Alvin Toffler - Future Shock

It needs to be emphasized here that the distinction between disposability and mobility is, from the point of view of the duration of relationships, a thin one. Even when modules are not discarded, but merely rearranged, the result is a new configuration, a new entity. It is as if one physical structure had, in reality, been discarded and a new one created, even though some or all of the components remain the same.

Even many supposedly "permanent" buildings today are constructed on a modular plan so that interior walls and partitions may be shifted at will to form new enclosure patterns inside. The mobile partition, indeed, might well serve as a symbol of the transient society. One scarcely ever enters a large office today without tripping over a crew of workers busily moving desks and rearranging interior space by reorganizing the partitions. In Sweden a new triumph of modularism has recently been achieved: in a model apartment house in Uppsala all walls and closets are movable. The tenant needs only a screwdriver to transform his living space completely, to create, in effect, a new apartment.

Sometimes, however, modularity is directly combined with disposability. The simple, ubiquitous ballpoint pen provides an example. The original goose-quill pen had a long life expectancy. Barring accident, it lasted a long time and could be resharpened (i.e., repaired) from time to time to extend its life. The fountain pen, however, was a great technological advance because it gave the user mobility. It provided a writing tool that carried its own inkwell, thus vastly increasing its range of usefulness. The invention of the ball point consolidated and extended this advance. It provided a pen that carried its own ink supply, but that, in addition, was so cheap it could be thrown away when empty. The first truly disposable pen-and-ink combination had been created.

We have, however, not yet outgrown the psychological attitudes that accompany scarcity. Thus there are still many people today who feel a twinge of guilt at discarding even a spent ball-point pen. The response of the pen industry to this psychological reality was the creation of a ball-point pen built on the modular principle – an outer frame that the user could keep, and an inner ink module or cartridge that he could throw away and replace. By making the ink cartridge expendable, the whole structure is given extended life at the expense of the sub-structure.

There are, however, more parts than wholes. And whether he is shifting them around to create new wholes or discarding and replacing them, the user experiences a more rapid through-put of things through his life, a generalized decline in the average duration of his relationship with things. The result is a new fluidity, mobility and transience.

One of the most extreme examples of architecture designed to embody these principles was the plan put forward by the English theatrical producer Joan Littlewood with the help of Frank Newby, a structural engineer, Gordon Pask, a systems consultant, and Cedric Price, the "thinkbelt" architect.

Miss Littlewood wanted a theater in which versatility might be maximized, in which she might present anything from an ordinary play to a political rally, from a performance of dance to a wrestling match – preferably all at the same time. She wanted, as the critic Reyner Banham has put it, a "zone of total probability." The result was a fantastic plan for "The Fun Palace," otherwise known as the "First Giant Space Mobile in the World." The plan calls not for a multi-purpose building, but for what is, in effect, a larger than life-sized Erector Set, a collection of modular parts that can be hung together in an almost infinite variety of ways. More or less "permanent" vertical towers house various services – such as toilets and electronic control units – and are topped by gantry cranes that lift the modules into position and assemble them to form any temporary configuration desired. After an evening's entertainment, the cranes come out, disassemble the auditoria, exhibition halls and restaurants, and store them away.

Here is the way Reyner Banham describes it: "... the Fun Palace is a piece of ten-yearexpendable urban equipment ... Day by day this giant neo-Futurist machine will stir and reshuffle its movable parts – walls and floors, ramps and walks, steerable escalators, seating and roofing, stages and movie screens, lighting and sound systems – sometimes with only a small part walled in, but with the public poking about the exposed walks and stairs, pressing buttons to make things happen themselves.

"This, when it happens (and it is on the cards that it will, somewhere, soon) will be indeterminacy raised to a new power: no permanent monumental interior space or heroic silhouette against the sky will survive for posterity ... For the only permanently visible elements of the Fun Palace will be the 'life-support' structure on which the transient architecture will be parasitic."

Proponents of what has become known as "plug-in" or "clip-on" architecture have designed whole cities based on the idea of "transient architecture." Extending the concepts on which the Fun Palace plan is based, they propose the construction of different types of modules which would be assigned different life expectancies. Thus the core of a "building" might be engineered to last twenty-five years, while the plug-in room modules are built to last only three years. Letting their imaginations roam still further, they have conjured up mobile skyscrapers that rest not on fixed foundations but on gigantic "ground effect" machines or hovercraft. The ultimate is an entire urban agglomeration freed of fixed position, floating on a cushion of air, powered by nuclear energy, and changing its inner shape even more rapidly than New York does today.

Whether or not precisely these visions become reality, the fact is that society is moving in this direction. The extension of the throw-away culture, the creation of more and more temporary structures, the spread of modularism are proceeding apace, and they all conspire toward the same psychological end: the ephemeralization of man's links with the things that surround him.

Still another development is drastically altering the man-thing nexus: the rental revolution. The spread of rentalism, a characteristic of societies rocketing toward super-industrialism, is intimately connected with all the tendencies described above. The link between Hertz cars, disposable diapers, and Joan Littlewood's "Fun Palace," may seem obscure at first glance, but closer inspection reveals strong inner similarities. For rentalism, too, intensifies transience.

During the depression, when millions were jobless and homeless, the yearning for a home of one's own was one of the most powerful economic motivations in capitalist societies. In the United States today the desire for home ownership is still strong, but ever since the end of World War II the percentage of new housing devoted to rental apartments has been soaring. As late as 1955 apartments accounted for only 8 percent of new housing starts. By 1961 it reached 24 percent. By 1969, for the first time in the United States, more building permits were being issued for apartment construction than for private homes. Apartment living, for a variety of reasons, is "in." It is particularly in among young people who, in the words of MIT Professor Burnham Kelly, want "minimum-involvement housing."

Minimum involvement is precisely what the user of a throw-away product gets for his money. It is also what temporary structures and modular components foster. Commitments to apartments are, almost by definition, shorter term commitments than those made by a homeowner to his home. The trend toward residential renting thus underscores the tendency toward ever-briefer relationships with the physical environment. (It might be noted that millions of American home "owners," having purchased a home with a down payment of 10 percent or less, are actually no more than surrogate owners for banks and other lending institutions. For these families, the monthly check to the bank is no different from the rent check to the landlord. Their ownership is essentially metaphorical, and since they lack a strong financial stake in their property, they also frequently lack the homeowner's strong psychological commitment to it.)