From Utopia to Futurescapes: Futures Literacy for Next Generations of Architects and Designers * Journal of Futures Studies

It is the kind of building that when entered can make you feel infused with the opportunity of a world very different from the one you used to know. This is the essence of a futurist architecture. It is the ethic to make a building that convinces people they are living in the future.

While we know that our imaginations shape our sociocultural experience through the creation of worlds, modernity thrives by throwing tight constraints around it, degenerating our ability and capacity to imagine radically new futures into being. This ontological war against possibility is ‘defuturing’ — there are less futures available to us; or put... See more

Imagining the future is just another form of memory. It’s a kind of forward-looking nostalgia. “The history of utopias is the history of rear-view mirrors. Every utopia is a picture of the preceding age.”3 If your memory gets scrambled, your ability to envision a coherent future is severely hampered. When the past feels slippery or shifty, you lose... See more