THE FUTURE, as the architectural historian Yogi Berra is said to have said, ain’t what it used to be. Whenever it comes to pass, it leaves unfulfilled any previously received idea of itself. Especially aesthetically. Actual futurity is not futuristic.
The future most difficult of all to remember is that which was anticipated by the most recent past. Consider the early 2020s, the first years of the pandemic, the first year of the current American presidential administration, grotesquely pre-inaugurated by January 6—suddenly now so long ago. It was the Hot Vax Summer of 2021. The Delta variant was yet to come. Squid Game. Sea shanties on social media. “Drivers License” by Olivia Rodrigo on Spotify. Tadao Ando’s ponderous renovation of the Paris Bourse de Commerce for Pinault. Lacaton & Vassal finally get their Pritzker; Pantone asserted that one of the two colors of the year is 17-5104: Ultimate Gray. And Amazon founder Jeff Bezos launched himself—wearing instead of a helmet a broad-brimmed hat, in possible tribute to the 2000 Clint Eastwood movie Space Cowboys—in a space capsule manufactured by one of his vassal companies, Blue Origin, sixty-six miles up into suborbital spaceflight. It was a putative tribute to NASA astronaut Alan Shepard’s similar 1961 trajectory, though timed to an anniversary of the later launch of Apollo 11. Other spectacles, such as launching nonagenarian Star Trek actor William Shatner in another capsule operated by Blue Origin, quickly followed. Long before Bezos, the self styled “renegade billionaire” Richard Branson set a precedent for this sort of venturesomeness with his cushy sojourns into ballooning and subspace flight. Architect Norman Foster—the airport guy and helicopter pilot and longtime courtier to plutocrats designed for Branson in 2011 a swoopy bunker-ish terminal in the New Mexico desert notable for its future-teasing name: the Virgin Galactic Gateway to Space. (Around the same time, in 2012, Foster + Partners designed a speculative inflatable moon base for the European Space Agency—all semiburied skylit domes and bermed tubes, encased by then-ubiquitously-fashionable robotic 3D printing in an excretion of regolith.) In an abject echo of the mid-twentieth-century space race, Branson would beat Bezos’s flight by nine days, albeit ascending to a height twelve miles lower than his peer’s. Neither man, strictly speaking, ever left the atmosphere.
We deploy half-century-old visual and formal stylistic conventions—a backward-looking space-age retrofuturism—for our representations of the future.
“It’s time to go back to the moon,” Bezos had announced in 2019. “This time to stay.” Elon Musk, whose SpaceX rocket company has, since 2012, successfully delivered supplies and astronauts to the International Space Station (receiving by this association a measure of NASA’s reflected glory), said on the occasion of the launch of the SpaceX Crew-2 in April of 2021, “It’s been now almost half a century since humans were on the moon. That’s too long, we need to get back there and have a permanent base on the moon—again, like a big, permanently occupied base on the moon. And then build a city on Mars to become a spacefaring civilization, a multi-planet species.”
The important word in such declarations was not moon but back. The aesthetics of Blue Origin and SpaceX, from machines to costumes, were something the world had seen before. They closely confirmed a vision of the future that would have been immediately familiar to any child of the 1960s and ’70s equipped with a comic book or television set: tumescent rockets and vehicles, rounded and polished, inside and out, past the strict technical requirements of physics, quite different from the submarine-spartan cylinder-and-cone material efficiencies of the late middle twentieth century’s actual space tech; sleek jumpsuits quite different from the rumpled and patchwork pressure suits worn by the original Mercury and Apollo crews. Which is to say that summer of cosplay spacefaring was more an exercise in image-making modernist styling than in engineering-driven modern design: The Lycra garments that 2021 NASA astronauts would wear onboard Musk’s ISS transport module were not designed by engineers but emerged from four years of art direction, including by a Hollywood fabricator who had produced costumes for superhero films like Batman v Superman (2016) and X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014). “[Musk] wanted it to look stylish,” the fabricator told a reporter. “We created a suit that we are now reverse-engineering to make functional for flight.”
“MY GENERATION was promised colonies on the moon,” the venture capitalist Peter Thiel remarked in 2012. “Instead we got Facebook.” The context was a disparaging address he gave at a Facebook all-hands meeting soon after the company publicly issued shares, which at the time weren’t selling as well as promised. The remark rewards interrogation. Who did this promising? Who is this we to whom the promise was made? And what did the moon ever do to invite colonization?
