SPECIAL FEATURE
T here’s a lot you can learn from the future, or at least, how different eras pictured the future. Take the future of housing, for example. The House of Tomorrow at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair, inspired by a hexagonal building, featured broad windows on all sides and even its own airplane hangar. The house was fitted with technologies new to the Depression-era like central air conditioning and an electric dishwasher. Starting in the late 1950s, Disneyland featured the Monsanto House of the Future as an attraction, where guests could see microwaves, dimming ceiling lights and an intercom system that everyone in the then-distant 1980s would surely be using. In the 1980s, a House of the Future opened in a suburb of Phoenix, Arizona that was run by Motorola microprocessors and resembled a
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futuristic copper bunker, half- subterranean to avoid the desert heat. In the year 2000, a House of the Future in Wales opened that featured locally- sourced green building materials and net-zero carbon emissions. Though these model homes were more science fiction than science fact when they were built, they can tell us something important about the actual trend of houses in the future. It isn’t so much the fancy gadgets that would make everyday life seemingly easier, but how a house could stand the test of time. Yet sustainable materials are only one part of the equation. Houses of futures past and present may function as interesting thought experiments, but they do not address a key question: how a house will exist in the cities of the future.
The 1933 World’s Fair’s House of Tomorrow (top), the Monsanto House of the Future (above) and the House of the Future at St Fagans National History Museum Cardiff, Wales (right)
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