For the first time in more than 40 years, in the exclusive Tomorrowland neighborhood of the world’s most beloved gated community, striving suburbanites underwhelmed by giant rodents and rum-soaked pirates can seek enchantment in sleek tableaus of visionary domestic bling. In May, Disneyland is getting back into the House of the Future business.
Like most gated-community monstrosities, Disneyland’s new 5,000-square-foot dream home will look just like a typical suburban ranch house, only bigger. What gives it its futuristic cachet is its interior touches—sartorially opinionated closets that tell you which shirt goes best with those jeans, thermostats that are as servile as mail-order brides, countertops that can scan the food you set on them and offer appropriate meal suggestions. Many of these technologies come courtesy of Microsoft; if Bill Gates’ minions manage to pull off their acquisition of Yahoo!, perhaps the House of the Future will be able to help you find your missing socks almost as effectively as Google’s eventual House of the Future will.
Physically, Disneyland’s new House of the Future is more than three times larger than the 1957 original; conceptually, it’s infinitely smaller. Indeed, is anyone really excited by the prospect of a countertop that can tell you to make tacos when you plop a bag of Taco Bell take-out on it? Or a closet that gets its sense of style from software engineers?
Disneyland’s 1957 House of the Future was no less an infomercial than the current incarnation—it was underwritten by Monsanto and a dozen other companies, including American Motors, Bell Telephone and Sylvania. But it was truly visionary, too, and not just because its razzle-dazzle gadgetry—including a microwave oven and an air-conditioning unit that pumped out breezes scented like the woods or the sea—made life more convenient and pleasant, instead of more complicated. (Do you really want to argue with your closet every time you get dressed?)
The original House of the Future was made mostly of plastic, in part because plastic is what Monsanto wanted to sell people, but also because plastic was suited for mass production. Throughout the first half of the 20th century, architectural optimists sought to industrialize home construction and thus make home-ownership more accessible to the masses. In 1906, for example, Thomas Edison introduced a system for making cheap and indestructible concrete houses. These elaborate just-add-water domiciles utilized a nickel-plated molding form that consisted of more than 2,000 individual parts—a single six-hour pour created concrete floors, walls and ceilings, and even concrete beds, picture frames and phonograph cabinets. These fireproof, insect-proof, easy-to-clean houses would last for centuries, Edison promised, and would be the “salvation of the slum dweller.”
In the 1940s, R. Buckminster Fuller perfected his “Dymaxion Dwelling Machine,” a kind of Lego system for DIY home-builders. Every part of the dwelling machine was prefabricated, made out of metal and less than 10 pounds in weight—finally, misanthropic weaklings had a house they could build entirely by themselves! Alas, neither it nor Disneyland’s 1957 House of the Future, whose primary building block was an 8-foot-wide L-shaped panel made of Fiberglas, ever caught on with the slum-dwelling masses.
Over the last few years, Dwell magazine has helped make prefab sexy again, championing the idea of sleek, modular, factory-built homes that are easier to construct, more sustainable and less expensive than their traditional stick-built counterpart. But prefab still remains a niche market, attractive mostly to the second-homeless looking for chic but affordable shelter to plunk down on that acre of land they just bought in Montana.
Disneyland’s House of the Future, meanwhile, has been given a philosophical remodel. The original was torn down after just 10 years on display, when Monsanto decided to focus its patronage on another Disneyland attraction, Adventure Thru Inner Space. The 2008 House of the Future has completely abandoned its techno-utopian roots and exhibits no interest in extending the bounds of the ownership society by giving the masses more affordable living options. Instead, its pushy closets and managerial countertops are just a way for developers to jack up prices. The world of home-ownership, it turns out, is a small world after all. And from the developer’s perspective, it makes infinitely more sense to cater to those with money to spend than those whose house of the future is the same dingy apartment they’ve been renting for the last 10 years, or even worse, a sleeping bag and a shopping cart.