With his early investment in Facebook, Thiel was instrumental in creating the world he would come to lament; that doesn’t make him wrong. The online network figures significantly into our anticlimactic present day: colonizing our imagination and mammalian sociability, extracting the most financializable assets from those resources and channeling them into the complex patterns of data now flowing like a second atmosphere across the planet’s surface. Thiel’s stated disappointment must have been based on an accurate assessment that all this capital and engineering acumen has been in the service of banality. In 2021, for instance, at the peak of a venture capital frenzy, some tens of billions were invested in slightly faster grocery delivery versus a fraction of that sum—a fifth, a tenth—on such epochal projects as cold fusion—a far cry from the Apollo era, when NASA spent some 5 percent of an American federal budget funded by a steeply progressive income tax whose top rate was nearly double the current one and that never confronted anything remotely comparable to today’s ingenious evasions. Our spaciest buildings are built by that early 2020s trinity of Facebook, Google, Amazon—enterprises that, as projects of mere marketing and shopkeeping, are fundamentally earthbound.
And yet Google built itself a moon base. In Mountain View, California. In 2022. Between a golf course and NASA’s Ames Research Center campus. The British creative director Thomas Heatherwick and the Danish architect Bjarke Ingels collaborated on a new campus for four thousand employees of the company—forty-two acres of landscaping and some very large swoopy buildings that, especially in their much-publicized 2015 renderings, closely resembled a persistent received wisdom about the speculative look of lunar and Martian settlements: low domes, glassy and tessellated, their perimeters bermed into the earth, sheltering picturesque modular interior structures as a bottle does its miniature ship. This collective imaginary—witness it in Foster’s lunar scheme—must have been significantly informed by the 1975 United States research base at the South Pole, a broad half-buried skylit geodesic dome with a tower. (The tower, just like the US’s first space station, was called Skylab). Another, more immediate influence may have been Ingels’s own 2017 project for Mars Science City, a geodesic-domed and semisubterranean complex for a desert development outside Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, to perhaps house that country’s Mohammed bin Rashid Space Centre and advance its stated ambition to colonize Mars by the second decade of the next century. The Centre was to be a Mars base prototype whose distinctive aquarium-like skylights were to dapple earthly sunlight in anticipation of their alleged application in blocking cosmic radiation once installed on al-Marrikh. The scheme has gone unbuilt. Ironically, the Dubai space agency’s current facility far more resembles what an actual Mars base might be like: a prosaic, efficient, and even Spartan compound of dull and often windowless metal boxes.
Space-age retrofuturist architectures are at great energetic and material cost made to look like they rest so very lightly and harmlessly on the earth—part of blameless nature and not complicit culture.
As constructed by 2022, the Google Mountain View campus had been cheapened and value-engineered such that it came less to resemble the work of Buckminster Fuller, and more a heavyweight imitation of the greatest hits of one of his successors: Frei Otto, the visionary specialist in double-curve tensile canopies. Publicity about the new buildings emphasized their ostensible adaptability and their sustainability-evoking features: how, like a base for cosmic colonists, these structures rest lightly on their planet. But they don’t. They’re big and heavy and require a very great deal of concrete and conditioned air, with a significant, nonrenewable, extractive, and energetic impact baked into their construction and inevitable, eventual demolition. They’re styled—in arguably just the same way that Google can be seen as an old-fashioned entrenched monopoly self-presenting as a beehive of cultural innovation—to look far more ecological and technological than, in their expressionist material excesses, they really are. With their not especially-functional baroque double curves, gratuitous structural stunts, and extraction-heavy materials, and despite the marginal operational fuel efficiencies imparted by their rather credulously lauded geothermal equipment and solar panels, they are an architecture of Peak Oil.
