Abstract

In contrast to many people who call themselves “futurists,” architects are truly effective in creating the futures—what they design and build often persists for a very long time, shaping, thwarting, and facilitating behavior for generations to come, long after the mortgages have been paid and they themselves are dead and gone. As Winston Churchill is famously quoted as saying, “We shape our buildings and thereafter our buildings shape us.” This was expanded by Marshall McLuhan into the wider truth that “we shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.”