‘Home of the Future’ at LACMA explores dark side of American dream

The slogan of the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair, which plays a prominent role in the new LACMA exhibition “Home of the Future, 1925–1985: Designing Domestic Utopias,” was blunt: “Science Finds, Industry Applies, Man Conforms.”

Those words capture a central tension in the sprawling show, which occupies interconnected galleries at the far end of the museum’s Resnick Pavilion. Many of the beautiful, sometimes ingenious products and technologies developed with the rise of the modern era gripped the popular imagination and made life easier, healthier and more connected. But they didn’t free people from domestic labor or deliver the prosperity and security heralded by their promoters. They instead often raised expectations, forced dependency and gave rise to a vision of progress that reinforced social exclusion, bred anxieties about status, and concealed the environmental costs of a culture built on consumption.

Sound familiar?

The desire for these transformative products was never innate, and LACMA’s exhibition zeroes in on that idea from the start. “Good design is seldom accepted. It has to be sold,” Midcentury photographer Julius Shulman is quoted as saying in the catalog.

The show traces the hard sell of a domestic utopia via world’s fair posters, model home catalogs, magazine advertisements, television specials and science-fiction imagery — along with close to 200 physical objects of every sort, including kitchen appliances, electronics and furniture. In each of its four documented eras — pre- and post-Depression, post-World War II, the height of the Cold War, and the counterculture ’60s and ’70s — promoters dressed the same promise in new terms, whether through cleanliness, leisure, security or freedom.

At every turn a vision of a better life was made to seem desirable and, just as important, inevitable. Like any good advertising, it worked best when soothing our anxieties and tapping into our fantasies.

In the 1920s and ’30s, new discoveries about hygiene inspired products by soaring talents in the nascent field of industrial design who set out to create clean, easily maintained homes — laboratories for healthy living in an age still ravaged by diseases like polio and tuberculosis. Mathias J. Weber and Russell E. Vanderhoff’s seductively streamlined Health-o-Meter scale gave the illusion that homeowners could be scientists, for the first time monitoring their own weight and growth. Kohler’s Integra, introduced as “the toilet of the future” at the Chicago fair, had a dramatic black finish made to equate sanitation with modern design. And Bruce Goff’s gleaming Vitrolite kitchen for Libbey-Owens-Ford glass company, shown in Charles Turzak’s rendering, integrated pigmented structural glass counters and cabinets into a polished, easily cleaned whole.

American Stove Co., Magic Chef stove, series 1400, introduced 1935.

(Lynton Gardiner / The Wolfsonian–Florida International University )

Vast expansions in electricity, telecommunications and production promised to connect the country and ease the tedious work of cooking, washing and cleaning. The American Stove Co.’s Magic Chef stove, one of the first ovens to be equipped with a clock, recast kitchen work as something that could be measured and controlled. Frank G. Brotz’s Kohler Electric Sink, which incorporated a motorized dishwasher into the familiar basin, promised release from the “thrice-daily drudgery” of washing dishes. Western Electric’s clear-cased Model 302 telephone enticed gawkers with an impressively complex system of wires and mechanisms.

George R. Lum for Western Electric Co., Telephone, model 302, desk set 1938.

(AT&T Archives and History Center)

Many of the names who dreamed up these wonders are now etched in design history. Isamu Noguchi created a baby monitor before baby monitors were a thing: the Radio Nurse, a dark Bakelite receiver resembling an abstract face. Walter Dorwin Teague gave corporate products a precise, machine-age polish, while Raymond Loewy brought the same sleek optimism to objects like the globe-shaped New World radio for Colonial Radio Corp., molded in glossy, heat-resistant Catalin and embodying quite literally the new reach of communications.

Lester Beall’s Rural Electrification Administration poster.

(The Resnick Collection)

Selling this promise of a technological future to those clinging to the dream of American prosperity was an especially potent exercise during the Depression. In his illustrated 1932 manifesto “Horizons,” Norman Bel Geddes cast “new design” as a path toward “economy, efficiency, comfort and happiness.” As the economy faltered, an orderly, healthy home could be sold as a form of salvation, with prosperity seemingly within reach. At the Chicago fair, corporations sponsored full-scale model homes and filled them with products already available or soon to be. For rural households still without electricity, Lester Beall’s 1937 Rural Electrification Administration poster “Wash Day” turns federal infrastructure into a household fantasy. Inside the black silhouette of a farmhouse, a pristine white washing machine appears at an almost monumental scale, set against flat fields of saturated color.

