You seem to have a very old-fashioned view of the future.
I’ve sewn a lot of clothes, and rarely used Velcro. It simply is not as practical as buttons, snaps, or zippers. The heavy-duty stuff (like you’ll often see on children’s sneakers) is stiff and doesn’t flex well; the lighter stuff wears quickly out and gets clogged up with lint and other assorted goop.
I’m beginning to sense a pattern here.
I think Sam Stone’s comment in particular also suggests the reason for this persistant nostalgia: the fact that what we preserve from the past, like Frank Lloyd Wright houses, tends to be the best of the best. Older corporate structures as well, built at a time when a company’s business prestige depended partly on having a beautifully finished headquarters building, seem to follow this pattern.
In the same way, we tend to inflate the way our ancestors lived. We see beautiful 19th century houses with 6 bedrooms, and unconsciously consider that to be “normal”, and we imagine that our ancestors lived in such plush surroundings. Actually, the vast majority did not live in anything like the houses that are so fondly remembered in movies like Life With Father. Yet we imagine that if we’d only been born 100 years earlier, we’d own such fine houses too.
Escaping middle-class mediocrity hardly seems more feasible going in the other direction. As has been suggested, modernistic, custom-built houses tend to be inhabited not by ordinary working folks, but by celebrities and others whose resources obviate their having to brook any compromise, or “settle for” anything less than the optimum. But maybe we’re more attracted to older structures because we do imagine that they represent what was typical.
One reason we stick to the past is that we know we are incapable of accurately predicting the utility and suitability of new solutions to old problems. Until we build some sort of robot to forsee the consequences of our inventiveness, there will always be the danger of our moving into a tesseract shaped house in an earthquake zone
A tesseract-shaped house should have infinite structural stability! Its support beams extend into the fourth dimension, after all.