Architecture 2000 and Beyond - Softcover

Forecasting is a strange and fascinating art. Located somewhere between fortune-telling and the daily weather report, it mixes divination and existing trends into an unlikely cocktail. One should never take it too seriously - and yet we all do. Economic forecasting shows this perhaps more than any other type. For instance, prophesying when the Internet and telecommunication stocks will crash - as they must some day - has itself become a respectable and necessary business. This is partly because of the long period of continued growth, and the prediction that we have entered a new paradigm, and partly because the global economy is so interconnected that a downturn in Dot-Com will ripple through every local economy. No one can afford not to notice such prediction, even if one does not give any particular one much credence.

The same is true of predictions of ecological catastrophe, nuclear war, the earth being hit be a comet, or the explosion of a super-volcano in Yellowstone National Park. Any one of these dire events that scientists are now routinely saying is thinkable would, as the black-humoured joke of the sixties put it, 'spoil the balance of the day'. On the plus side, for those with Panglossian temperament, it has become normal to say life expectancy, in fifty years, will reach 120 years, just as the Dow Jones reaches 50,000. Happy days, sad days. Divination necromancy, astrology, The Book of Revelations - weather reports - has it ever been different? Prediction, thinking about the future, is addictive.

I wrote this book of forecasts and after one third of a century I am curious to know how much I got right and wrong, or half-right, or missed altogether. But I am equally interested in probing the value of prediction. Does it serve any great purpose as a point of orientation, as I argue in the old text, or is it more an amusing pastime, something to stimulate the imagination? Is the role of prediction more that of the Delphic oracle; or the stockbroker identifying long-term value? For instance, does a set of predictions about trends in technology and society affect the way architectural firms structure themselves, or are there so many counter-trends at any one time that no orientation is possible?

My view is that successful architects do orient themselves very strongly to certain trends they find desirable. For instance, in the century Le Corbusier identified himself with the evolution towards pure, abstract form, which was a definite trend of machine production. More recently, Robert Venturi orientated himself towards the emergence of commercial culture and its artistic possibilities; Peter Eisenman foresaw the continued importance of investigating architectural rules and representation; Ken Yeang identified ecological problems as the main issue; and Norman Foster foresaw the dematerialisation as the basic tendency. It is this orientation; among other things, that gives each architect a competitive edge - a consistent disposition - and the latter quality is also a key for my predictions. Because of the architect's mind-set and training there are coherent and consistent traditions.