Future Perfect

There's a great sequence in Diamonds Are Forever (1971) where Sean Connery, aka James Bond, enters an ultra-Modern glass and concrete hill-top house in Palm Springs and is attacked by two beautiful, athletic girls, Bambi and Thumper. They manage to overpower him, and throw him out of the window, seemingly to his death, but luckily his fall is broken by a wonderfully designed swimming pool. The architect of this abode, Elrod House (1968), was John Lautner, who designed and built over 100 homes in the American West. The moment when Connery emerges from the pool, dripping, cheerful, and victorious, embodies Lautner's essentially optimistic approach to the function of architecture - if you must argue, then it should be in a good-looking room with a fine view, and if someone throws you from a window, well, it's nice if your fall is cushioned by a cunningly positioned swimming pool.

This scene was shown on a loop in 'Future Perfect' and summed up the positive spirit of the show, which focused on the current fascination many contemporary artists have with certain aspects of Modernist architecture, in particular a kind of fantastic utopianism - astonishing buildings which inflate or mutate, prefer curves over straight lines, or which seem to appear, as magically as The Little Prince, in unlikely locations - in India, Lanzarote, the Arctic Circle, the Moon or the desert. Curated by Alex Farquharson and Bruce Haines, the show included ten artists and architects. Its broad remit - how art and architecture imagine the future - was deliberately eclectic and loosely structured, seemingly informed more by day-dreaming and imaginative associations than any adherence to rigid historical canons. However interesting individual works were - andjust about everything included had something to commend it - one of the most compelling aspects of the show was its reiteration that even the wildest, most unrealisable ideas can inspire functional, fully realisable objects.

This lack of overt prescription served the work well, allowing links to be established between ideas and images that I doubt have been made before, creating an avalanche of trippy connections: Glenn Brown's paintings with Matt Groening's cartoons; Cesare Manrique's buildings on Lanzarote with Clough Williams-Ellis' designs for his proto-post-Modern Italianate town Portmerion in north Wales; Archigram's designs for 'Walking Cities' with David Thorpe's pictures of displaced tower blocks; Vidya Gastaldon and Jean-Michel Wicker's sculpture with Buckminster Fuller's Geodesic Domes; Graham Steven's videos of inflatable sculptures from the early 1970s with Simon Starling and Martin Boyce's homage to Jacques Tati; the children's cartoon from the 1970s, Barbapapa, with drawings of space stations commissioned by NASA.

'Future' has always been an slippery kind of a word - how to cast a definitive net around a moment in time that can be anything from a second away to infinity, and which no one has ever actually visited? That said, the future in 'Future Perfect' appeared to be something to look forward to, even, paradoxically, when it has already happened, i.e. Modernism, the best examples of which still manage to look as if they were just about to be born. How does it do it? Despite its advanced years, the idea of Modernism, as spirited as an amiable drunk, still managed to wander through 'Future Perfect' like the life of the party, surrounded by admirers, while post-Modernism sulked in the corner like a teenager whose dad is getting all the attention.

The reassuring sense that things will not only look better and more youthful as the world gets older pervaded the show, even in work for which optimism isn't necessarily an overt imperative. Although Liam Gillick's slide projection, Pain in a Building (1999), for example, depicts endless, rather drab views of Thamesmead, the London estate built in the 1960s where Stanley Kubrick filmed A Clockwork Orange (1971), the Modernism of the buildings is posited as an ideal which, however misconstrued, still indicates a certain faith in the possibility of change; in Paul Noble's drawings of sewage treatment plants, Ermm (1996-2000) and Uh-Oh (2000), signs of life emerge laughing from the desolation of already crumbling post-War towns.

You may never be able to reach the future, but sometimes it feels as if you are closer to it than at other times. Cinema has always been one of the best conduits for visionary ideas to enter the popular imagination, and the films and TV shows included and alluded to in 'Future Perfect' - Diamonds Are Forever, The Prisoner, A Clockwork Orange, Playtime and Futurama - all manage to touch on complex ideas about the way a person moves through their environment in the most accessible way imaginable. 'Future Perfect''s examination of the translation of architectural ideas from buildings to art, through time, and into popular culture, revealed not only how enduring these original ideas are, but how much is still in them, waiting patiently to be mined.