Another theory of everything.
It’s possible to discern in outline how the convergence of different strands of design, fabrication, building, and occupancy could, as they evolve, revolutionize important parts of the economy. But it also feels like we’re in the early years of mass-production, when Ford cranked cars out by sticking with one model. We’re caught between the array of choices available to us on a personal level, and the lack of choices available to us on a societal level. This discrepancy has opened up a space for fractional options, from Uber and Lyft to Airbnb and WeWork, that try to compensate for our societal poverty.
Buckminster Fuller’s 4D housing proposal was based partly on the idea of time-sharing dwelling. Not only would the housing be put in place faster, but people would use it when they needed it. Implicit in Fuller’s overriding interest in “lightness” is the idea that we would live in a simpler way, less dependent on owning the clothes we wear or the beds we sleep in. We’d accept a more dynamic form of housing, for example — and there’s nothing mundane about 4D — instead of variety for its own sake. Life’s necessities would be rethought, something that was under way at the time in terms of childcare and communal kitchens, for example — shifting them to a collective model to free people’s time for other things. This aspect of futurity has been lost.
The dystopic element that runs amok currently reflects this loss. We see everything through the lens of a “personal” that puts us at a distance from others. We take communal off the table so it can be sold back to us as “third places” that mimic conviviality. We never let our imagination go in the direction of the radical sharing that early moderns saw as a way past the industrial city’s bleak tenements. We pose micro-units as a holding pattern until IPO wealth kicks in or we move far away to recreate a version of our parents’ lifestyle. What we don’t do is layer societal needs into the converging mix, to see it as not simply or even fundamentally personal, but a new form of abundance that isn’t based on shrinking space but on living more humanely and intelligently.
We’ve been here before — in Vienna in the 1920s, in William Morris’s News From Nowhere, and in the speculations and utopian communities that predate Marx and Engels. They often crashed and burned, yet they contained the seeds of something better than “how we live today.” It was that impulse and critique that sparked these experiments, and we don’t lack for reasons to try them again, to let them leaven our hopes of progress.