Farther up the West Coast, geodesical spheres, each about a hundred feet in diameter, nestle together like soap bubbles: an eye-catching 77,000-square-foot showpiece in front of the generic glass-curtain-wall skyscrapers that constitute Amazon’s corporate campus in downtown Seattle. The 2013–18 scheme by global firm NBBJ recalls, in its verdant interiors and tessellated bubbly skin, the Eden Project—a 2001 compound of greenhouse enclosures in Cornwall, England, by High Tech architect Nicholas Grimshaw, which has the strange distinction of enclosing the world’s largest indoor rainforest. Amazon’s daintier version is also something of a terrarium that encapsulates, like a kind of ark or supplemental biosphere, a reported forty thousand plants from a thousand cloud forest species sourced from five continents. Its air-conditioning, during Seattle’s unprecedented triple-digit heat-dome temperatures in the summer of 2021, must have worked very hard—that extreme tempering unintentionally offering a grim glimpse of what attempted human life on Mars would actually be like. Being inside the structure, opined the Seattle Times in 2018, “is like resting in a space capsule ready to launch.”
Bezos has placed about $10 billion of his current $180 billion or so dollars into a private foundation themed around the climate emergency, called the Bezos Earth Fund; that sum is about equal to the $5.5 billion spent toward his own eleven minutes of suborbital flight, plus the $4 billion spent building the spacey and retrofuturistic corporate headquarters. Depending on how you like your math, Earth’s atmosphere is about five years away from an irreversible and catastrophic tipping point in its concentration of greenhouse gases. Which is, given the slowness of the art of architecture, about as long as it took Bezos and company to build those glassy Spheres.
The most sustainable building is the one you don’t build. The next most sustainable is the building you already have.
We still, to this day, seem to like geodesic spheres and hemispheres. But no longer as Bucky liked them—as a definitively modern articulation of doing more with less, of building rapidly and lightly, of enclosing maximum volume with minimum material. From the early 1960s through the early 1970s, those geodesic aesthetics were catholic and polysemic in their appeal across economic classes, social aspirations, politics—from the back-to-the-land intentional community of Drop City to Defense Department radomes to that United States South Pole installation and to Fuller’s own spherical design for the US Pavilion at Montreal’s Expo 67. Nowadays, we experience the geodesical—in office parks, in hipster Joshua Tree retreats, in Orlando’s 1982 Epcot Center Spaceship Earth, and all the blurring spaces between—far more narrowly as throwbacks to historically situated constructions of the futuristic and the countercultural: yesterday’s tomorrow, today.
Amazon Spheres. Antony Huchette
It was from within a temporary geodesic dome at the 2013 edition of the annual Burning Man festival in Nevada—another fantasy of colonizing an inhospitable terra nullius—that the future president of something called the Seasteading Institute did some influential early proselytizing about its science fiction–meets–libertarian vision of floating offshore settlements. These are imaginary new places that, being geographically beyond governmental jurisdictions, would supposedly secure liberty and prosperity for their heroic residents and conceivably render permanent some of the pleasures of the Burning Man playa itself. Peruse the Seasteading Institute’s architectural proposals and you’ll see geodesic and geodesical domes: nine transparent, hexagonally tessellated hemispheres resolving into interlocking pentagonal islands within an artificial reef perimeter; three translucent mega-domes, quaint hamlets murkily discernible within them; all perched on branching platforms of solar panels and tidy lawns. A less amateurish but similar vision is presented in “Oceanix City,” a 2019 scheme by Bjarke Ingels— yes, him again—with dubious imprimatur by the United Nations Human Settlements Programme’s New Urban Agenda venture and in alleged response to rising sea levels, for a floating compound for ten thousand people. Triangular platforms, radiused cornered in for maritime appearances, lie in hexagram array around a lagoon-like center, all rendered with expressive but cryptic faux-tech fixtures and dainty Dutch canals patrolled by what appear to be vitreous spherical bots out of The Prisoner (1967–68), the visionary British science fiction television series in which a harrowing carceral structure presents as a picturesque seaside village. The term seasteading, coined after homesteading, has been around since the Reagan era; the current institute was founded by an ex-Google employee in 2008 and—like Facebook—substantially funded by Peter Thiel, who observed in his 2009 essay about extra-jurisdictional territoriality, “The Education of a Libertarian” (a text now infamous for a remark asserting the incompatibility of freedom and democracy), that “between cyberspace and outer space lies the possibility of settling the oceans.”
