Remember when you were a kid at Disney World and the futuristic stuff they revealed on the Horizons ride (otherwise known as the only fun part of Epcot) seemed imminently possible? Space colonization. Ocean colonization. Desert colonization. It’s no wonder that the visionaries who whipped up this wacky version of today back in 1979 were all we could think of when BBC guest editor Zaha Hadid tipped us off to Archigram, a ’60s avant-garde architectural group who created hypothetical futuristic projects.
(Check out an audio slideshow of some of their work here.)
“It was bored by the narrow mindedness of typical British rebuilding and housing,” Sir Peter Cook, one of the group’s members explains to Hadid. “It wanted to offer a city that could be affected by the latest changes — a plug-in city in which the apartments and bits of apartments could be swapped or traded in.”
Our favorite part of their vision: the inflatable mobile villages that could be transported via hovercraft. Pictured above is the one Archigram project that became a reality; thanks to a skin, the building (which is located in Austria) is able communicate with its surroundings through lights. That kind of thinking isn’t too big of a leap from something that Thom Moran and Rustam Mehta might dream up. Maybe they should all join forces and save the world. Thoughts?
(Side note: A motion simulator replaced Horizons back in 2003, which makes us sad.)