Architectural Design, February, London

Edited by Monica Pidgeon and Technical Editor Robin Middleton, the cover of Architectural Design’s February “2000+” issue features a wired, faceless astronaut against a red background. This bizarre but powerful image first appeared as an advertisement for Cuttler-Hammer Co., a manufacturer of electrical products (primarily industrial power distribution and control equipment) based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. An abstract spaceman seemed just right to lend credibility to the corporation’s products, while at the same time it provided the ideal imagery for John McHale’s futurist discourse on the year 2000 and what he termed “planetary housekeeping,” published in this issue of AD. “2000+” was instrumental in many ways. First, it was McHale’s earliest fully designed and edited publication on world systems and the management of the global reservoir (to be republished first in Design Quarterly’s January 1968 issue “Towards the Future” and later in McHale’s 1969 book The Future of the Future). Second, it came at a time when AD was about to embrace a shift from built work to indeterminate experimental structures that would advance the rethinking of shelter and habitation. Extracted directly from NASA’s space program, the imagery of “2000+,” including space monkeys, geared astronauts, exoskeletal harness systems, sections of moon shelters, submarines, and spaceships, was enough to stir a sensation and mark AD’s experimental trajectory in a manner that largely defied definitive borders between science fiction and social reality. The spaceman icon, coming from NASA to the world of advertisement and eventually appropriated by an intellectual enterprise such as AD, becomes the supreme representation of this convergence. LK

Close window