Step inside the ‘Home of the Future’, from design fantasies to modernist architecture

The future is not what it was, and ‘Home of the Future, 1925-1985: Designing Domestic Utopias’, a new exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), shows us what we have gained and lost. Advertisements, labour-saving gadgets, and models of model homes trace the rise and fall of America’s faith in material progress. Since then, visions have come to pass; science fiction has often turned into fact, yet the public mood is one of deep disquiet. A future of AI and climate change, for instance, could make for a terrifying prospect.

Step inside 'Home of the Future, 1925-1985: Designing Domestic Utopias'

Decorative arts are one of LACMA’s great strengths. Curator Wendy Kohn and her associate Grace Converse have assembled an extraordinary array of objects and images to show how the US was transformed in those six decades and how the optimism of that era soured. The exhibition is divided into four sections that flow into each other and overlap.

In the first, 1925-1945: Health, Efficiency and Mechanization, speculative fantasies - from a self-cleaning house to flying cars - proliferate. Those were years in which electrification remade rural America, radio and telephones bound it together, and war generated new materials and technologies.

The second section, 1945-1965: Plastics, Push Buttons and Prefabrication, illustrates a consumer paradise for the middle class; a cornucopia of gadgetry, pastel décor and a two-tone sedan (or two) in every suburban garage. It was also the heyday of Charles and Ray Eames, George Nelson, Henry Dreyfuss and many more brilliant designers, whose best work has a timeless appeal.

There’s a model of Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion House, an aluminium rotunda that might have gone into production at a former bomber plant in Wisconsin, except that the inventor was too busy tweaking the prototype and lost his chance. Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House comes across as a model of rigour and abstraction in contrast to Barbie’s Dream House and the all-plastic Monsanto House of the Future, which had a ten-year run at Disneyland.

In parallel to this showcase of high and low design is the third section, 1950-1970: The Cold Was Command Center, in which the home is visualised as a shelter from nuclear attack and other threats. In an age of anxiety, movies and television peddle fantasies of living in space or underwater, with architects and designers scrambling to keep up.

The concluding section, 1965-1985: the Counterculture and the Computer, takes us from The Whole Earth Catalogue and hippie communes to Apple’s first Mac and the wired age we now inhabit.

Complementing ‘Home of the Future’ is a pocket show, ‘The Kitchen and its Discontents’, focusing on two modern classics that LACMA has acquired. Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky’s Frankfurt kitchen was a feature of progressive housing estates in Weimar Germany; and Le Corbusier called on Charlotte Perriand to design a modular kitchen for his Unité housing blocks in Marseilles and other European cities. Both eliminated drudgery for low-income tenants.

These two exhibitions, which run through March 14, 2027, fuse aesthetics and technology, social history and commerce, to explore a half-century of progress. Both appeal to the senses, as one covetable object, image, and furnishing follows another.

Only an artist as imaginative as Isamu Noguchi would have conceived the speaker for a 'radio nursemaid' as a helmet that Darth Vader would love to wear. And it took the inspired graphics of Lester Beall to convince conservative farmers that a government program of electrification would change their lives. Including these and more, the profusely illustrated catalogue for this exhibition (New York: Del Monico, $80) features 15 thematic essays and is likely to become an enduring work of reference.

'Home of the Future, 1925–1985: Designing Domestic Utopias', Sep 27, 2026 – Mar 14, 2027, Resnick Pavilion, LACMA, Los Angeles, USA

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