Not surprisingly, given my profession,
I spend a fair bit of time thinking about future-proofing buildings.
Trying to second-guess what social changes we will make,
which materials and technologies we will focus on,
and how our buildings should reflect our changing lifestyles.
So it's rather an eye-opener to take a step back,
to see how people of the mid 20th century imagined we would be living today.
Jaques Tati's absolutely corker of a satirical movie,
Mon Oncle
(which probably just happens to be my favourite movie of all time)
saw the kitchen of the future as a very white, extremely utilitarian and clinical
experimentation with multi-function.
A kitchen which is anything but user-friendly.
And Walter Cronkite's prediction of the kitchen of 2001 is a very scary place
of microwave conveyor belts and recycled dishes.
But not in a good way.
Both imagined a kitchen of gadgets,
where the machine was king.
It's a far cry from our current penchant for adding & celebrating rustic elements in our kitchens.
Even in kitchens where food is never actually cooked,
but simply heated and served,
there has been a trend for a long while to minimise the visual "noise" of appliances,
and I doubt that will disappear anytime soon.
The machine is no longer king, rather a pawn designed to quietly go about its job.
But then, it's a dangerous practice to make radical predictions,
as we can see now, with the wisdom of hindsight!