FAST FORWARD: DAL FUTURO AL FUTURO. L’HABITAT CONTEMPORANEO IMMAGINATO NELLE UTOPIE DOMESTICHE DEGLI ANNI ’50

In 1956, on the occasion of an exhibition organized by the Daily Mail in Kensington Hall, Alison and Peter Smithson presented their project for The House of the Future: a space without windows, fluid, continuous, mutable, constantly connected with the outside world through audio and video devices, but invisible to the eyes of passers-by. The house of the future should have represented the paradigm dwelling of the end of the millennium: a plastic and nylon bunker hyperconnected electronically; a membrane adherent to the body, where the biunivocity between space and function dissolves in the continuity of the environments. An interactive device in which technology disappears from household appliances to adhere and integrate with the architectural organism. The house of the future is a theme around which, in the 1950s, the expressive and above all critical skills of designers, researchers and theorists were tested; in a continuous oscillation between imaginary universes, comic book inspirations or hyperrealism seasoned with more or less intense ideological luxuries, the house becomes the pretext for measuring what we could have been or demonstrating how different reality is from simulated reality. The contemporary house imagined by architects of the past is in fact characterized by immediacy: the space is instantly accessible, the difference between near and far is erased and the distinction between public and private sphere is increasingly blurred. The durable is replaced by the temporary, the sedentary by the mobile. Just as the projects of the Smithson’s House of the Future foreshadowed, as well as the one of the same name realized by Monsanto at Disneyland in the same year, the contemporary house is an interconnected device, within which we retreat to show ourselves, reducing the dimension of privacy to the maximum in order to expand our relationality through technological tools that have not substantially modified the traditional domestic spatiality, made of specialized rooms, doors, windows and corridors. The aim of this contribution is to verify the intrinsic hypotheses within the projects for the houses of the future, developed in the 1950s of the 20th century, to build the imagined identity of contemporary architecture. The past, which simulates the future, becomes the key to the present. The idea behind this work is that it is possible to define the characteristics of contemporaneity through projects that, in a precise historical period, project our society in a context placed 50 years in the future