What will our skyline look like?

摘要

Dream about the future, and you dream in buildings. In the places where you first learn to think about tomorrow—in H.G. Wells, at the World's Fair, in The Jetsons—tomorrow is first of all a skyline fresh out of the cellophane. Personal whirly copters dart among glinting steel towers, everything looks like the Seattle Space Needle, and nothing is crummy or made out of wood. One glance at the present will tell you the future is never all that futuristic. That's not a glinting steel anything over there. It's one more plasterboard mattress outlet. And the sheer volume of things already built means the world to come will consist largely of the world that is already here.