SIX MEMOS FOR THE NEXT MILLENNIUM

Six memos for the next millennium (1985) - Italo Calvino

Italo Calvino was an Italian journalist and writer. In Britain and the United States, he was the most-translated contemporary Italian writer at the time of his death, and a noted contender for the Nobel Prize for literature.Six Memos for the Next Millennium is a book based on a series of Calvino's lectures at Harvard in 1985.

In this book, he predicted the following millennium in six keywords, as a manifesto. 
These six keywords surprisingly matches series of  contemporary social phenomenon.
I would first talk about the "lightness" in architecture.  

Lightness

"Software" of the  post-industrial age would finally dominate "hardware" of the industrial age.
Which matches the internet revolution on going today. Websites and applications, instead of combining everything making complicated navigation and collections, started to make everything "lighter" with the minim steps to a specific target. People always have expressions of architectures as solid volume, making of concrete or other heavy material that has "Weight" .As a contrary to "lightness" architectures seemingly to be "Weight" and immortal. But this idea has been deconstructed in post-modern societies.  Despite the material, the physical status of architecture, they are still a  part of the changing history of contemporary culture. Architecture had always been forced to adapt the changes in technology or lifestyle, and this will continue.

Architectures can be "light" also mentioned by Toyo Ito, since he studied the temporary architecture. So we can say "lightness" in different ways infects architecture.From it's form, we would prefer glass and having transparency in architecture, not like the concrete volume, modern architecture want to communicate with the surroundings, it greatly depends on the social condition, as Sakamoto Kazunari
 talked in his book < The Poetic Ordinary > Before 1970s, the city is declining, the public space is a threaten to people not a welcoming attitude. According to this, houses that time, always have a thick concrete wall with low saturation color (mostly grey) and having really small windows.After 1970s, with the economy recovery, the public spaces are being safer, people would like to step out their homes which used to be considered as barrier or prison, and then, architects started to consider designing big windows or having communication between in and out.

There's a story about the wall streets, there used to be a trading floor with hundreds of traders working and shouting to each other, making phone calls to buy and sale stocks. The professional traders even injected clostridium botulinum to make them look poker-faced, so they can hide their moods. But now a days, the deals are mostly made in a small architecture in Jersey as a information center. The original trading floor in wall streets has become a exhibition space to show how people works before.This story tells us, technology is liberating space from sticking with it's original functions, also gives us opportunities to have more space creation.

light as birds, not feather.

It's connected to the story above, this "lightness" is alive. Internet and other modern technology makes function and form can be totally separate. Some "required" functions are not that necessary ever since, some "optional" functions which can improve the quality of living can be well considered.
Sharing, Public spaces, Co-working, Co-living. These ideas can have their place. I believe the improvement in technology is the way to liberate people from duplicate work, from physical living. Life can be simplified or say "light lifestyle" with the help of technology, we can understand our life in a new way, to think what is really necessary. Breaking the chain of old social pressure, social value system. Living condition is not talking about the physical existence of luxury rooms or decorations, but more concerning about the public environment, the social network and so on.

Global cities, metropolitan, also generic cities, same issues are threatening young people who want to have a career in them.Heavy traffic/Price increases/High rent/Pollution/Crime....... In Asian countries, people are thinking a lot of buying houses not renting, since having the property of a house is a "social requirement" of marriage. These all making the young a heavy duty to carry, these are real "weight" to young people, they need a "light lifestyle", a well designed ultra small apartment might be a good choice.

Technology improvement not just changed our physical environment, it's also liberating our minds, we can have autonomy in thinking of what we need, what we don't, in having a life quality of "lightness"