"Yesterday's Tomorrows: Past Visions of the American Future"

The 1930s future: so quaint!

Somehow, imagining a brighter future seems quintessentially American. "Yesterday's Tomorrows" explains the country's obsession with futurism not in terms of technology, but as an evolution of society itself. From the preface:

To imagine that the future will resurrect cherished values of the past has no doubt been comforting to modern Americans. If only the material world changes, leaving social arrangements intact, the prospect of technological innovation becomes less intimidating. Yet this may well be in illusion. Technology has historically been a catalyst of change, not a conserver of traditions or a refuge for established ways of life and thought. The visions of the future gathered here are of little interest as prophecies. As artifacts of culture and belief, however, these past visions of the future—testaments to the pervasiveness of this illusion of technological utopianism—are guideposts to a better understanding of our own future.

Reading "Yesterday's Tomorrows" is a bit like walking through a history museum: the curator's text guides interpretation, but it's up to the visitors to make up their own minds about the past.

I was especially struck by the many illustrations of future cities, which often look as if they'd been designed and built by a single mind, and invariably these were drawn by engineers and architects. They were carefully organized, rigid; not organic like the cities of today. Interestingly, no one had plausible ideas about how these visions might come to pass. War, peace, government intervention, scientific progress, economic regress, a wholesale revolt against individualistic consumerism? Imagining the end product without having any idea which road may lead there seems to be a human tendency.

The future in popular culture science fiction often represents change as not only inevitable but effortless.

Le Corbusier, "A Contemporary City for Three Million"

Hugh Ferriss, "Skyscraper Hangar"

Buckminster Fuller, "Old Man River's City"

Still, the section on cities of the future was one of the most interesting of the book. The more gifted designers used the future as a blank canvas upon which to resolve serious issues in urban planning. The decisions and trade-offs they made give a lot of insight into why today's cities are designed the way they are.

Prescriptive visions of the city of the future from the nineteenth century to the present always imply an extraordinarily high degree of planning. The orderly buildings, the protected green areas, the clean air, the efficient transportation networks—historically, none of these are effected in modern American society.

For something completely different, here's my favorite picture from the entire book:

Popular Mechanics, 1950. Hilarious!

The year 2000 will be exactly the same socially and technologically as 1950, but waterproof? What a failure of imagination!

My highly subjective rating: practically a museum in a book, "Yesterday's Tomorrows" is filled with lush illustrations and contemplative prose engagingly exploring a little-studied aspect of the human experience. Recommended, and a quality coffee table book.