Tech

This crazy UFO house from the 1960s is now a gathering place for futurists

Chris Weller

2015-12-07T21:45:00Z

Big ideas can be traded anywhere, from coffee shops to college lecture halls.

British artist Craig Barnes offers a slightly more unique option: a retro-chic orb — one of 100 made in the 1960s— that Barnes himself has refurbished.

It's called a Futuro house, and it's a come-all venue for thinkers and visionaries that sits on the roof at the Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London, where it will stay until next September.

Over the next year, visitors are encouraged to come discuss the world's biggest issues in a space perfectly fit for forward-thinking.

Barnes' love of Futuro houses goes back to his childhood, he tells Tech Insider.

It wasn't until years later, on a 2013 visit to see his extended family in Port Alfred, South Africa, that he happened upon a weathered metal structure that looked oddly familiar.

"I was sure I'd seen it in a book," Barnes recalls. "So I started researching the history of it and quickly found out it was a Futuro designed by the Finnish architect Matti Suuronen."

Barnes bought the house on an impulse, quickly getting to work on the refurbishing process despite having no idea where he would put the thing.

"You know, I don't live anywhere that's big enough to store it in pieces, let alone put it together," Barnes says. "So it was a kind of logistical roller coaster ride of a challenge since then."

Luckily, he got in touch with someone in early 2014 at Matt's Gallery, in East London, where they offered to host the Futuro house as part of a six-month exhibition.

To outsiders, the house looked like a spaceship touching down on Earth.

The house, otherwise known as Futuro 22, is built to accommodate roughly 30 people, Barnes says. Fully furnished, it weighs between six and seven tons.

Even in its short run at Matt's Gallery — the house was open to the public for only three months out of its full six-month stint — it'd already generated crazy amounts of buzz.

Questions abounded: What is that thing on the roof? Are we in trouble? That paint color is lovely, where can I find it?

Enough interest swelled to get the attention of Central Saint Martins College, Barnes' alma mater, where it has been sitting since September.

There isn't any prescribed way to use the house, Barnes says.

Instead he calls it more of an "instigator," suited for "questioning who we are, where we're going, and what we're going to do when we get there." Students at the university will use the Futuro house for class discussions and compile their musings in a collection called Slivers of the Future. "

Those will stand alongside the art exhibition that runs there, "The Intelligent Optimist," though Barnes clarifies that pretty much everything can find a home.

There will be performances, meetings, talks, and film screenings. Barnes hopes the breadth of uses will expand as people begin seeing the space as multi-purpose.

"It's an hour in the future, really."

Design considerations came from a number of different places, Barnes says.

The color on the outside is the closest to what the original color would have been, he explains, something he knew he wanted to preserve even before he started the project.

"And on the interior, that was the only place I made some executive decisions," he says.

Barnes went with a neutral white all over because he wanted to imagine what the Futuro might look like brand-new. It was in a sorry condition when he found it, and the bright white gave it new life.

Being historically accurate in restoring the house was a top priority for Barnes.

For the furniture, he drew on a mixture of tradition and popular culture.

Most Futuro houses he'd researched all came in three-color palettes. Since he opted for the all-white walls, his mind immediately went to the 1968 film "2001: A Space Odyssey," which famously featured blinding interiors and eye-popping red furniture.

"You're talking about a very pop aesthetic," he says. "And I couldn't get the image out of my head."

Arranged in a semi-circle, the upholstered lounge chairs seem to recall a kind of command station, or perhaps the meeting of an intergalactic council.

The result is that the Futuro's interior somehow looks even more futuristic (at least how people envisioned the future in the 1960s) than the outside.

But however lofty the discussions may be, they're still conducted by regular humans here on Earth.

"As an artist, I'm interested in space and one's experience of space around us," Barnes says. "I think that can be a really exciting stimulator of ideas and conversation."

These days, Barnes says he's mostly "working in orbit" around the Futuro.

On the first Wednesday of every month, he gives public tours of the house, though all tours are currently sold out apart from March and April.

Companies that rent out the Futuro can hold business meetings and presentations inside.

The original homes were built to accommodate an entire living space, which means that in addition to the chairs and table is a small workspace to hash out ideas.

Just because the Futuro didn't succeed as a product brought to market, Barnes says, that doesn't mean it can't be awe-inspiring.

"Hopefully that kind of embodiment of a belief, that we can do things differently, can kind of be transferred to now and be used as a propagator of change and development."

Maybe by stepping inside a structure of the past, people can look to the future in ways they never have.

"We spend a lot of our days in very rectangular environments," Barnes says, "and I think sometimes you just need to go into something and go 'Wow, so this is what living inside a Smartie feels like.'"

Design