Established
This House of the Future was founded in 1957 as an attraction site in Disneyland (Anaheim, California), built by the Monsanto Company, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and Walt Disney Imagineering. It was closed in 1967. Within its ten year period, approximately 20 million people have visited this attraction.
Monsanto Company
The Monsanto Company, heavily involved with chemicals, desired to expand its presence in the home construction industry. For this attraction, their goal was to design a home that explored the optimized utilization of plastics as a building material. They pushed plastics as a new and creative candidate for building materials. Today, the company is best known for producing genetically modified seeds and other agricultural solutions.
House Description
This walkthrough attraction featured a home set in the year 1986 (three decades into the future), highlighting futuristic materials, styles, and household appliances. The future was depicted as an absence of traditional furniture styles and natural elements, and an embracement of ultra-modern synthetics—mainly, plastic. However, one key aspect still seen as contemporary (at least, to our current standards) was the color scheme of the furniture and décor—it was all very 1950s.
The house, with four wings extending from a center, “floated” on a pedestal above a modern landscape. It was approximately 1300 square feet, with each wing measured at 8’ H x 16’ W x 16’ L. It included a family and living room, kitchen, dining room, master bedroom, master bathroom, two children’s bedrooms (one for each gender), and a shared kids’ bathroom.
The builders designed a home using wings, or cubes—straying away from the usual square exterior—to maximize access to daylight for each room and add privacy for various activities. This design could also be implemented into any location—whether a rocky mountain or steep hill, the pedestal would turn any bad location into a workable one. The structure on top of the pedestal could even be rotated to change the views.
Governing Philosophy & Rules
This utopia indicated no information about the future state of government, laws and politics, and human rights/rules. There is no federal, state, or local government designation.
Science & Technology
The Monsanto Company and its collaborators studied how plastics were being used in construction in the 1950s, and they experimented how its particular properties could be practically applied in the future. The exterior consisted of 16 “molded polyester-urethane” layers, while the interior consisted of “reinforced epoxy support columns, laminated wood beams, and laminated safety glass” (Yesterland.com). All of the structural properties were made to last in outstanding condition. In fact, the demolition crew’s wrecking balls bounced off the structure after the site was closed down. Ultimately, they had to resort to choker chains to break up the plastics into manageable, smaller pieces. This house demonstrated an increased acceptance of plastic as an exploitable material for the construction industry.
One of the major revolutionary indicators was the kitchen. Inside this home, household appliances either hung from ceiling cabinets or popped up out of the counter. A smaller microwave oven (they were inconveniently large at the time) was a prophetic indicator of the evolving appliance. Today’s modern fridge drawers mimic the home’s “cold zone” units that fit inside several cabinets.
There were other “revolutionary” features inside the house that accurately reflect our society today. Some items include the electric toothbrush, built-in stereo system, wall-mounted televisions, and security screens to see who is at the front door. Dimmable ceiling lights found inside the house back then are also a common element found in homes and other buildings today. The push-button speakerphone with preset dialing, installed by Bell Telephone, is echoed today via speed dial buttons on mobile machines.
Plastic does seems to be a bigger part of our lives today—hello, Ikea furniture—but it is not everything. While we do incorporate plasticware and plastic furniture, today’s society does not find plastic particularly elegant or classy. In today’s time, people look to other elements (steels, woods, bricks, ceramics) as higher quality materials.
1967, Closed
This attraction was closed down in 1967 to make way for another attraction, Adventure Thru Inner Space, which was also sponsored by the Monsanto Company.
2008, Innoventions Dream Home
Disney announced that it would bring back the attraction in a renovated form, renamed as the Innoventions Dream Home, with a more modern and accessible interior. In collaboration with Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard and Lifeware, it was a house focused more on modern technology rather than foundational material.
2014, Today
Although the attraction is now closed, the reinforced concrete foundation still exists in its original location. It is currently being used as a planter in a garden space within the park—hiding in plain sight!
Trivia
– Three years after it’s opening, the house underwent a major update because many of the things that seemed “futuristic” in 1957, became contemporary in 1960. It underwent another major update before it was closed.
