FJ!!

If I'm not mistaken, that appears to be a poorly drawn, ugly, ill-conceived deck. Which would make the haunting part understandable.

I have to disagree! I'd buy a house with a deck like that. Though, my favorite is this one:

Gak, it looks like a space ship just landed in a nice spot in the woods.

On the other hand I've been to Frank Lloyd Wright's Falling Water which is a really nice place.

The house in the ad has a smaller footprint on its surroundings than the Wright one seems to have.

Isn't that just so over the top? The amount of construction you'd have to do for that summer cottage.

OTOH, maybe all you have to do is put the pylons in and then hang an affordable pre-fab in between.

I think you'd have to do a substantial amount of work to build something like this. If one were to take a practical view of it, I would think flooding is the biggest issue to overcome. You're pretty far down in the valley.

I think you could build the house components off-site and just add them to the slab once it is finished.

Plastics! Why, you can just stamp out large house segments in a factory somewhere, cart them into the woods — uh, that part might need more Future Tech to not molest the intervening trees — and snap them together. Voilà! Instant Future House!

And, of course, everyone will have small, affordable, environmentally sound flying machines that never break down so they can get to and from these distant Future Houses without huge travel time, traffic jams, and the other usual perils of car commutes.

That, or people will use telepresence over the Future Data Net to work and socialize and order from FutureFreshDirect.

Pre-fab housing is a very hot segment in the modern architecture community.

Now *I'm* haunted! That buttress is something.

Of course you're haunted by it.

They don't know that the field generator that allows their fragile existence is going to fail in approximately three minutes. Venturing outside on a class 4 terraformed world! Hubris!

It will all end in tears, you know. The yeast-based entities that dominate this realm will digest those two over a period of years. It will be quite foamy.

Ugh it disgusts me.
Now, breakfast.

of course it does. It's not a deck, it's a four-lane drawbridge.

It reminds me of a Thunderbirds landing bay.

mulholland drive

It does have a certain Escheresque, perspective-defying (-ignoring?) quality.

Don't worry, I absolutely love it too.

If we build it, they'll all hate it and we will have it for ourselves alone.

Why do you find it haunting? I think it's fantastic. If only you could build that!

I can't get it out of my head. I want to be those people, stuck in this bubble, this parallel time, where this future of fantastic constructed modernism glam was almost available. This ad is so boviously a vision not of opulence but of the future of upper-middle classes; chic, sleek, big, and to actually be enjoyed.

These days the visions of opulence have both become unattainable for the classes these were ads were meant for in the 60s, and become so very vulgar. IN a way mangosteen is closest: these people are in a bubble.

Now I'm in love with the word "boviously"!

I can't get it out of my head. I want to be those people, stuck in this bubble, this parallel time, where this future of fantastic constructed modernism glam was almost available.

You. Stop. Whatever you are doing. Read this now. (Or if reading fiction on computer screens gives you a headache as much as it gives me a headache, borrow a copy of Burning Chrome from, um, anyone you know -- it's published therein.)

Reading on screen didn't give me a problem, that the story at 2/3s became another story of his did.

I thus missed if he went any deeper into the sociology of that world. Gibson is often so superficial.

These days the visions of opulence have both become unattainable for the classes these were ads were meant for in the 60s, and become so very vulgar.

I would agree they have become unattainable for the middle class*. I'm not so sure I would agree with vulgar. Maybe vulgar in the vein of consumption, but in style? I think not.

*At least here in the USA, what is the middle class today? If you look at our household income, we're well into the top 20% which amazes me. I think of myself as middle class.

Is that big bowl a planter, a fountain, or a barbecue where the roast the unsuspecting humans they haul home?

I definitely love modern glassy retreats nestled in natural settings.

Like the one in this otherwise mediocre film:

http://www.cinephiles.net/The_Glass_House/Film-Synopsis.html

Looks like a fire-pit to me, so my vote is for the roasting.

North by Northwest?

Does it retract?

Probably not, but it would explain the lack of patio furniture.

The lack of furniture is so they could land their helicopter-jets or hovercraft there.

Flying cars, you mean.

It looks like the loading ramp of a ferryboat to me, especially with the guy wires at the outer end.

Yes, the trailer-on-stilts (as jwg commented above) looks like they were trying to invoke Frank Lloyd Wright. In fact, the whole series of pictures looks very Wright-esque.

The one of the lady doing aerobics at poolside, though, strikes me because of the prosaic little metal TV stand sitting in the middle of all that fantastic architecture.

The TVs are usually the eyesores in the whole thing.

I saw this and immediately thought "Frank Lloyd Wright." And yes I know it isn't.

Maybe something out of "The Fountainhead." Or The Brady Bunch: Mr. Phillips invites the whole family to test the company's new time machine. Mike as the Architect of the Future.
Alice kept busy polishing all that plexiglas.

I also thought the deck looked a lot like a giant diving platform. A few too many drinkie-poos, someone gesticulates wildly, and the momentum carries them over the edge and SPLAT onto the nice winding road below. It even has the Olympic Flame, just waiting for the torch to arrive.

And yes, I did eventually notice the plexiglas guardrail at the end. But it's not that high so I think the deck would still have good splat potential. At the very least it'd be a great spot to lob water balloons over the side onto arriving visitors.

Especially when it has a cantilevered deck. Both designs look like a hybrid of Neutra, Wright, and Saarinen.

In a recent Motor Trend article, it was mentioned how bold designs from Nissan over the past several years was a major part of that company's fiscal turnaround, and that Honda and Toyota had come to same conclusion -- that people want innovative, distinctive design in their everyday life.

Perhap prefab contruction will, from a cost perspective, finally allow the middle class to have distinctive living environments that are now out of reach of all but they very few.

Just crying out for a little robo-mower and a few shots off it with the new 9 iron before jetting off to the office in the am (avoiding the neighbor's glassed in bubble-home!)

Ah, highballs, a pack of cigarettes, and some Dean Martin on the HiFi...