Yesterday's homes of tomorrow, at LACMA

What did Americans imagine the home of the future would look like? A new exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art answers with flying cars, self-cleaning houses, push-button kitchens and bomb shelters. 'Home of the Future, 1925–1985: Designing Domestic Utopias' runs in LACMA's Resnick Pavilion until 14 March 2027.

Curators Wendy Kohn and Grace Converse split the story into four overlapping chapters. The first covers the early dream of health and efficiency, when electricity, radio and the telephone were remaking rural life. The second is the postwar consumer boom of plastics and prefabrication, pastel décor and designers like Charles and Ray Eames and George Nelson. There's a model of Buckminster Fuller's aluminium Dymaxion House, alongside Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House, Barbie's Dream House and the Monsanto House of the Future, which stood at Disneyland for ten years. A Cold War section shows the home as a shelter from threat, and the last takes us from hippie communes to Apple's first Mac.

A smaller companion show, 'The Kitchen and its Discontents', looks at two landmark kitchens, the Frankfurt kitchen and Charlotte Perriand's design for Le Corbusier.

It's a rich, nostalgic and slightly unsettling look at how our hopes for home have changed. If you're in LA before March, it sounds well worth an afternoon.

Our summary of a story from Wallpaper*, published 28 September 2026. Read the original