying kites, making music of all kinds and building weird experimental structures. At an altitude of 8,000 ft., some of the proceedings tend to soar into the wild blue yonder.

But this year perhaps it was Aspen that was not what it used to be. Rather than dealing with our loss of an imaginable future--or, rather, our yielding it to the futurologists with their projections, megatrends and future shocks--the conference evaded the issue it raised. Two programs offered escapes into bittersweet nostalgia. One was an enchanting evocation with slides, film clips and live theater of "Vienna: A Moment of Greatness." Another was a seminar on "Designing the Corporation's Future," which returned to the prescription of the first Aspen conference and of every one since: that a designer should be nested high in every corporate tree.

The only clear-cut statement about the future came from Steven Jobs, 28, chairman of the board of Apple Computer, Inc. Within two years, Jobs predicted, more computers than automobiles will go on the market. "They should be well designed," he said. "But well designed or not, they will sell anyway." To some of his listeners, this indicated that Apple considers design dispensable gift wrapping. It also raised the specter of technology and engineering moving ahead of design instead of following from it, with the result that the style of buildings, computers and graphics would merely reflect expediency. As Design Writer Ralph Caplan put it, "Designers today are caught between market research and their creative instincts. The trouble is, we don't have a choice. Non-design is also a form of design." If the future is not what it used to be, perhaps next year's Aspen conference should consider what it ought to be.

--By Wolf Von Eckardt This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.