Remembrance of Houses Future
| Tue Dec. 2, 2008 12:34 PM PST
REMEMBRANCE OF HOUSES FUTURE....If, like me, you adored the House of the Future at Disneyland when you were seven years old, you might enjoy P.J. O'Rourke's account of his visit to the HP/Microsoft revival version this summer. 
Unsurprisingly, considering the designers, it was closed down at the time due to "technical difficulties," but he was at least able to view it from above:
According to Disney, the shape of things to come can be found at Pottery Barn, with a quick stop in Restoration Hardware for "classic future" touches and a trip to Target to get throw rugs and cheap Japanese paper lanterns. HoF II was designed by the Taylor Morrison company, a home builder specializing in anodyne subdevelopmental housing in the Southwest.
....Any random dull normal person (we have one in our family) could come up with snappier ideas for the future than HoF II seems to contain. How about self-washing windows? Automobiles have had them since the 1930s. And have you watched the clever manner in which convertible car tops operate? What keeps that technology from being applied to self-making beds?....I didn't even see one of those robot vacuum cleaners that trundles around hoovering on its own agenda, never mind, say, a helium balloon with a propeller and a mop of feathers that flies about dusting things (it might not do a very good job dusting, but at our house neither do we).
More here on the original HoF if you want a trip down memory lane. More here on the new one.
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Continued From Above
Comments
the shape of things to come can be found at Pottery Barn, with a quick stop in Restoration Hardware for "classic future" touches and a trip to Target to get throw rugs and cheap Japanese paper lanterns.
I'm pretty sure that was also a bad episode of "Top Design" on Bravo. All that's missing is a few tacky lamps by "iconic potter", Jonathan Adler.
And have you watched the clever manner in which convertible car tops operate? What keeps that technology from being applied to self-making beds?
Has the author seen the way a convertible top really operates? How could anybody get comfortable with all of the cables and rigging? Not to mention, the sheets would be pulled taut over you like restraints while the unit was closed.
I, for one, can't stand when people feign technical knowledge so as to belittle the working creations of others.
I think this article would have been better written by either Jim O'Rourke or P.J. Harvey.
Anonymous,
Sheesh.
This is a good article. It reflects our times. It has nothing to do with belittling the workers at Disney or whomever created this dismally realistic home of the future.
Did you read the article?
The point is that we have lost the dream of a Utopian technological future.
Submitted by Chris Brown (not verified) on Tue Dec. 2, 2008 2:42 PM PST.
I know it's off topic, Kevin, but I'm wondering how you like the Wind netbook now that you been using it for a couple of weeks.
Submitted by Maynard Handley (not verified) on Tue Dec. 2, 2008 2:45 PM PST.
I'm similarly not sure that convertibles have much to teach beds.
I do, however, find it bizarre that car seats (at least in high end cars, say Mercedes 300E and up) seem to be so much more comfortable than anything furniture companies are capable of creating. I've never yet found one of those chairs, constantly mocked on TV, with a fridge in it --- maybe they have some attention paid to ergonomics. But why the hell can't your $1000 sofa-chair at some furniture store come with the same motors and controls that are standard on any decent car seat?
Or, of course, to go in a different direction, look at the way that many people try to sit on double-wide sofas, like a bed with their body straddling both seating areas. Many many sofas have some detail misdesigned so that this doesn't work --- you slide out the sofa, or it is too wide, or the armrests are too high for your legs.
What exactly was the last piece of consumer research done by the furniture industry --- 1783? But of course you'll never hear them blaming themselves for their woes; no it'll be the fault of those damn foreigners and their cheap labor, or the sky-rocketing cost of wood (because, god forbid they imagine ever making light-weight furniture out of, say, aluminum).
It's hard to find an industry that makes Detroit look like visionaries, but the furniture industry fits the bill.
Maynard,
You might want to seriously look at La-Z-boy chairs. I have some new recliners, and no they don't look like the one Frasier's father had, and I really have to say they are incredibly comfortable.