International waters are always of tactical and fantastical use. A grim anticipation of seasteading’s fantasies of high-tech offshoring might be found in the proof-of-capacity subsea tests, so-called, of nuclear ordnance of ever-increasing tonnage during the Cold War, from the Pacific’s Bikini Atoll onward. A credible reading of the Soviet-American space race is as a collective civilizational tactic of sublimation: the existential threat of global thermonuclear war diverted into mass media spectacle, the enemy ingeniously reframed as a rival, speeding (however uncooperatively) toward a common vision of the future. Human beings found this oblique way to avoid killing each other (as much as we might have otherwise) by instead shooting the moon. Not that we didn’t also kill each other. The far-seeing advocacy by the likes of Stewart Brand and Carl Sagan to secure, along the margins of that Cold War, the transmission of photographs of the “Whole Earth”—and later, from much farther away, the “Blue Dot,” a view of the same subject from beyond the rings of Saturn—sought to add some chastening intimation of the sublime: all the world rendered tiny, precious, alive, peaceful.
In their inadvertently parodic masculinity, in their pathos-infused attempt to do something extraordinary, in their sweaty simulations of hypercompetence, in their psychopathology of affluence and extravagance and attempted glamor, in their vision of the world primarily in terms of style, 2021’s small adventures at the edge of space answer to much in Susan Sontag 1964 “Notes on Camp.” Most of all there is camp’s willful innocence, its failed seriousness. And so, such adventures also likely spring from the sensibility’s solemn origins in a repression of knowledge of tragedy. If the space race was a collective sublimation of some aspect of a potentially civilization-ending nuclear war into a kind of mechanical performance art—of a conflict into a contest—then our tech billionaires’ spacefaring, both actual and fantastical, amplified by the stylings of their architects and Hollywood costume designers, may at its heart be something both more forlorn and farcical: a semiconscious expression of climate anxiety soothed by fantasies of galactic adventurism, millenarian transhumanism, and technocratic solutionism.
“IT IS A LITTLE cold, but we can warm it up.” That’s a sentence from a cheerful description of Mars on Space X’s website. It’s illustrated with a rendering of still another geodesical dome filled with greenery. The red planet, with its sere riverbeds and pale sky, was once, as you might remember from middle school science class, far more Earth-like. Then billions of years ago, its dying ember of an iron core, in cooling, lost the ability to sustain a protective magnetic field. Are we so in awe of this ancient and distant planetary death that we now want to undo it, rather than save the still vivid but imperiled life of our own planet? Have we so repressed and diverted our anticipatory bereavement? Is the dream of bringing life to Mars a symptom of denial of death on Earth—of the one million species so far terminated in the plant and animal holocaust of the Holocene Extinction? Why else do we dream of reviving that faraway corpse, at the distance of hundreds of millions of miles and at the pace of centuries, when our Mother Earth’s own life hangs, year to year, hour to hour, in the balance, under our very feet? It is a little warm, but we can cool it down.
Human settlement on Mars is, barring some unforeseeable paradigm shift, an illusion. Mars is not a Planet B, a cosmic New Zealand. It is neither the farthest offshore haven nor the freest seastead. The absence of an Earth equivalent magnetic field shielding the planet from solar radiation means human beings would have to live underground in their Mars city or else lead brutal, short, and cancerous lives. Although some have mused that one might, by detonating carbon dioxide–melting nuclear bombs at the Martian poles, emulsify the blood-freezing Martian atmosphere into something kinder, the sober scientific consensus is that any geo-engineering of Mars would take centuries or millennia and a mobilization of resources and capital beyond what’s foreseeably available to human civilization. Never mind that temple, the human body: Central to any practical consideration of being a spacefaring, multiplanet species are conditions of menstruation, conception, pregnancy, prenatal gestation, and birth. We cannot foreseeably decant new human organisms, à la Frank Herbert, from tanks. “Gravity on Mars is about 38% of that of Earth,” notes a would-be manly passage on Space X’s website, “so you would be able to lift heavy things and bound around.” Yes, and because of the cellular and vascular and uterine miracles of human reproduction, that missing 62 percent of gravity could very likely render many embodied subtleties of motherly humanity impossible and even lethal.
