Photo by Aleksandar Cvetanovic on Unsplash

About 2.5 million years ago, early man created the first stone tools. Tools enabled man to cut wood and build shelter, hunt larger animals, make art, invent medicine, even go to war.

Ignorant to the impact his tools had on the world, man was on his way to become a technological being. We realized from a very early time that technology empowered us to control our future, positively as well as negatively, depending on who was holding the axe. But as we evolved, technology became more than just a tool to control the future. Technology today is, more than anything else, convenience. And it’s this convenience that we’ve been after all along. It took us a few ice ages, but we’re finally here. Or are we?

The reality is we still aren’t completely satisfied with what we’ve achieved. We still dread going to work on Mondays, and flying from Paris to New York still takes a lot of time. Technology can fix all this, and it probably will. But then other things will bug us. Like having to cook our own food, wearing glasses, going to school, even bearing children, perhaps. It is a future that architect Frank Lloyd Wright predicted.

If it keeps up, man will atrophy all his limbs but the push-button finger

– Frank Lloyd Wright

In addition to being an architect, Wright was also a writer and educator. He has more than 1,000 designs to his name, half of which were completed during his 70-year career. His design philosophy was extremely forward-thinking. He believed structures built by man should be designed to fit harmoniously with the surrounding environment and humanity. The best example of his “organic architecture” is said to be Fallingwater, a house designed by Wright in 1935 in rural southwestern Pennsylvania, 43 miles southeast of Pittsburgh (picture above). The work has been deemed by experts as “the best all-time work of American architecture.”