Home Futures

How will future changes affect today’s domestic architecture? Will soaring temperatures render the ubiquitous glass boxes grafted onto earlier housing stock uninhabitable? Will families have to seek refuge in dimly-lit, shrouded Victorian parlours? Home Futures contrasts the radical predictions made by(1956); footage from General Motors’ , a promo for the “kitchen of tomorrow” (1956); photographs of Hans Hollein’s installation (1969); annotated photographs of Haus-Rucker-Co’s (1971), which defined living areas using light transparent enclosures instead of solid walls; and by Ugo la Pietra (1982), an installation showing homes with small TV screens integrated into household furniture. Some predictions, such as the computerized control of domestic environments, parallel the way we live now, while others seem quaint. We don’t work in inflatable bubbles in parks, as Hollein forecasted; instead we access the internet in coffee shops. At home, massive Orwellian television screens dominate living areas, supplanting nature. No one foresaw that social media would become the default communication setting, even within the home.