Image: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art will open ‘Home of the Future, 1925–1985: Designing Domestic Utopias’ on September 27, 2026, presenting six decades of ideas about how technology and design might transform everyday domestic life. Organized by LACMA, the exhibition brings together architectural models, drawings, photographs, films and objects.
The exhibition’s scope follows visions of the home from 1925 through 1985, a period in which designers and architects proposed new ways of organizing household space and labor. Its examples include self-cleaning kitchens, plastic houses and desktop computers, placing speculative architecture alongside consumer and technological objects associated with domestic life.
Rather than focusing on a single architect, designer or named artist, the presentation is structured around a broad history of imagined domestic environments. The range of formats—models and drawings alongside photographic and moving-image material—allows the exhibition to address both the physical appearance of proposed homes and the ways those ideas were circulated and represented.
LACMA’s September newsletter describes the exhibition as a tracing of “domestic visions,” linking its objects through changing expectations about the future of the household. The period covered begins in the interwar years and extends into the era when personal computers entered the home, creating a chronological framework for examining successive proposals for domestic innovation.
‘Home of the Future’ will be presented concurrently with ‘The Kitchen and Its Discontents,’ which also opens at LACMA on September 27. That exhibition draws on photographs, prints and advertisements from the museum’s collection and includes two historical real-world kitchens. The two presentations therefore place speculative domestic designs alongside historical examples of kitchen environments, although LACMA lists them as separate exhibitions.
LACMA will hold member previews for ‘Home of the Future’ from September 24 through September 26, ahead of the public opening on September 27. The exhibition is made possible with support from Getty, with major support from Debbie and Mark Attanasio, the David Bohnett Foundation, Martha and Bruce Karsh, and the WHH Foundation. Generous support is credited to Debra and Leon Black, Sapna and Joe Dangaran, Alison and Geoffrey Edelstein, Suzanne and Ric Kayne, Koni and Geoff Rich, Gianluigi Tacchi and James Bellavance, and Trina Turk.