Irving Harper of George Nelson and Co. for Herman Miller Inc., Marshmallow Love Seat, model 5670, designed 1956, this example made c. 1960s.

(Jonathan Urban / Museum Associates / LACMA)

By the ‘40s and ‘50s, the postwar home and its many accouterments — powered by wartime advancements, growing abundance and an ethos of “buy now, pay later” — amplified the promise. Plastic, prefabrication and push-button convenience suggested that mass production could bring elegant, futuristic living — and freedom from drudgery — within reach of the masses. George Nelson treated furniture as a flexible system, producing (with designer Irving Harper) the candy-colored Marshmallow Love Seat; replacing conventional upholstery with 18 brightly colored circular cushions mounted on a spare steel frame. Eero Saarinen produced the molded-fiberglass Pedestal chair, sweeping the seat and stem into a single sculptural form intended to eliminate what he called the “slum of legs” beneath tables and chairs.

Eero Aarnio for Asko Oy, Ball Chair, designed 1963.

(Jonathan Urban / Museum Associates / LACMA)

Architects attempted to make the home itself into a sexy product. At Disneyland, Monsanto’s House of the Future, designed by architects Richard Hamilton and Marvin Goody, was a gleaming, cross-shaped structure of molded plastic, raised above the ground on cantilevered supports and partnered (in renderings) with a plastic heliport. Its kitchen featured molded surfaces and electric appliances. Promotional images and films conjured a playful, adaptable and benevolent house — plastic as the building block of family happiness.

Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion house was an aluminum, factory-made “dwelling machine” that could be delivered by air and assembled almost anywhere. Its unified form, modular furnishings, water-recycling system and labor-saving technology promised a more efficient life, less tied to conventional building and household routines.

Hamilton & Goody Architects, Monsanto House of the Future, 1956.

(MIT Museum)

Institutions like the Museum of Modern Art and magazines like Arts & Architecture promoted prototype homes from now legendary industrial designers and modernist architects like Saarinen, Charles and Ray Eames, Marcel Breuer, Albert Frey, Gregory Ain and even Frank Lloyd Wright.

Effective pitches could turn a product, whatever size, into a fantasy of freedom. In the General Motors film “Design for Dreaming” (1956), directed by William Beaudine, a woman enters a fabulous kitchen as if in a magical dream. The promise, said curator Wendy Kaplan, was that the fictional woman would have more time for “tennis and hanging with … friends.” The dream even hinted at a life beyond domesticity — perhaps even freedom to “actually have a profession,” Kaplan added.

But the housewife in these displays was still expected to remain responsible for the home. Liberation came through a more efficient kitchen, not a change in who cooked. And appliances that reduced some labor often raised the bar: more frequent washing, more cleaning, more elaborate meals, as University of Chicago home economics professor Hazel Kyrk described in “Economic Problems of the Family.”

Frank G. Brotz for Kohler Co., Electric Sink, introduced 1926, this example 1928, Kohler Co.

(Kohler Archives)

That universal “everyone” did not, however, include everyone. Government-backed home ownership and the suburban boom excluded many Black, Latino and Asian Americans through redlining, restrictive covenants and discriminatory lending — a fact reflected in the almost complete absence of minorities in these vast selling campaigns.

A few welcome exceptions on the creators’ side are architect Paul R. Williams’ “Small Home of Tomorrow,” which proposed a simple, well-designed home fitted with gee-whiz appliances; Arthur Elrod and William C. Raiser’s swirling, vivid orange Ebony test kitchen, which treated cooking as creative craft; and the proposed multiracial community of Soul City, founded by Floyd McKissick, which imagined homeownership as a claim to economic autonomy that segregation denied.

The vision of a utopian domestic future took a strange turn during the Cold War, marrying the breathless excitement of the space age with the existential dread of nuclear annihilation. The same scientific power that had transformed lives now produced weapons capable of destroying humanity. The home was imagined as both shelter and command center.

Office of Donald Deskey Associates. Drawing, design for Undersea Lounge: Scheme 3 Interior Perspective, ca. 1960s. Designed by Russell Heston (b. 1929).

