The Futuro was the brainchild of Matti Suuronen, an industrial Finnish architect who was tasked with creating a dynamic alpine chalet and arrived at a fibreglass spheroid prefabricated house, taking cues from silo designs and desiring the form to appear almost entirely intergalactic \u2013 as if assembled from a scene in Stanley Kubrick\u2019s 2001: A Space Odyssey or an issue of Planet Comics. The analogue developed by Suuronen here is far from incidental: the world was transfixed by the Space Race and so Futuro had to appear as unsituated as the spacecraft in order to suggest an infinite living potential dynamic – or, in short, a better future. The blueprint was simple: a radial diagram that located a fireplace at the core, a mechanised kitchenette and bathroom, with six reclining units to the perimeter. With an aeronautical hatch door as a means of entrance, the fibreglass split into sixteen lightweight panels equipped with a band of elliptical windows. Promotional imagery showed the Futuro cable lifted over mountainous terrain \u2013 one had to look twice to confirm it wasn\u2019t the structure, itself, that was flying. Although visionary, it bound itself to the retro-kitsch side of futurism and delivered a commercial disappointment \u2018as famous for its otherworldly appearance as for its cult following\u2019 \u2013 it failed to achieve even modest architectural commemoration. Nonetheless, of interest here is the way that Suuronen broadly coalesced imagery that typified technological advancement and contextual curiosity into a single cartoonish entity \u2013 an entity that was assumed to triumph in a similar manner to that of its source material.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Matti Suuronen<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":533,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,20],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/design.tel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/532"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/design.tel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/design.tel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/design.tel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/design.tel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=532"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/design.tel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/532\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/design.tel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/533"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/design.tel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=532"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/design.tel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=532"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/design.tel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=532"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}