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In fact, Goldfinger was a modernist. In a not-so-subtle piece of social criticism, Ian Fleming took the name of his most villainous character from a Marxist architect, Erno Goldfinger, known for dramatic high-rise residential towers whose forms echoed the reduced, brutal lines of grain silos and cement factories. Like many Britons, Fleming was appalled by the way buildings like Goldfinger's were transforming London's 19th-century skyline. Prince Charles continues this crusade against the "monstrous carbuncles" of modernist design to this day.
I've been thinking about this stuff recently because I'm in Italy again, staying in an apartment in that retro-Renaissance city, Venice, with only techno-dystopian DVDs like Blade Runner and Until The End of the World to while away the hours (it's been a bit rainy). I've also been to Milan, where I saw a wonderful exhibition called Inventing the Future, a retrospective about the work of industrial designer Joe Colombo, who died of a heart attack on his 41st birthday in 1971.
Colombo's last project interested me the most: the Total Furnishing Unit developed for the 1972 MOMA exhibition Italy: The New Domestic Landscape.
Influenced by the space program, the Total Furnishing Unit was a capsule for Earth living, a 28-square meter "habitat cell" consisting of kitchen, cupboard, bed and bathroom, all made of molded plastic, ready to be arranged as an all-in-one living solution -- a kind of capsule pod -- at the center of an open-plan space.