Nothing dates faster than the future. That is why architecture, the slowest of the arts, is probably the worst medium to express it. But that hasn't stopped architects trying and their futuristic fantasies have been hugely influential in our cities. This was never more so than in the early 20th century, when the modernists conceived of rational cities that would replace random street-patterns with gardens spiked with skyscrapers linked by streets in the sky. The best ended up like London's Barbican (yes, the best), the worst like the decaying housing projects that circle nearly every major city.
So it is entirely appropriate that Future City, a paean to architectural utopias, should sit in the Barbican, London's last chunk of architectural utopianism. (Conceived in the 1950s, it was finished only in the 1980s, when it was already painfully passé.) Future City is an attempt to display architecture's most radical visions from the lasthalf-century. It is a superb collection of stuff, with fantastic, visionary drawings, pasted-together manifestoes and stunning models.
Strikingly displayed (in a dramatic exhibition design by Foreign Office Architects), it is, nevertheless, a failure as an exhibition. There is no narrative, no rationale, very little explanation and, frankly, no point beyond getting together some wonderful but rather familiar artefacts. Situated in the heart of London's postwar modernist dream, it entirely ignores the legacy of that radical movement - which actually changed our cities - to concentrate instead on silly fantasies, architectural cul-de-sacs and empty speculation.
The show takes as its eccentric starting point the meeting of Constant Nieuwenhuys and the situationist philosopher Guy Debord in 1956. Fascinating though that coming together may have been, it had minimal significance architecturally. Debord's influence lay far more in his interpretation of the existing fabric of Paris, the idea of the flâneur's dérive (aimless urban walk) and the genesis of psychogeography - which, in its restless search for the meaning of place, was the diametric opposite of modernist dreams of starting over. Debord refused to visualise a city of the future and must (and does) make the worst possible starting point for an exhibition on visualisations of the future.
This show is in effect an outing for the stunning Regional Contemporary Art Collection (FRAC) based in Orléans, France, bulked up with some other good material. Because of its spuriously ambitious title, however, we are led to expect something more. We come here for an insight into how our cities may change and instead we are given sci-fi fantasies, the doodlings of architects with too much time on their hands and not enough commissions. Roll up for pod houses, whacky shapes, blobby cities, superstructure cities, high-tech fun palaces, airship cities, far sillier stuff than you can see in any second-rate movie.
As if that were not bad enough, you can see models and photos of this stuff now being built. Our "radical" architects are now beginning to realise the visions of their predecessors in the 1950s. Yet these whimsical shapeshave long ceased to be innovative and we now know thatthe technology to realise them exists. What would have been good would have been to see proposals that really are radical as of now.
This is not to say that there aren't fascinating moments here. Yona Friedman's proposals for laying superstructures above existing cities to allow their expansion still look extraordinary. Foreign Office Architects' own Yokohama Port Terminal is truly radical in its sculptural absorption of pedestrian flow and its deceptively simple integration of landscape and building. The Pop-Art proposals of 1960s London still appear irreverent, pertinent and, most of all, funny (humour not being a big thing with visionary architects) but raise questions about the absence of Richard Rogers' Pompidou Centre, the ultimate realisation of many of these ideas.
There are fragments of Zaha Hadid but not nearly enough from one of the first architects actually to achieve some of the most extraordinarily futuristic designs (her current show at the Guggenheim in New York deftly displays some of these visions). There are exhibits from architects including Will Alsop, Lebbeus Woods, Neil Denari, Diller & Scofidio and others that I still find as arid and boring as I did 20 years ago, and others from Gordon Matta Clark, James Wines and Peter Eisenmann that seem to have no relevance here at all, being about the deconstruction of the house as object rather than the city itself. This is, in the end, not a show about the Future City but about image-obsessed designers desperate to appear radical, more onanism than urbanism.
Across town in a half-finished office development on Euston Road is Airspace, a small exhibition addressing the radical changes about to occur on London's skyline. The riposte to the Barbican show, Airspace (curated by the architectural consultancy Newbetter and the Architecture Foundation) is a display of interpretations and film, of real possibilities and (partly) humorous predictions. Filmmakers have looked at the effects tall buildings have on their immediate urban surroundings and at the depiction of skyscrapers in film (a superb video installation by Alex Haw), while a series of London panoramas offer potential futures including "Londonhai" (a Shanghai/Dubai inspired vision of total architectural freedom) and a rendering of the city with no tall buildings at all - surprisingly dull.
Small, tight and intelligent, Airspace is an exhibition with a point and one that raises (and deliberately does not answer) questions of huge importance to the capital and beyond in a period of truly dramatic and radical architectural change.
Architects from the Renaissance through to revolutionary France and Russia, modernism and beyond have tended to envisage utopias as fresh beginnings. Yet architecture is at its most effective and interesting when in dialogue with an existing context and, with the exception of China and the Middle East, that is the situation most architects find themselves in. Film designers have understood this well, from the dark expressionist visions of 1920s Germany to Bladerunner and The Matrix. Viewed as a utopia the future is boring, but juxtaposed with the crumbling remnants of urban civilisation it can be invigorating.
The Barbican show, despite its location and exhibits, fails to realise this and becomes a freakshow of rusty radicalism. Shorn of political, historical and theoretical context the heavily rhetorical work of Paul Virilio, Rem Koolhaas and others appears banal and pointless. Ill-conceived and poorly curated, this is ultimately a failed exhibition of very good material marred by starting in the wrong place and ending up nowhere.
'Future City' is at the Barbican until September 17, tel 0845 1207550. Airspace is at 350 Euston Road until July 14, tel 0207 245 3334