We design and build as if for Mars, on Earth. We deploy half-century-old visual and formal stylistic conventions—a backward-looking space-age retrofuturism—for our representations of the future. These combined tendencies, and whatever message about the actual future that the combination tacitly conveys, are influential: Far from the Peak Oil follies of the West Coast and Pacific, we see it even in cities that generally lack architectural ambition and achievement, such as New York. Two essential local examples that illustrate the era and range of retrofuturism are at the American Museum of Natural History: James Polshek’s 2000 Rose Center for Earth and Space, all high tech–ish shimmering glass and white tubular steel and silvery encapsulated spheres in evocation of circa-1970 NASA, and Jeanne Gang’s 2023 Gilder Center for Science, Education, and Innovation, mostly a very swoopy shotcrete-lined event space atrium (plus butterfly vivarium) that with its slight and metageological expressionism is definitely giving moon base. If the museum had more genuinely cared about the history of nature or had more fully known about the nature of history, it might have chosen not to build these things at all. It might have lived more resourcefully into its existing places. It might have tried to dishabituate us from all unnecessary newness. And so to redirect us from mere novelty in the shapes of constructed objects toward more constructive innovations in human behaviors. The most sustainable building is the one you don’t build. The next most sustainable is the building you already have.
If the space race was a collective sublimation of potentially civilization-ending nuclear war into a kind of mechanical performance art, then our tech billionaires’ spacefaring may at its heart be something both more forlorn and farcical: a semiconscious expression of climate anxiety soothed by fantasies of galactic adventurism, millenarian transhumanism, and technocratic solutionism.
In perpetuating retrofuturism, we architects are complicit in the service of certain kinds of power; we participate in the perpetuation of certain delusions. Within our own small profession, this stylistic perpetuation also perpetuates certain habits of obeisance and enforces certain expectations of compliance by architectural subjects and users.
Retrofuturism helps us look away from the anthropogenic climate change–driven cultural and social poly-crisis (now that in only three hundred years we have used up all the burnable fossils); away from the horror of the planet’s current Sixth Great Extinction; and away from the coming sober but creative simplifications of a post-energy-surplus civilization.
The style enables patrons and architects to self-soothe and self-stimulate by providing them with a fantasy of environmental sustainability that helps resist the more difficult project of building factually environmentally responsible buildings. Buildings that are radically local in their generation of operational energy and, so, conceivably gross, not net, zero in their carbon footprints. Buildings assembled from such renewable matter as timber and mycelium, or else by ready-made material harvest from existing structures and infrastructures. Or, better yet, characterized by the perennially adaptive reuse of existing legacy platforms. So: mostly, old buildings, reworked, retrofitted, and ever more deeply dwelled. Space-age retrofuturist architectures, on the other hand, are at great energetic and material cost made to look like they rest so very lightly and harmlessly on the earth that they could lift off and away from it or else made to seem so cozily and tenderly burrowed into the earth that they are a part of it—part of blameless nature and not complicit culture. In all these ways, retrofuturism encourages at planetary scale our defensive yet self-destructive psychological habit of the denial of death.
At the same time, paradoxically, the retrofuturist style may also encourage a nihilistic denial of life: of yet unfulfilled potentials and discoveries and so of our duty to the future, to our descendants, near and far. It diverts our gaze from the future to the past by reinforcing an assumption that the past’s imaginary future was better than our own could ever be—and that therefore we should substitute that old vision for whatever our own might become. “Well, you keep saying the future wasn’t always this way, right?” says the plucky whiz kid protagonist in the dour 2015 Disney film Tomorrowland. “It wasn’t,” replies her interlocutor, a broken man, a putative ex-visionary in the handsome person of George Clooney. “When I was a kid, it was—” “Different, right?” “Right.” “Okay, cool, then start there.”
We experience the geodesical as a throwback to historically situated constructions of the futuristic and the countercultural: yesterday’s tomorrow, today.
Although today’s space-age architecture, with its aeronautical look, doesn’t formally resemble the classically inspired palazzi of the last Gilded Age, it is still classical work. To paraphrase the famous remark by British classicist Mary Beard, there is something about classics, embedded in the subject, that says people before us did it better. To say that people before us did it better is the essence of a certain type of counterprogressivism. To say, okay, cool, start in the past, is the essence of a certain type of pessimism. To participate in that pessimism is to enable that ever-threatening edgelord end-times collective fatalism—LOL nothing matters because Zombie Apocalypse—that further empowers the already powerful to do, evermore, just as they please.