Very stream lined looking too. No fridge in the arm though.
The steel-and-glass design reminds me of the '68 Impala I keep on blocks in the back yard. That's where I go to relax. The seats are comfy, too.
Seriously, though. The structure is amazingly small by today's suburban McMansion standards, don't you think?
Submitted by Stefan Jones (not verified) on Tue Dec. 2, 2008 3:36 PM PST.
To hell with futuroihdism.
* Go read Stewart Brand's How Buildings Learn.
* Visit an Arts and Crafts style house. Imagine that made with modern materials, conveniences, and infrastructure. Yeah, that's the shit.
Clearly, Roombas don't run Windows so they aren't allowed. Who wants their vacuum to crash, or randomly demand activation activation, or have an embedded media player, web browser and video editor?
Ok, to be fair, Roombas crash a LOT but it isn't that kind of crash.
Interesting. The Innoventions house has some nice design qualities. Very pretty, but not beyond contemporary houses I've been in lately.
So tables have the Microsoft "Surface" PC in them. Wow. Looking through the links at what the house has it seems that some of the stuff is mainly demos of proposed products, or things that have lots of flash but aren't that easy to deliver or are that practical (the virtual mirror is a specific example). The setup in the younger boy's room with images showing up on multiple screens around the room while telling the story would take a lot of time to configure and may not be interesting after the 12th time.
But it brings up something I've been wondering about lately: what would we think the future would be like? Many of the ideas of the future from the past were based on things now known to be rather impractical: domed cities (expensive, massive structures to solve what?), or atomic cars, or flying cars (very costly energy-wise and not very space efficient on the ground) or robots or intelligent cars (we've found artificial intelligence to be a bit harder to implement than imagined).
With computers and the Internet we've got capabilities that wildly exceed the imagination of most predictors of the future (at least that I'm familiar with).
What can we look forward to? Improvements in medicine, robotics (including self-driving cars)? Cold fusion?
What can we look forward to? Improvements in medicine, robotics (including self-driving cars)? Cold fusion?
The real answer is: I Don't Know and Neither Do You. However, there are smart people paid a lot of money to sit around and think about this. This kind of blue-skying is a great job, but is of limited use in retrospect. The problem is that most of these predictions essentially boil down to "the present, but more of it". Flying cars in the 50's, since transportation improvements were huge. Lunar colonies in the 50's and 60's, since the space program was big. And so on.
In reality, there are always disruptive technologies that come along and set everything on a different course. Obvious examples are the PC and the web. Predictions made before these technologies were implemented are a hoot to read now, since they're so off.
But, since it's so much fun, what the hell. Personally tailored medications and medical implants. Use of quantum entangling to develop long-distance unjammable un-interceptable communications. Augmented reality using ubiquitious communications and data sharing. No flying cars, though.
nerd,
Predictors of the future back then looked at current trends and projected them forward, which is pretty much what we do.
We went from horse-drawn carriages to horse-less carriages and then to human flight so the next thing would seem to be flying cars.
And I want one, and I don't care what that grump thersites says.
After WWII it was understandable that they would think nuclear power would eliminate the need for power considerations, and it was probably okay to not worry too much about using fossil fuels because they were considered a stop gap measure until we perfected nuclear power. With unlimited power we were going to be mining the asteroids for heaven's sake.
Science Fiction has always been big into predicting the future, at least until the future started turning sour and then it switched mostly to fantasy and magic.
Here are my predictions - no cold fusion, no practical hot fusion either. Power becomes more precious. All the alternatives together can't make up for fossil fuels. People travel less and use telecommunications more.
The carrying capacity of the earth will be about 3 billion, which is where the population stabilizes.
The Demoocrats retain control for eight years and do the best they can, but shortages are too much and the Republicans retake control. I figure they screw it up for four years, get elected (barely) and the revolution happens about a year later. I'm saying 2021 or so. After that it really is anyone's guess. No one can see past a decision they don't understand.
In the meantime we do the best we can and try to make it is not us doing most of the dieing.
