image of the future

The future is happening right now… If you live in the house, it will not fall down. Arseny Tarkovsky Life, life   Architecture plays a very special role in the complicated relationship between the past, present and future. The oldest examples of human architectural activity are over 45 thousand years old. But the future is also powerfully present in architecture. Of course, hardly anyone of today’s designers think forty millennia ahead, but making projections for several centuries looks quite reasonable. Regarding the future, every architect has (should have) an understandable picture of the world in relation to at least the city in which he is working, or at least the neighbourhood for which he is designing a project. In urban planning, even unrealised projects and concepts often remain relevant for a long time and determine the development direction for a city, territory, and sometimes a settlement system in the country; they influence the future. Many aphorisms on the subject of the future are ironic in nature. Niels Bohr said: “It is very difficult to make an accurate prediction, especially about the future”. And so we faced the uncertainty of the future when preparing this issue. One thing was planned, but with the help of our regular and new contributors, it turned out to be something quite different. The future is full of surprises, and that is the only thing that can be confidently predicted. Thinking about the future constantly balances between hope and fear, between utopia and anti-utopia. Today, the balance between optimism and pessimism seems to incline towards pessimism, and dire predictions clearly prevail. All the more reason to return again and again to the theme of the future in its various aspects – the future of Irkutsk, cities and countries of the world, the future of today’s architecture, the future of historical and cultural heritage... The architectural profession is to shape the future and determine its image.