LACMA opens exhibition on 20th-century domestic utopias

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) has opened a new exhibition titled ‘Home of the Future, 1925–1985: Designing Domestic Utopias’. Curated by Wendy Kohn and Grace Converse, the exhibition utilizes architectural models, drawings, photographs, and various objects to trace how American visions of the future home were imagined and marketed over six decades.

The exhibition is organized into thematic sections. The first period, 1925–1945, focuses on health, efficiency, and mechanization, featuring speculative fantasies such as self-cleaning houses and flying cars during an era of electrification. The second period, 1945–1965, explores the rise of plastics, push-button technology, and prefabrication, highlighting a consumer-driven middle-class paradise characterized by suburban gadgetry and mid-century design.

Presented alongside ‘The Kitchen and Its Discontents’, the exhibition examines the historical significance of the kitchen as a site of domestic labor and the shifting public mood regarding material progress and technological optimism.