With new technology and new designs, futuristic homes had a particular view of future domestic life:

This is Xanadu, the Computerized Home of Tomorrow, which opened its doors in 1983 in Florida, strategically located just a few miles from Disney World’s Epcot Center. Xanadu’s Yale-trained architect, Roy Mason, wanted to create a walk-through instruction manual for building a smart home. Mason saw this blurring of architecture and sociality as the answer to the many problems of the American family: loneliness, boredom, frustration, parent-child conflict, and general depression. The result proposed automation as remedy and liberation.

Much like the techno-pessimistic nightmare imagined by Ray Bradbury’s short story “The Veldt,” in which housekeeping and child-rearing are ceded to automated homes, Xanadu’s “electric hearth” was run by a “House Brain” to control life support functions. (The House Brain is, in a way, another term for mother.) Staffed by a robot dubbed Robutler that remediated paid servant labor, the house aimed to take over a wide variety of tasks — but only as the owners wished. The Brain, meanwhile, was a personal assistant, presaging the integration of Alexa and Siri into smart home systems. It was designed to provide customizability in managing various aspects of middle-class life. It could call local plumbers and neighbors, offer telemedicine, menu planning, and even outfit selection via an automated clothes-retrieval closet.

Xanadu was not the first of its kind. In 1957, Disney unveiled the House of the Future in collaboration with MIT and Monsanto, which sought to showcase the engineering and design versatility of plastics. Visitors of Tomorrowland walked through the attraction and marveled at its features — microwave ovens, wall-mounted TVs, adjustable sinks, modular bedrooms — which would, of course, become commonplace in the decades to come. Likewise, Xanadu invited thousands of guests each day to see a possible home of tomorrow, augmented by technology that could be customized to conform to the changing needs and shapes of American families…

This mixed temporality is a classic trick of the model home: The space is staged to prompt viewers to imagine bringing these systems into their own lives now, while also presenting a new ideal of futuristic living…

People do not live the same way at different time points. This is true because of a variety of factors, including technological change that can introduce new opportunities or challenges and design of objects and places. Daily life changes.

But does new technology necessarily go along with new design? Put another way: could we have new technology while living in a world that still looks like the 1970s or the 2000s? Or could we have new designs for houses and domestic life but no significant changes in technology?

These houses constructed decades ago put design and technology together: they were a package deal. But I would guess our average home technology has changed more than the average home design. Still relatively few American houses are fully modernist inside and/or outside. New homes continue to remix older design features.

And I wonder how much those future visions of American homes contended with the many homes built decades ago they will not be retrofitted or redesigned or redeveloped. Moving to futuristic design is a long process with the many housing units from previous eras still standing and serving their occupants well. Similarly, integrating technology in an older home might be a challenge. It is one thing to put an Echo on the counter; it is another to put in full house air conditioning or run wires through multiple walls.