Home of the Future: Designing Domestic Utopias, 1925–1985

Home of the Future traces how the American home of tomorrow was imagined, packaged, and sold—by whom, and for whom. While these visions promised abundance and technological transformation, the exhibition also asks who was excluded from that future, and who imagined radical alternatives. This exhibition will be on view at LACMA from September 27th through March 14th, 2027.

This publication will be the first to explore how visions of the future transformed American domestic life between 1925 and 1985, a period characterized by an arc of scientific celebration and then disillusion. In the late 1960s, forty years of technological optimism and relentless consumerism were replaced by growing fears of an ecological apocalypse. The book’s first two sections will investigate how designers, companies, and the government imagined, disseminated, and sold the home of the future. The last will explain how these strategies were later rejected, but also repurposed. Combined with countercultural ideals about autonomy and sustainability, the result was an embrace of the “smart homes” that dominate today.

Models, drawings, and photographs elucidate fantasies about future living: The Dymaxion House! The Miracle Kitchen! The House of the Century! Commercially available products demonstrate more immediate futures–the revolution in ways to communicate, clean, save labor, and to heat and cool. Appliances ranging from sinks and toasters to radios and TV sets reveal how advances in energy production (electric, gas, solar, and atomic) and the prevalence of synthetics fundamentally altered not only the way Americans lived but also the nature of their beliefs.

Foreword by Michael Govan. 
Introduction by Wendy Kaplan.

Edited by Wendy Kaplan. Text by Glenn Adamson, Andrew Blauvelt, Grace Converse, Sam Dodd, Alexa Griffith Winton, Margaret Hanson, Christopher Long, Amy Ogata, Emily Orr, Monica Penick, Mark Resnick, Abraham Thomas, Gary Van Zante, and Kristina Wilson.


- Hardcover 
- 352 pages
- 12.5 × 9.6 inches
- Published September 29, 2026 by DelMonico Books