Description

Blending architecture, design, and technology, a visual tour through futures past via the objects we have replaced, left behind, and forgotten.

So-called extinct objects are those that were imagined but were never in use, or that existed but are now unused-superseded, unfashionable, or simply forgotten. Extinct gathers together an exceptional range of artists, curators, architects, critics, and academics, including Hal Foster, Barry Bergdoll, Deyan Sudjic, Tacita Dean, Emily Orr, Richard Wentworth, and many more. In eighty-five essays, contributors nominate “extinct” objects and address them in a series of short, vivid, sometimes personal accounts, speaking not only of obsolete technologies, but of other ways of thinking, making, and interacting with the world. Extinct is filled with curious, half-remembered objects, each one evoking a future that never came to pass. It is also a visual treat, full of interest and delight.

Publisher Review

“A truly fascinating and consistently unexpected account of a forgotten landscape of lost futures. This richly original work chronicles the designed world of the undead and, at the same time, challenges today’s easy consensus of progress and modernization. Entertaining, jolting, and scholarly, it is a superb counterblast to our own age of relentless upgrades and product improvements.” — Tristram Hunt, director of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London “Objects have come and gone from our lives throughout history, mostly because something new has been designed to fulfill their functions more efficiently, appealingly, economically, or sustainably. Never before has this happened with such speed or on the same scale as in the digital age. Extinct is both a thoughtful and incisive analysis of the phenomenon and an engaging tribute to some of the intriguing or eccentric objects we have lost in design’s equivalent of natural selection.” — Alice Rawsthorn, author of “Design as an Attitude” “This is a wonderfully curious book about how the ghosts of extinct inventions live on, not just in our minds but in the world around us. It is strangely addictive to discover how the epitaphs of these technologies form the blueprints of our future.” — Mark Miodownik, author of “Stuff Matters: The Strange Stories of the Marvellous Materials that Shape Our Man-made World” “Extinct is an intoxicating exploration of a host of objects, systems, and protocols that are no longer in use or never made it. They are design ghosts, actively haunting the present and conjuring up alternative nested futures. Each short story becomes epic. This brilliant book is a survey of the future rather than of the past.” — Beatriz Colomina, Howard Crosby Butler Professor of the History of Architecture, Princeton University, and author of “Are We Human?: Notes on an Archaeology of Design”