– In 1956, 15% of plastics made in the U.S. was allocated to construction, compared to 23% today
I find it really funny that Monsanto had this utopian vision of the future in the 1950s when the company’s current practices seem so dystopian to me. Obviously a company’s job is to make money and one way to make money is to get your customers to rely on you. What better way to get them to rely on you than to sell them seeds to grow food that have to be repurchased every year because they only last one growing season?
Also, the house’s reliance on plastics is interesting because when I think of something that’s high quality, I think metal or wood. Plastic, like Monsanto’s seeds isn’t environmentally friendly, plastics don’t degrade and will sit in a landfill for a hundred years. But then again, what else would you expect from this company?
You know, we’ve read a lot of works describing futuristic utopias or dystopias, and one of my favorite things about these works are the fantastic pieces of technology that are conceived as apart of the author’s story. To imagine how people would behave around devices or machines that to us in the present are somewhat inconceivable is to further participate in that utopia/dystopia’s thought experiment. The design of a home is something that influences and is influenced by the organization of the family structure that lives within it. With the Monsanto House of the Future, we were predicting what we thought an average home would look like in several decades, and in turn trying to guess how an average family would look and interact with each other during that time. Sociology suggests that the “nuclear family” is an idea that arose during this time, and people must have been convinced that this is the inevitable direction that all family structure will be moving towards, as suggested by the Monsanto House of the Future.
I think the fact that this attraction was prophetic about many of the technologies we have today, such as modern refrigerators and electric toothbrushes, is really cool. Even the newer attraction from 2008 has a huge camera as a mirror, reminding me of the smart phones and iPads that are so large with their front cameras for selfies. In the futuristic novels and movies we have looked at this semester, I wonder if some of those crazy technologies will become accessible to us as well. It actually reminds me of Isaac Asimov, the author of Foundation. When I was doing my research on him, I found out that he predicted how heavily we would come to rely on technology as a race. His ideal situation was one where this reliance was a positive and controlled thing.
The Monsanto house did a better job on the products inside than the outside construction! Though plastic is very durable, it is pretty harmful to the environment because it is so indestructable and hard to throw away. The chemicals in it are also harmful to humans; I’ve seen a lot of articles lately advising the population to stop microwaving things and packaging our food in plastic. However, as Robin mentioned in a comment above, Monsanto isn’t the most reputable company when it comes to quality and ethics. See this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrQe1pDRQxM
The House of the Future definitely had some great prediction, especially on some of the space saving furnitures (e.g. the pop-up dish holders!). Also, I thought the four-winged design was brilliant at the time because it not only allowed the people inside to adjust the house based on the sun’s location, but also it’s space saving to have 4 small cubical rooms than having one huge cubical space.
I remember we touched slightly on modern-day space saving living spaces, but ran out of time! @db112791 and I were so excited to talk about them! Here’s a link (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHMfJdy7CJc) to one of my favorite minimalist apartments designed and owned by founder of Treehugger.com, Graham Hill. This apartment is actually in Soho, NYC. I wonder if I can ever find it some day!
The House of the Future definitely had some great prediction, especially on some of the space saving furnitures (e.g. the pop-up dish holders!). Also, I thought the four-winged design was brilliant at the time because it not only allowed the people inside to adjust the house based on the sun’s location, but also it’s space saving to have 4 small cubical rooms than having one huge cubical space.
I remember we touched slightly on modern-day space saving living spaces, but ran out of time! @db112791 and I were so excited to talk about them! Here’s a link (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHMfJdy7CJc) to one of my favorite minimalist apartments designed and owned by founder of Treehugger.com, Graham Hill. This apartment is actually in Soho, NYC. I wonder if I can ever find it some day!
The Monsanto House of the Future certainly is interesting. It is nothing of a community but more of an enclosed space with people living inside. It reminds me of Biosphere II where everything is separated from the earth and environment. I find it cool that many household items can be hidden in the walls almost like a secret passageway. In today’s world there aren’t so many things that can be considered “futuristic” because in a few years or so those things become integrated into our society and they become “normal”. I remember one of my professors was talking about the first computers and how they were so big they took up an entire room. Now we have laptops that can fit in our backpacks and some are very light.