If the current state of the world has got you down, a visit to a new exhibit at the David Winton Bell Gallery at Brown University may be just the thing to renew your faith in the future. Building Expectation presents a collection of historic and ongoing visions of the future from the 19th century until the present day.

The focus of the show is less upon famous designers or art and historical movements and more on broadly based popular speculation.

According to exhibition curator Nathaniel Robert Walker, "The world of tomorrow has usually been imagined first and foremost as a place – the new Promised Land, the millennial landscape. And architecture, cast since the Enlightenment as the calling card for cultural and technological periods in the grand narrative of human development and progress, has always been one of the future's most revealing and recognizable features."

The exhibition's content has been drawn from a number of university libraries and private collections, as well as the Swiss state-supported museum of utopia known as the Maison d'Ailleurs (House of Elsewhere). Many of the objects in the exhibition have never been exhibited in the United States.

For more information on the exhibition, visit: http://news.brown.edu/pressreleases/2011/08/future.