In 1984 Andrea Juno and Valhalla Vale interviewed JG Ballard, who was asked his greatest fear about the future. He stated, ‘ I would sum up my fear of about the future in one word: boring. And that’s my one fear: that everything has happened; nothing exciting or new or interesting is ever going to happen again […] the future is just going to a be a vast conforming suburb of the soul’. Carlo Rovelli would say that there is no such thing as future in physics. Marshall McLuhan would suggest that what we consider the future is actually our present because we find ourselves living in the past. Considering a future present we may agree ‘we live in an age where science fiction has become fact. Our contemporary age is as radical with change, latency and uncertainty becoming the new norm’. As we prototype our collective present we may consider that there is no architecture without experimentation. In constructing the fundamental relationships of how we live and understand our world we need to examine methods that fundamentally see designing and acting in the world as intellectual enquires. Experimentation is not only necessary, it is fundamental to move beyond assertions of what things should be in order to see them for what they can be
Theodore Spyropoulos is the Director of the AA’s renowned Design Research Lab (AADRL), resident artist at Somerset House and is co-founder of the experimental art, architecture and design practice Minimaforms. Theodore has been a visiting Research Fellow at MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies and professor of Architecture at The Städelschule in Frankfurt.