(The Estate of Donald Deskey, courtesy Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum / Art Resource, NY)

As the age’s potent mix of terror and delirium spun on, designers and illustrators proposed ways to live comfortably in space, underwater or in underground bunkers. Paul László’s “Atomville, U.S.A.,” a vision of suburbia half a century in the future, buried the family home beneath an earthen shell that doubled as a helicopter landing pad. Its sunken gardens and swimming pool promised comfort, while a blast door, escape hatches and air filtration protected against nuclear fallout. Donald Deskey Associates imagined a hypnotic “Undersea Lounge,” a self-contained interior for living beneath the water, while NASA illustrator Rick Guidice vividly depicted physicist Gerard K. O’Neill’s proposed Stanford Torus — an enormous, wheel-shaped suburb in space.

Bob Lerner for LOOK Magazine, Anne Anderson in RCA Whirlpool Miracle Kitchen, 1959, kitchen designed 1956.

(Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LOOK Magazine, Photograph Collection / Robert S. Lerner Photography, LLC)

An endless array of products leaned into the public’s awe at the age’s sci-fi possibilities. This included prescient pieces ahead of their time, like the video-enabled AT&T Picturephone, and those that would never come to pass, such as the RCA Whirlpool Miracle Kitchen. The latter’s spread in Look Magazine (displayed for crowds at the 1959 American National Exhibition in Moscow) showcases a Roomba-like vacuum and other astonishing appliances that seem to work by themselves. But men hidden behind two-way mirrors actually operated them. Others, like the Ford Gyron Remote Control Car of the Future, only managed to come to life as children’s toys; and some were just plain ridiculous, like Honeywell’s H316 Kitchen Computer, which required a two-week training course just to retrieve a recipe.

Honeywell Inc.; Computer Control Division; Neiman Marcus, H316 Kitchen Computer, 1969.

(Mark Richards / the Computer History Museum)

By the late 1960s, confidence in technological progress was fraying. Environmental damage, plastic waste and the conformity of suburbia prompted designers and countercultural communities to imagine other ways of living — up to a point. The residents of Drop City, a Colorado artists’ community, built domes from the curved steel tops of salvaged cars. Architects Barry Simpson and Charles Hosford made a folding stool that could serve as a seat, stepstool or side table. Small, portable, multipurpose designs, from inflatables to cardboard furniture offered a life with fewer possessions. The Whole Earth Catalog, founded by writer and editor Stewart Brand, promoted ecological knowledge and self-sufficiency, but was still a compendium of things to buy.

Companies, too, found ways to sell all natural products, flexibility and individual expression. Zanotta advertised the first beanbag chair, the polystyrene-filled “Sacco,” as “A Big Bag, a Soft Seat.” Its formless body accommodated slouching, lounging or lying down, selling freedom from both conventional posture and the bourgeois living room. Even resistance to consumerism could be packaged as a new consumer ideal.

The pairing of objects with their promotional campaigns is the show’s most illuminating contribution, shedding light on the massive, often strange apparatus needed to drive these incredible designs — some icons, some welcome surprises — forward in each age. It reveals how the country’s 20th century manufacturing prowess expanded into the production of dreams. Corporations, government and the media taught consumers what progress should look like, which anxieties a product might soothe, and what kind of future to desire.

Isamu Noguchi; Zenith Radio Corporation, Radio Nurse receiver and Guardian Ear transmitter with original box, 1937.

( Museum Associates / LACMA)

But the sheer abundance of objects — I haven’t even mentioned the fascinating companion show-within-the-show, “The Kitchen and Its Discontents” — leaves less room for examining those campaigns and the work they performed. The excellent catalog follows those connections further, tracing how often hypnotic visions of the future home both reflected and shaped ideas about lifestyle, progress, gender, race, labor and consumption; in the galleries, those ideas remain largely suggestive.

Still, the exhibition offers a revelatory history — and a telling roadmap to our present. While the future imagined here made life easier, cleaner, more beautiful and more exciting, it did not arrive as advertised. The plastic home didn’t remake housing; the automated kitchen didn’t free women from domestic work; the self-sufficient home gave way to new forms of reliance. Yet a similar techno-utopian pitch survives in today’s smart homes and domestic technologies, from assistants like Alexa to artificial intelligence marketed as a way to make life easier. These tools may offer real benefits even as they addict and distract us. And while the systems sustaining our comfortable, consumption-driven lives launch us toward climate disaster.

These rooms powerfully evoke what Kaplan in the catalog calls America’s “restless forward motion, powered by the conviction that tomorrow’s design would solve today’s problems.” That ingenuity is worth celebrating. But its promises deserve open-eyed scrutiny.

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