A chair for the future. The Smithsons´designs for an ideal house

Abstract

In 1956 the newspaper Daily Mail organized an exhibition under the title «The ideal house». To this end, they asked young architects Alison and Peter Smithson for a projection exercise trying to imagine what the house of the future would look like in the next twentyfive years . The house sitted in the exhibition was actually a pure staging, not even a prototype, but a scale model of architecture. The only real objects were, paradoxically, the chairs models designed ad hoc for the proposal, and it is precisely for this reason that perhaps they are the ones that more accurately have expressed the Smithsons´ idea for the future. A small piece of furniture is able of transcending its scale and condensing in a very synthetic way the architectural contributions of its authors.