Since every building is expected to reach out thirty to one hundred years into the future, it’s astonishing that the building industry doesn’t do extensive futures research. Perhaps it’s a paradoxical effect of the acceleration of change in our lifetimes. The very compression of events that makes futures study more necessary makes us more ahistorical in our outlook. We’re too immersed in the onrush of change (no one calls it progress these days, interestingly) to do much looking backward or forward, and so we put ourselves at the mercy of events, repeatedly surprised and baffled. Buildings
...more
