The United States of Abandoned Places
"Fewer than a hundred of Finnish architect Matti Suuronen’s sci-fi-inspired Futuro Houses were ever produced, and now fewer than 50 remain, making the odd spaceship vacation home crumbling away in a Royse City, Texas field more sought after than it would appear. Designed in the late 1960s, the prefabricated Futuro Houses were meant to be a cheap, durable, and stylish little dwelling that could be placed in any environment. Made of fiberglass and plastic, the homes could be broken down into 16 individual pieces and bolted together wherever the owner wanted, from a snowy mountainside to a sunny beach. Unfortunately, the space age design may have been a bit too ahead of its time for most communities, which along with an oil shortage, cut the future of these bulbous vacation shacks short. Almost from the installation of the first Futuro house in Suuronen’s native Finland, locals seemed to decry the strangely shaped buildings. While almost a hundred of the pieces were created and placed around the world from America to New Zealand, a number of them were shot down by zoning laws, or demolished. The oil crisis in the 1970s made the use of plastic prohibitive and production of the houses was stopped. Despite the objections of some, architecture aficionados took to the buildings and were able to preserve many of them, while those without protection simply fell into ruin. The Futuro House sitting in Royse City is unfortunately one of the latter. The interior has been gutted and is now covered in graffiti. The exterior has weather and stained with age, although as of late 2014, it seems to have received a fresh coat of bright orange paint. The inside however is still a mess. A far cry from the Futuro Houses which are well-preserved in private collections around the world, this vacation ship looks like it has crash-landed, but can still be located on Highway 276, approximately six miles east of Rockwall, Texas." - ATLAS_OBSCURA
