Houses of the Future

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At the beginning of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the heroine finds herself in a hall of doors, the tiniest of which can be unlocked with a gold key. Through the opening, no bigger than a rat hole, she glimpses a delightful garden of flowers and fountains. But it is inaccessible to someone of Alice’s dimensions, and she wishes she "could shut up like a telescope." Her wish is granted after she succumbs to the injunction "DRINK ME," and Alice finds herself, frustratingly, now no longer able to reach the tiny key lying on the table. Had Alice lived inside Disney’s House of the Future — a vision of domestic life in 1986 built at Disneyland in 1957 — she might instead have pressed a button, and through the power of electricity, the table would have lowered itself obligingly to accommodate her reduced height.

It is not implausible to imagine Alice — who inspired the Disneyland rides Mad Tea Party (opened in 1955) and Alice in Wonderland (1958) — in the House of the Future. In its colorful and curvy "zones," willing pieces of furniture (a bathroom basin, an ultrasonic dishwasher, a microwave cooker) raised and lowered themselves at the touch of a button. The exertion of brushing teeth was nixed by electricity. The act of picking up a phone receiver was made redundant by a hands-free push-button telephone. The slog of going to the front door was quashed by a CCTV intercom in the bathroom. The energy needed to depress the valve on an aerosol can was saved by a room-by-room climate system, which pumped out an array of smells, from the scent of roses to salty sea air. These perfumes diffused into rooms that, at the flick of a switch, could deliver any intensity of light and shadow through polarized ceiling panels. The House of the Future afforded its inhabitants serene control through luxurious passivity.

The house was designed by MIT in cooperation with Monsanto, best known for the artificial sweetener saccharin until the postwar period — the start of an era of thermoplastics — when 30 percent of the company’s output was in synthetic resins and surface coatings. Correspondingly, the structure conjured a domestic environment of undecayable plastics inside and out. Its structure comprised four floating fiberglass-reinforced polyester wings with large thermal-pane windows and looked like no home seen before, or since. The material properties of plastic — the word stems from the Greek for "pliable" and refers to any substance capable of being shaped or molded — analogized the future: it too was infinitely moldable, capable of reshaping, differently formed from the Now. Publicity for the House of the Future boasted of the 100 percent synthetic environment in which, untouched by any futurism in social relations, mother and daughter cooked, the son hobbied around in his room, and father faced this way or that on a flexible sofa while reading the newspaper or listening to the hi-fi. (Nobody indulged in the one activity that was to dominate the homes to come: TV watching. On one wall, a nonoperating large flattish screen hinted at a future that was not yet in sight.)

Some 41 years after it was flattened — with difficulty and by hand, owing to its overly sturdy plastic build — the House of the Future opened its doors again this past summer in Disneyland’s old Carousel Theater. Alice, who in Carroll’s tale was the recipient of a lecture by Humpty Dumpty on portmanteau words, would have appreciated the ungainly contraction in its new name: the Innoventions Dream Home. And she might have wondered if the "dream" referred to the type of distorting and topsy-turvy nightmare that she undergoes down the rabbit hole and through the looking glass. However, existence in this particular other side is in no way as destabilizing. Indeed, familiarity is this future’s watchword. Imagining life in the future (defined here as up to two years hence) does not warrant the "Imagineering" of a curious house of tricks. Instead, there are some quasi-rooms, or "platforms," courtesy of the home-building company Taylor Morrison, for a bog-standard, muted brown and beige suburban tract home, wired for the operation of digital technologies from Microsoft, Life|ware, and Hewlett Packard.