I have this personal theory that the future is on an upswing right now.
Take your phone out of your pocket and take a look at it. (How futuristic would that phrase have seemed 30 years ago-)
Even if you have an older, clunkier model, its lines suggest it could be launched out of an electromagnetic rail gun, that its sleek casing could give depleted uranium a run for its money.
Our phones, and our other personal electronic blobjects, our computers, even our cars- A decade ago, car design was stalled in dullsville. Some kind of wretched convergent evolution had given us sedans, hatchbacks, and minivans that varied only in colour, from silver-grey to maroon. Now we've got plenty of those old designs, but they're intermixed with weird cubist van things, candy-coloured microcars, and smiley-faced European imports.
Hopefully, we're just a couple of rounds of designer evolution from the reintroduction of tailfins.
Remember tailfins? I don't, because I was born about a decade and a half after the Big Three decided they were undignified. (Not to mention half a decade after man last walked on the moon, not that I'm bitter about that.)
The passing of the tailfin marked the sad death of the future for a while in modern society.
There was a time, almost half a century, where the future ruled the world of architecture and industrial design.
Starting a little more than a hundred years ago, myriad philosophies of creation were taking off. They had a dozen names, many of them applied retroactively, and they cross-fertilized one another like hyperactive dandelions.
Art deco. Streamline moderne. Futurism (which had creepy associations with Italian Fascism). They were at play in the realm of modernism and abstract art.
They were born from the age of the engine. As cars and airplanes and zeppelins competed with the new streamlined trains, a new iconography was created from the practical considerations of smooth fenders and swept-back wings.
Designers seized on these themes. Everything was going to be faster! Streamlined! Exploding with the power of electricity, of the internal combustion engine, of the atom!
So everything had to be streamlined, as if it was ready to be launched like a rocket.
As William Gibson pointed out in The Gernsback Continuum, this led to pencil sharpeners that looked like they'd been designed in a wind tunnel.
The last child of the future, aside from the cars with the tailfins, were the gas stations and all night diners of the 1950s.
Saddled with the name Googie architecture, they were the poor and flashy descendents of the futurist impulse, slapping giant stucco replica Tesla coils and neon-lit starburst designs across North America for a few years.
And then it was gone. The future came, but no one was interested in looking like they actually lived there anymore. Appliances like fridges turned avocado-coloured in the 1970s, then lost even that distinction, becoming white or steel monoliths, not the rockets-in-waiting of the 1940s and '50s. There were nods to the future in the 1980s, mostly in fashion, part of the zeitgeist that birthed cyberpunk.
The future is always going to come, but for the first half of the century, we were genuinely looking forward to it. We showed that, by trying to build as if it was already here.
Frankly, I hope we can do that again. That old future was more fun than a lot of the other ones we've tried out.
Matthew Claxton is a reporter for the Langley Advance, a sister paper of the News.
