Coulhart a/k/a { feuilleton } on Expo 70 in Osaka
There is a brief mention in Retromania of Expo 70 on account of what Karlheinz Stockhausen did there:
Stockhausen had a spherical auditorium built to his specifications at the 1970 World's Fair in Osaka, Japan, with nests for musicians scattered throughout the audience; the latter sat at "the equator", on a sound transparent platform, and surrounded by fifty speakers distributed in ten circles (eight above the equator, two below).
There is a whole account of it here
This is one of the compositions performed
Despite the title resemblance, this is something else - pretty cool sounding, though, and love the record cover
Someone - I think it was Rem Koolhaas - said Expo 70 was the peak of the 20th Century and that's it been downhill all the way since, in terms of human imagination. The swansong of the era of big public projects, governments prepared to plan things that took decades to be realised and that they'd not benefit from electorally, state action with a long-term focus rather than short-term with an eye on the next election.
But there's a lot of gauchely futuristic buildings that have been built in the last couple of decades - London is overrun with them, things that feel like intrusions into realspace of digitally imagined architecture. And then you have the whole megacity ultramodernist thing of Dubai and Shanghai.
Still, none of it has that mid-century utopian aura - it's corporate power flexing itself, imposing on the skyscape. Mostly coming out of the private sector, right?
The future now - in that brash teenage hard sci-fi distinctly old fashioned sense - seems to be owned, as a site of enthusiasm, by your tech-bro oligarchs. They are the "I heart eyesores" contingent of today. The "sores" has a different inflection beyond the aesthetic, it's like gashes in the cityscape left by disruptor capital.
(Likewise Trump's disgusting conception of Gaza as a potential real estate development bonanza.)
Realtor-futurism.
I have not yet seen The Brutalist, perhaps this is relevant.
At any rate I personally now am more interested in seeing bits of England I never got to see than ever getting to the Moon or Mars.
I wouldn't want to live in the house - or apartment - of the future either. Those sort of desires seem arrested-development type desires. Child-man desires.
Perhaps as you get older, you become more painfully aware of what's disappearing than exhilarated by the thought of things ahead - especially given you won't get to see them owing to your rapidly shrinking lifetime.
