Sunday, March 04, 2007

YOUR GREAT, GREAT GRANDCHILD'S HOUSE: 2200 A.D.

Here's my best guess as to how your family will be housed two hundred years from now. Your successors will live in a tropical jungle populated by beautiful exotic plants and animals. Their weather-proof furniture will be arranged in clusters near tree trunks, ponds and waterfalls. No rain will fall on the house area if your family doesn't want it to. No bad weather unless your family desires it. Tame leopards, monkeys and beautiful birds will play in the livingroom.


The way I see it, walls won't be needed to keep out bad weather. Surely two hundred years from now there'll be devices that can keep an exposed area warm and dry, even in the middle of a storm. Walls won't even be needed for privacy since the air around the rooms can probably be made opaque or luminous depending on what the owner chooses. Most of the plants in the area will be real but maybe your family's walls will be holographic images of plants. I wouldn't be surprised if the paths and roadways leading to homes disappeared into faux holo-plants. Confronted with the dense wall of plants the owner would simply walk through them till he found himself inside the house.

I wonder if hard living structures will even exist in the future. If security and shelter can be had without hard walls and a roof would anyone still choose to live that way? If they do I predict the architects of the future will ransack the past for ideas based on real, historic structures. I wouldn't be surprised if some people decided to live in homes that looked like Thai temples or Italian villas.


My guess is that most people would want to live in newly-grown tropical rainforests but some will no doubt prefer the look of dense, temperate zone evergreens or Arizona-type deserts. I assume that plants of any type will be made to thrive anywhere our successors choose to plant them. Of course it's possible that people will live and work in virtual-reality cities that we can't even imagine. Maybe our successors will choose to imagine themselves as intelligent fish living in a coral reef or ants in an ant hill. The limitless possibilities of virtual reality make this kind of speculation difficult.


20 comments:

katzenjammer studios said...

...and I predict that pencil and paper will still be the best method of animating.

Kali Fontecchio said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Kali Fontecchio said...

Hey! This is funny timing- we went to the Huntington Gardens today, and I kept saying,"Eddie would love this!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

Brubaker said...

I dunno...I'm hoping that global warming won't get as bad as it is now in the future. Let's hope the world will still exist in 2200...

Yes, I'm a gloomy person. So sue me!

William said...

That's how I live now! Then again, I am a hobo.

Sean Worsham said...

Our closest thing to VR now is the Nintendo Wii. Gosh I gotta get off that thing!

Anonymous said...

Mmmm..... interesting predictions!

Don't dismiss the possibility that we could all end up living like hobbits too!

diego cumplido said...

Eddie, this time you went too far!! I went out on holidays and returned a couple of days ago, and when I entered your blog WHAT DID I FIND?!... YOU'VE BEEN POSTING ALL MY FAVOURITE VIDEOS. The Kerouac's one, the opening sequence from Touch of Evil, Screaming Jay Hawkins stuff, Godard's Breathless. I felt like you had my soul stolen in my absence. You should get killed!! do you know that??.

Oh! just forget it. I love your blog anyway.

Lester Hunt said...

Brilliant as usual, but I would make something like the opposite prediction. Your basic idea seems to be that people love the feeling of vast open spaces and only live indoors because they have to. That's true of me: I love camping, especially in CA, where you usually don't need a tent! But humans have always liked the feeling of living at least part of their day in a snug little box. (Uterine retreat?) In real rain forests, they build little houses of leaves. (Among the Yanomamo of Venezuela, the hut is the property of the wife, who in a domestic dispute may dismantle it, leaving the husband homeless!)

Kali Fontecchio said...

"(Among the Yanomamo of Venezuela, the hut is the property of the wife, who in a domestic dispute may dismantle it, leaving the husband homeless!)"

GENIUS!

Eddie Fitzgerald said...

Lee: Wow! Interestig link! I wonder what people who've lived in houses like that for years think about them.

Anonymous said...

>Among the Yanomamo of Venezuela, the hut is the property of the wife, who in a domestic dispute may dismantle it, leaving the husband homeless!

Dirty latin savages!!

Anonymous said...

Uncle Eddie: That's a terrific question. Me? I get claustrophobic just looking at the photos!

Charlie said...

Golly Gee willikers! I wish I lived there now!

I.D.R.C. said...

I would not want a house that disappears when the electricity goes out.

3awashi thani said...

maybe i'm a negative person but i can't imagine this happening without like a hundred glitches, maybe because my internet gets disconnected like everyday.
so i can easily imagine some guy walking around in his virtual jungle and telling his guests "don't mind the tree that keeps blinking in and out of view were getting a programer to fix it in the morning" omg i just realised in your perfect future programers would rule the world and be the only people able to do diy on their houses o.o
great pictures btw

Eddie Fitzgerald said...

Miss: You live in the UAE!? Wow! What's it like?

3awashi thani said...

whats the uae like? obnoxios currently it's trying to sell itself like a whore to tourists so it wont rely oil anymore. the ads are driving me crazy.
otherwise it's nice and peaceful you woudn't even know iraq is having a war right across the gulf from us

david said...

These are cool photos. I wish the future would be like this. The last one reminds me of that weird eutopia those pale people inhabited in the Time Machine (the one from the 60's not the crappy remake)

Eddie Fitzgerald said...

Miss3: Fascinating!