LACMA’s New “Home of the Future” Exhibition Looks Back to See What Comes Next

LOS ANGELES — A new LACMA exhibition is asking visitors to look backward before they picture what comes next. “Home of the Future, 1925–1985: Designing Domestic Utopias” opened September 27 at the Resnick Pavilion and runs through March 14, 2027. Rather than treating the future home as a parade of clever gadgets, the show examines how six decades of designers, companies and popular media packaged ideas about comfort, labor, family and technological progress.

The exhibition brings together architectural models, drawings, photographs, films and household objects. Its range stretches from self-cleaning kitchens and push-button appliances to plastic houses designed for rapid assembly, early desktop computers and concepts for living beyond Earth. That variety matters because the “home of tomorrow” was never one stable idea. It changed whenever Americans’ anxieties, ambitions and consumer habits changed—and it often revealed as much about the present as the future.

The exterior of LACMA’s David Geffen Galleries in Los Angeles. Image: ArchEyes Magazine / CC BY 4.0

For Los Angeles audiences, the subject feels unusually at home. Southern California has long been a testing ground for experimental architecture, aerospace imagination, screen fantasy and aggressive marketing. The same region that sold streamlined houses and jet-age lifestyles also helped turn domestic space into entertainment. LACMA’s exhibition places those bright promises beside harder questions: who could afford the imagined future, whose work made it possible and which households were missing from the picture.

The show covers a period that begins in 1925, when electrification, new materials and mass production were reshaping the household, and ends in 1985, when personal computers were moving from specialist equipment toward ordinary domestic life. Across that span, technology was repeatedly presented as a route to freedom from chores. Yet appliances did not automatically erase domestic labor. In many cases, expectations simply rose as machines made particular tasks faster.

That tension gives the exhibition more depth than a nostalgia display. A futuristic kitchen can be beautiful and still contain assumptions about gender. A prefabricated house can promise affordability while depending on land, infrastructure and financing that are not equally available. A space habitat can inspire genuine wonder while avoiding the immediate housing pressures on Earth. The strongest way to view these objects is to hold excitement and skepticism at the same time.

Visitors may also notice how often tomorrow was sold through images before it existed as a practical place. Renderings, advertisements and films made the future feel visible and therefore purchasable. The technique remains familiar today: smart-home systems, artificial-intelligence assistants and energy technologies are marketed through scenes of effortless living. The exhibition’s historical distance helps expose the pattern without requiring viewers to reject innovation itself.

The timing adds another layer. Los Angeles is in the middle of an unusually active museum moment, with ambitious new and redesigned cultural spaces changing how art and popular imagery are presented. LACMA’s own campus transformation has made questions about architecture, access and institutional ambition especially visible. A show about designed futures therefore sits inside a museum that is itself making a large claim about the future of public culture in the city.

This is not a prediction center, and it does not need to be. Its value comes from showing that every future is designed by someone, promoted to someone and financed by someone. Once visitors recognize that structure, contemporary promises become easier to read. The useful question is not simply whether a new device works. It is whether the life imagined around that device is desirable, attainable and shared.

The exhibition also rewards comparison with the city outside. A visitor can leave a gallery of idealized homes and return to a Los Angeles shaped by housing costs, long commutes, climate risk and unequal access to public space. That contrast is not a failure of the exhibition; it is part of its subject. Like Angels Flight’s long Los Angeles history, the show demonstrates how built environments carry the priorities of their eras even after those priorities change.

Anyone planning a visit should check LACMA’s current hours, ticketing and gallery information before traveling. Pairing the exhibition with a slow walk through the surrounding museum district will probably reveal more than rushing through a checklist. The central idea is simple enough to carry home: the future is not an automatic destination. It is a proposal—and proposals deserve both imagination and scrutiny.