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Back to Futurism?


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In a way Futurism is a basic instinct. A lust of the blood for the modern. For progress. For clean lobbies and antibiotics and heart transplants and aircraft travel and genetically modified crops and embryo screening and Hotol and fusion. We eat Futurism for breakfast.

In a way I like Futurism because it holds faith with technology. It says: Fly that airplane! Burn holes in the atmosphere until you can burn cleaner holes, because progress and modernity will solve the problems that arise from that valiant act. I suppose it is the masculine principle. At its heart futurism is human because it is Utopian.

What is the problem with William Morris, for example? Isn't his vision of the future revolting - horribly cloying with his fussy wallpaper and his arts and crafts and his false ideas of femininity.

How much more interesting Le Corbusier's futurist city, his contemporary city for three million people.

Futurism may not have a good record, but the left only abandoned the Futurist movement in Italy in 1924. Futurism became post-futurism. Futurism is the lust for progress.

Isn't the lust for progress a vital human emotion. Not touchy feely upper class dilettante progress with a fedora on top, but a future with clean lines. The designs of Luigi Colani, perhaps.

One of the interesting things about Colani is that, by way of Tullio Crali and the Stone Synthesis Manifesto in 1959, he get right past the nostalgia of classicism and right back to the natural philosophy of the Ionian pre-classicists.

Which is where we are all still located, isn't it? In some arial space between the islands of Patmos and Samos; within sight of the river Meander.

And in the very home of the modern world, in London - the Great Wen, in the playground of Rain Steam and Speed, in the locus of Darwin and Newton and Jets and Radar and Fibre optics and antibiotics and genetics - selfish and unselfish - Futurism is not out of place.

Surely Futurism, and in particular a Futurism that recapitulates all the achievements of Futurism and its related works, a kind of Futurism that has got past the Roman and the classical to see our future in nature itself, is worthy.

So let us dust off the sooty bone meal of the Victorian and the Edwardian, all of it, right up to the dusty concrete of the Elizabethan and embrace Futurism.


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