Your chance to live in a UFO

Photo is from The Guardian.


If ever there were an architectural style meant just for me, the Futuro would be it.

The Guardian, a publication I'm happy to say I've written for, published this article on the Futuro. I've seen this style before, and I always guessed it was something meant as kitsch or one-offs designed exclusively for UFO nuts. For example, famous actor and UFO devotee, Jackie Gleason, had a manor shaped like a flying saucer that he called "the mothership."

There is a story in UFO lore that after golfing with Nixon, the then-president asked Gleason if he wanted to come see alien bodies recovered from a UFO crash, being kept in cryogenics at Homestead AFB in Florida. Google it sometime. Great story, but probably no more than that. But I digress...

The pod-like Futuro homes were designed in the 1950s by Finnish architect, Matti Suuronen. He emphasized that the design came purely from the elegance and practicality of mathematics, but  I think one would be forgiven for suspecting other influences, caught inadvertently from the zeitgeist if nothing else. It was the time when flying saucers entered public consciousness in waves of sightings called "flaps." Atomic Horror b-movies, such as Forbidden Planet, featured such spaceships in spades. The one pictured above even has a deployed staircase for entry, just as if the house were a landed saucer.

Only 100 were ever built and even fewer still survive today. I thought I saw one when I visited Albuquerque, but while locals call it "the spaceship" or "the bug house," I found out it's not a true Futuro. I did, however, drive past one when I visited Chris from Dorkland in Tampa. That Futuro is now the VIP room at a strip club called 2001: A Nude Odyssey.

I really should have taken a picture of the exterior for the name alone.

This dwelling isn't a Futuro, either...at least I don't think so...but it follows the same spirit....

I'm trying to imagine what it would be like to live in a structure that was completely circular. Would it throw you off at all? It's strange, but I believe I've been psychologically conditioned to live in structures and rooms that are all square or slight variations on the square. Would living in a "saucer" stimulate the imagination? In addition to living in it, what would it like to have it as a writer's office?

I might just be influenced by glancing at the photo above, but I think I'd like a Futuro in the woods, up on stilt "landing gear" just as in these photos. Sort of like a fire tower, you know? I'm certainly not woodsy, but I'd like the isolation and the shape of the Futuro would seem to...I dunno...hold it at bay, more so even than the standard square. Purely psychological, I'm sure, but that's how I feel.

Then again, Whitley Strieber had many of his experiences in a cabin in an isolated, wooded region of upstate New York. Being in the wilds inside a saucer-shaped building might be tempting fate a bit too much for my tastes.

So look around. There might be a Futuro you could pick up cheap. I'll let you know if I find one, but I'm not thinking the family will want to move.


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