When “The Jetsons” first premiered in the fall of 1962, it
was the first show ever broadcast in color on ABC. Promising a high-tech future originally set
100 years ahead in 2062, the fictional Orbit City’s architecture borrowed
heavily from the ‘googie’ style of modern architecture first popularized in the
1940s.
By the early 1960s, the Space Age
was in full swing, giving us not just Orbit City’s flying cars and maid robots,
but also the famous Theme Building at LAX, still recognized today as a uniquely
Los Angeles landmark.
Peering ahead from 2018, a variety of practical improvements
in technology and design will similarly foster ongoing changes in today’s
architecture, in the process expanding not just the look of buildings, but also
how they get built and funded.
That will
be important in a rapidly expanding world in which the population is expected
to hit 10 billion by 2056, with over 70 percent of us living in cities. Moreover, since an estimated three billion
people will require new housing by 2030, sustainable solutions less reliant on
energy-intensive steel and concrete will need to take center stage.
Some futurists are looking to wood, which not only creates
oxygen while growing, but traps carbon dioxide even when used as a building
material. While the idea of wooden
skyscrapers seems implausible, it’s not a new idea, as multi-story pagodas up to
450 feet were already being built in Asia over 1,500 years ago.
Today, the world’s first residential building built
exclusively from pre-fabricated timber pieces rises nine stories in the Hackney
neighborhood of London, England, while the Bali-based company Ibuku uses
fast-growing, specially treated bamboo to build custom homes, resorts,
restaurants and other public spaces throughout Indonesia.
Notably, wood is better for regulating indoor
temperatures, can be exposed openly, and, with its water content of 15 percent,
can surprisingly be more fire-resistant than concrete or steel.
The advent of 3D modeling will also help designers further
unleash their creativity, whether it’s a curving bamboo roof to act as a
natural air conditioner, the twisted stainless steel of Los Angeles’ Disney
Hall or a new stadium in England which can be used for both soccer and football
due to the ingenious use of a mechanism to slide one entire field under the
surrounding seats.
Another huge change will occur to the staid and reliable
elevator. If you look at today’s
skyscrapers, they’re built vertically to surround elevator shafts, with their
elaborate systems of pulleys and pistons.
Tomorrow, however, the same type of
mag-lev propulsion systems used in bullet trains in Europe and Asia will be
able to move elevator cars not just up and down, but also side to side. Unconstrained from the need to build up,
buildings will be able to extend out in as many directions as seems
commercially feasible.
Helping to build these odd new structures could be the
infamous drone, used not just for warfare or delivering Amazon packages, but
also eventually capable of building high-rises with greater precision and
safety than current methods. During 2011
in France, the first Flight Assembled Architecture installation tapped several
‘quadcopter’ drones to install 1,500 different pieces into a 60-meter
model. Built at a 1:100 scale, this
design could one day soar up to 600 feet and house up to 30,000 people.
Working alongside the new drones could be industrial-scale
3D printers. In 2014, a Chinese company unveiled
such a printer which is capable of producing ten homes per day for a fraction
of traditional methods. In addition to
lower costs, new ways of mixing building materials could lead to substantial
changes in the very aesthetics of home building.
In our increasingly inter-connected world, social media will
also play a role, whether it’s using photorealistic renderings to gather
community feedback for a new project, or tapping a crowd-funding platform to go
where traditional lenders dare not tread.
In 2015, a trio of young architects took their Thames Baths
concept to Kickstarter, where they soon eclipsed their fundraising goal with
nearly 1,300 contributors. Based on
similar projects installed elsewhere in Western Europe, the idea was to create
a series of floating pools on an existing waterway usually considered hazardous
to bathers and swimmers, in this case the River Thames.
Using treated and heated genuine Thames
water, the total price of 10 million pounds is expected to be raised with
sponsorships, grants as well as traditional, private investors. Yet without the crowd-funding platform, this
idea might have not seen the light of day.
Even George Jetson might have been impressed.