A SINGULAR CONTRIBUTION to architectural criticism by longtime New York Times critic Michael Kimmelman is the popularization of the term billionaire whisperer. He influentially attached the sobriquet to Thomas Heatherwick within the context of a May 2021 assessment of Little Island, the twee and picturesque venue in the Hudson River that was largely funded by the (nonspacefaring) billionaire Barry Diller. Built by demolishing a venerable pier, weather-beaten but reparable, and with bottleneck circulation and crowd-control procedures that effectively privatize its formerly public space, this enclosure of a commons on the waterfront might suggest to some the daintiest possible intimation of seasteading.
Although it seems to needle both client and designer, the appellation billionaire whisperer in fact flatters both parties, whose relationship is itself one of mutual flattery. Whispering evokes the horse whispering undertaken by the archetypal figure of the shamanic cowboy who breaks wild horses; perhaps the titular subject of the brilliant 2011 documentary Buck or the 1998 Robert Redford film The Horse Whisperer, based on a novel about the same singular cowboy, were all on Kimmelman’s mind. The architect becomes an avatar of emotional intelligence and the triumph of technique over wilderness; the billionaire becomes an embodiment of that wilderness, of once unfettered nature, deferentially fettered and soothingly cultivated. Part of horse whispering is mirroring: The boyish cool of the role-playing architect is a gratifying reflection, one that enables the billionaire to feel both magnanimously indulgent of eccentricity and instrumental to the self-realization of this incarnated persona, the whisperer, who stands supplicant as an image of what the billionaire chooses to believe is his own best self.
The not-incidental emotional labor undertaken by the billionaire whisperer tends to be in the performance of a very particular kind of optimism: an affect of upstart cockiness tempered by innocent-seeming wonder, supported by hidden technical competencies. That is: all the right stuff. “Rocket science” is still what we say when we mean the smartest thing there is. The practice of architecture—for all its diligent expertise and occasional mystique—is not rocket science. And yet billionaire whisperers, especially now that the greatest fortunes are tech fortunes, are invested in making it seem so—in making architecture seem scientistic and rocket-fueled, as well as scalable and disruptive in ways that are comfortingly familiar to venture capitalists. Sustaining such a vision of architecture, and its associated archaic vision of the future, keeps us all invested in appreciable newness as a desirable quality for our objects and material culture. It sustains a fantasy of perpetual updates to something rounder, cleaner, crisper. It diverts from what must now be done, which is to cultivate the shaggier and spikier enterprise of repurposing, repair, reuse, reparation, regeneration. Even now, we are made and told to prepare only for a smooth ride.
Bjarke Ingels, for example, once promoted a project that he dubbed—in a pun on what is still lamentably termed the master plan—Masterplanet. Publicized in 2020, Masterplanet envisions continentally scaled devices and procedures—previously formulated by specialists as thought experiments for desperate last resorts in harm mitigation—that were to notionally geo-engineer our planet back to temperate habitability. Credulously reporting on the proposal, Time magazine notes that “a mischievous smile spreads over Ingels’ tanned, boyish face” as he explains various schemes that, in the architect’s words, “turn on the carbon-sucking capacity of the oceans.”
Such schemes come with a compound moral hazard: First, any consoling narrative that there will—eventually—be a gadgety fix to the climate emergency sustains our current petrochemical practices, perpetuates the complacent burning that fuels every other kind of injustice, and delays redress. Second, given how autocracy often presents as technocracy, Masterplanet’s inattention to the global political mechanisms and policies critical to its execution suggests it might end up serving the interests of the masters and less so the planet. Call it, in the newly fashionable term, soft fascism. Third, with its technical unseriousness, the project gravely overlooks the chaos-adjacent successive cascade-effects of any blunt intervention into the definitively complex systems of the earth’s energetic, atmospheric, and biospheric mechanisms—the delicacy of which we have already glimpsed in the zoonotic and epidemiological catastrophes of the early 2020s.
