Live for tomorrow

THERE are 10 up-and-coming firms featured in “Open House: Architecture and Technology for Intelligent Living,” an exhibition opening today at the Art Center College of Design’s South Campus in Pasadena. Each was asked to create a house to suit the world as it might be 25 or 30 years from now. None seemed daunted, in the slightest, by the uncertainty of the task.

Maybe that’s because what the show seeks from them is not so different from what clients ask of architects every day: to imagine various possibilities for a particular piece of land. Or maybe it’s because architects, by nature, are totalitarian optimists. They love the idea of the future -- as long as they are the ones defining it.

But any architect who tries to become a futurist these days steps into a cultural quagmire. In an age of terrorism, sectarian violence and looming environmental disaster, the way we think about the future is easily as dire as it’s been since the end of the Vietnam War. Whether it’s the film “Children of Men” or Cormac McCarthy’s bleak novel “The Road” (the latest choice for Oprah’s increasingly hard-bitten book club), we seem to be stuck in an apocalyptic mood.

While those fears creep in around the edges of “Open House,” much of the show carries the antiseptic, confident feel that has marked so many past efforts to imagine the house of the future. It stops short of arguing that the marriage of technology and architecture will save the world, but it does suggest that the union will make us increasingly comfortable -- and more than a little pleased with the hipness of our surroundings.

The show is organized jointly by Art Center and the Vitra Design Museum in Germany, where it appeared in a slightly different form last year, and curated here by Gloria Gerace and Dana Hutt. It includes work by some of the most talented young architects in the world, including Hitoshi Abe, incoming chair of the architecture department at UCLA, and Mexico City-based Michel Rojkind. More than a few of the projects grapple in theory with pollution, climate change and other problems, but as installed they mostly look crisp and unsullied, like a white dress shirt just loosed from its dry-cleaning bag.

In part that has to do with the setting for the show, which was designed by Nik Hafermaas. Art Center’s South Campus occupies a gigantic former wind tunnel transformed by the L.A. firm Daly Genik into a stylish satellite for the school’s Pasadena headquarters. In a more tightly packed space, the projects in “Open House” might have rubbed up against one another and produced real sparks. Here they mostly swim in the voluminous space.

The show begins with a kind of sidebar, a history of the futuristic house that includes stunning models of projects by Buckminster Fuller, Alison and Peter Smithson and others. After that spin down memory lane, we turn quickly to new proposals for the future, beginning with a design by the Korean firm Mass Studies. Called “Seoul Commune 2026,” it takes the idea of residential “towers in the park,” popularized by Le Corbusier but given up for dead when St. Louis’ Pruitt-Igoe housing project was razed in 1972, and revives it for the age of green design.

Imagine a dozen towers shaped like chess pieces, draped with thick foliage and squeezed between a freeway overpass and the Seoul waterfront. The scheme uses clumsy architecture to make a clever point -- that if Robert Moses were alive today he’d be working in an Asian mega-city.

Then there is the proposal by the German firm realities: united, founded by brothers Tim and Jan Edler, that relies on something called “climate clothing” to create a house with invisible boundaries between house and garden. (The outfits, which you can wear as under- or outerwear, keep you warm when it’s cold outside and vice versa.) Right down to its title -- Open the House! -- the proposal couldn’t be more sweetly optimistic about the possibilities opened up for homeowners persuaded to wear these high-tech girdles.

The twentysomething guy shown in one rendering -- looking a bit like actor Jason Schwartzman as he gazes out toward a deer in his snow-dusted yard, his girlfriend lying across his lap -- appears fully content with himself and with the fact that his house has no walls. If there were a thought bubble above his head it would be filled with a single word: Sweet. Or the German equivalent, anyway.

In Southern California, though, it is hard to get too excited about the novelty of a house that allows “the clear distinction between inside and out” to be “abandoned in favor of a more fluid transition.” (Tim, Jan, meet Cliff May.) Still, the brothers’ models of gabled German houses with lower floors flipped out like skirts are among the most memorable in the show.

“Open House” doesn’t really take off until it begins exploring the conflict between the idea of the house as antenna -- a means of reaching out -- and the house as refuge from an increasingly crowded and cacophonous world. That contradiction belongs at the heart of any effort to explore the meaning of residential architecture. After all, the private house, as curator Hutt points out in an essay in the show’s catalog, has always been the main vehicle for architectural innovation and the place we associate most closely with stability and memory.

In a high-tech world, then, do we want our houses to be changeable and stocked with the latest amenities or rock-solid and reliable, suffused with a restorative calm? To its credit, the show offers a look at both options. A design by architects Joel Sanders and Karen van Lengen and sound designer Ben Rubin is entirely, unabashedly technophilic. It turns a single-family house into a big microphone to collect noise from the outside world, allowing residents to mix ambient sounds like a DJ.

The scheme by Australian architect Sean Godsell for a pavilion on a sloping desert site, on the other hand, makes a virtue of its simplicity. “The design of the building is based on the idea,” he writes, “that great architecture frees the spirit [by] providing it a place to rest.”

The single-room house is wrapped in a thin membrane that Godsell says will not only shade the building but collect rainwater, filter dust from the air and, thanks to integrated solar panels, convert sunlight into electricity.

In the end it’s that effort to use an architectural skin to soften or even purify a polluted natural world that connects the most compelling projects in the exhibition. Along with Godsell’s work, the same spirit is evident in the Jellyfish House by talented young Bay Area architects Lisa Iwamoto and Craig Scott, which aims to be as fluid and adaptable as its namesake.

And it is certainly plain to see in the dunehouse by the New York firm su11, designed for a site in Henderson County outside Las Vegas, which for several years has been one of the fastest-growing parts of the country. It is less a house, actually, than a framework for a new kind of tract development designed to blend with and learn from nature.

Fascinatingly, the dunehouse also suggests that architecture may be entering a new age of what might be called survivalist regionalism. If hurricanes keep pounding the Gulf Coast, if predictions of a permanent drought in the southwestern U.S. come true or if sea levels rise around the world, architects may have to respond with buildings designed for harsh climates and extreme living. Houses raised 15 feet off the ground -- as opposed to three or four -- may become part of the Louisiana vernacular. In other coastal regions, new houses may need to float.

And those designed like the dunehouse to conserve water like a cactus may flourish in the suburban rings around Phoenix or Las Vegas. There they’ll rise cheek-by-jowl with the faux Mediterraneans, the colonnaded McMansions and all those other monuments to a time when the only thing American houses feared was being smaller than the place next door.

christopher.hawthorne@latimes.com