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Revisiting Futuro, the sci-fi house from 1968's future

Revisiting Futuro, the sci-fi house from 1968's future

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The first Futuro house has been restored and put on display in Finland. Futuro was a pre-fabricated house design from the 1960s that ultimately turned out to be a commercial failure.

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futuro (weegee)
futuro (weegee)

Finnish designer Matti Suuronen created a round, prefabricated house called Futuro in the 1960s, but only around sixty units ended up being produced. The first of those was restored and put on display last week in Espoo, Finland, so The Guardian went along to check it out. Apart from the unusual smell and disorientating round shape, writer Justin McGuirk reflects on how Futuro was "the closest housing ever came to product design." With its UFO-style visual cues and mass-produced plastic build, seeing Futuro in 2012 brings us back to a vision of the future that never came to pass. It seems kitsch only in hindsight, but as McGuirk puts it: if something calls itself the future it's probably not.