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Anticipation? Hardly, because we are already there and we know it is generally, aesthetically wrong; like most predictions.

Nostalgia? for a dated and erroneous vision of the future. So what can we call it? Pathos perhaps? I feel a sort of pathos in these antiquated predictions, in the wrongness of them in the whole doomed business of futurology. Doomed not least because of the retrospective stylishness of these supposed dystopias, a stylishness that alas seriously compromises their dystopic power. Style wise the worlds evoked by Huxley or by Orwell are to die for. In 1984 a film was made of Orwell's book and its dystopia had, rather dishonestly, been recast as style heaven; those chic short haircuts, those stark utilitarian overalls, those clunky black shoes; and the architecture! heavenly visions of the brickwork of Gilbert Scott. Battersea Power Station!

I know of no prediction of the future city that does not fill me with a poignant longing for alternative future; or pasts as they would be now.

But these projections of the future all pale beside the actual future; for now was the time that it actually seemed that the future was not chronologically obliged to be ahead of you. It could be now. And nowhere more so than New York. New York stole a march on chronology and rocketed forward into the future: and people were aware of it too. There was awe at the eruption of building early on in the twentieth century William wrote to Henry James in 1907:

"The courage, the heaven scaling audacity if it all and the lightness withal, as if there was nothing that was not easy.."
(And the Woolworth Building was still to come!)

"our civilization is progressing wonderfully" says Theodore Starrett. "In New York-by that I mean Manhattan Island-we must keep building and we must build upward. step by step we have advanced from the wooden hut to the 30 storey skyscraper…now we must develop something bigger, something larger…"

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