Hallo Tomorrow (Hello Demain!)

The French appear much less shy to say hello to the future. Progress, innovation and technology is usually embraced. This line of thinking brought about the Parc de Villette in Paris and in it this summer the exhibit Hello Future, hellodemain. This contrasts from the much dimmer view that the Germans often take in consideration of the future, for example in the most recent German TV piece on Smart Cities in which a rather pessimistic static future is predicted because the smart city can read all the trends and desires of its populace and programs itself accordingly.

Parque de Villette

 
While I have visited the Parque de Villette a few years ago and found Tschumi's work quite intriguing I didn't have the opportunity to see this summer's future exhibit there. Instead, I took the virtual tour after seeing the fabric structure that houses part of the exhibit in the latest edition of Fabric Architecture. The orange structure designed by Jacob and MacFarlane architects might be interesting enough but inside the future is reduced to futuristic cars and flickering electronic screens, yet another reminder how poorly we usually do in imagining the future. Most of the time we extrapolate one trend and forget about all the others and "mutations" (paradigm shifts) are all but absent from most predictions.

Things that really determine the future are often social in nature and not technological. This is also why Marx' description of the future did not come to pass, the near crash of the international financial system notwithstanding.
Progress is often just a re-cast of what we know already in a different way. In this sense Madrid, Spain started a very different future this year when it finished its own version of the Big Dig and buried a motorway under a river, created a park and opened a futuristic new pedestrian bridge that connects parts of the city that had been separated for too long.

The shiny new Pasarela-del-Arganzuela is a testament less of a car free city than of a city where priorities have shifted and the car has been de-throned from its dominant position in urban planning. Still there, but relegated to the underworld where until recently pedestrians had to go if they safely wanted to cross. See this blog to appreciate what a scar the expressway along the riverbed had created.

The new bridge is not only a symbol for what shifts we see in urban planning worldwide (for current US freeway tear-down see urbanland.uli.org), it is also an apt expression of architecture that embraces structural engineering to express itself. The tubular steel construction opened up to allow views, air and light but closed enough to create protection from the sun. Designed by Dominque Perrault, who also designed the US headquarters of the the firm that produces the wire meshes that he likes so much and that he helped make a fashionable architectural object. The firm is GKD AG and their building is in Cambridge, Maryland.

Although the recent Baltimore mayoral campaign did not offer sweeping views of a bright future for this city, change is already here, the future can be felt in many places and artists, architects and engineers are an important part of it. Being open to the future (hello demain!) is an important beginning predicting it is another story. Which is Baltimore's bridge? I think I know which  our freeway is that needs to disappear, or maybe I know two!