I AM WRITING you this from the most immediate, and therefore most elusive, past of all. From a past so recent it is almost your present. From the hottest and wettest summer I can remember in all my time on the island of Manhattan, from days on end in which each day becomes measurably the hottest in recorded history, with Los Angeles’s orange skies over New York City and Mumbai’s monsoons in Montreal. One piece of recent news, from that figurative heat of the summer campaigns, is that the putative small-time billionaire Donald Trump, in his third campaign for the American presidency, has named the forty-year-old Ohio senator J. D. Vance as his vice presidential candidate. In his neonatal babyface, in the faint literariness bespoken by his best-selling memoir, in the aura of technological literacy conferred by his work in fintech, in his own sour take on the performance of camp-adjacent masculinity, Vance’s persona seems cast precisely in the mold of the billionaire whisperer. Vance’s own billionaire is of course not the disgraced former president but Peter Thiel—yes, him again—who employed the younger man at his Palantir hedge fund, then comprehensively invested in Vance’s own ventures—notably $15 million to a successful 2022 Senate campaign, the largest such sum ever. The two reportedly met in 2011 at Yale Law School, where Vance was then a student, in what he would call the most significant moment in his education, at which Thiel is said to have delivered a version of his talk about how, “my generation was promised colonies on the moon.”
“Rocket science” is still what we say when we mean the smartest thing there is. The practice of architecture—for all its diligent expertise and occasional mystique—is not rocket science.
It appears that a most vivid difference between now and just-before-now is the exponential development of large language models and machine learning—popularly called artificial intelligence. The carbon and energy load of the infrastructure for this technology—enclosed by more big boxes out in Mars-like deserts somewhere—is extraordinary. To say nothing more of this unwarranted consumption of energy, the cultural load of the verbals and visuals of generative artificial intelligence (in whose moral burden we stylists of the built environment share more than many) may be even greater. What AI adds to the spacefaring fantasia of the most recent past is a whiff of transhumanism. And also—during the Sixth Great Extinction—a stench of nineteenth-century eugenics. You don’t have to peer too far down the rabbit hole of the relevant literature to encounter observations such as the one made by the peculiar and problematic anthropologist Gregory Cochrane that “one generally assumes that space colonists, assuming that there ever are any, will be picked individuals, somewhat like existing astronauts—the best out of hordes of applicants. They’ll be smarter than average, healthier than average, saner than average—and not by just a little. Since all these traits are significantly heritable, some highly so, we have to expect that their descendants will be different.” Perhaps some billionaires imagine their descendants will very closely resemble their whisperers, which is to say: incarnate fantasies of their own most gratifying self-images. Click a little more down the rabbit hole and you’ll hear about replacing even those biological consciousness platforms of that new master race with their digital successor—using the former as some kind of boot program for a brain simulation that is both immortal and independent of planetary conditions. Not your brain, though. Maybe X Æ A-Xii’s.
Far out, man. And to be sure, in its lysergic shock, almost a tonic to the snake-oil slickness of the retrofuturistic aesthetic, whose performance of innocence elides acknowledgment of tragedy, whose performance of optimism masks the liberties taken by the systematic perpetuation of fatalistic pessimism. A performance that cloaks dank doomer nihilism with something shiny and campy, looksmaxxed and whispery. That with an unchanging vision of a retrofuture forecloses the genuine possibilities of an avant-future yet unconceived. That suppresses our socially mammalian human and humane tendency toward duty, stewardship, conservation, and mutual care. That substitutes for the rigors of the modern movement at its best—economies of means, technologies in concert with ecologies, transparencies of action and intention—the squalor of the modernist style at its worst—mannered illusions of progress that serve regressive ends. In place of retrofutures, avant-futures are still available! Futures of stewardship and conservation; futures of post-energy-surplus and postgrowth (as we used to think of growth) development; futures that are woodsy and rusty but ingenious and urbane; futures that are made and mended; resourceful yet abundant; dignified and delightful. Futures that answer Musk’s vainglorious 2017 remark—“You want to wake up in the morning and think the future is going to be great—and that’s what being a spacefaring civilization is all about. And I can’t think of anything more exciting than going out there and being among the stars”—with Fuller’s 2117-worthy reminder that, always and already, “we are all astronauts on a little spaceship called Earth.” For now, it may be enough to resiliently and determinedly suspect that when you are given a familiar futuristic vision—even or especially one that is aerodynamic with bits of green—that what is being stolen from you is the future itself. That what is actually being inflicted on you is an attempted foreclosure, through the enforcement of the past masquerading as the future, on all the glory and radical potential of this very moment. Of now, and now, and now.