The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) has opened two concurrent exhibitions that examine design as a driver of social, political and economic change in modern domestic life: Home of the Future, 1925–1985: Designing Domestic Utopias and The Kitchen and Its Discontents.

A house of tomorrow, told through more than 260 objects

Across the twentieth century, Americans were promised an extraordinary number of domestic futures: self-cleaning kitchens, plastic houses assembled in a single day, push-button appliances and desktop computers — all of them shaping ideas about how life should be lived. Drawing on more than 260 architectural models, drawings, photographs, films, paintings, furniture and everyday objects ranging from sinks to television sets, Home of the Future explores the American house of tomorrow. The exhibition asks not only which futures people imagined, but who did the imagining, how those images circulated, and whom they were meant for. It is curated by Wendy Kaplan, curator and head of LACMA's Decorative Arts and Design department.

Four overlapping periods

The exhibition is organised into four overlapping periods. The first, 1925–1945, "Health, Efficiency and Mechanisation", shows how the home was reimagined as a machine — rational, hygienic, precisely calibrated to modern life. Reducing domestic labour was the primary goal: Kohler's electric sink promised to free households from the drudgery of washing dishes by hand three times a day, while American Stove's Mrs. Modern declared that its Magic Chef "cooks for me, not slaves me." Radio and telephone further remade the house, wiring private life into an expanding network of information, entertainment and advertising.

Plastic, push buttons and prefabrication — and those left out

The second period, 1945–1965, "Plastic, Push Buttons and Prefabrication", traces how wartime innovations in plastic, plywood and metal were redirected into furniture, textiles and architecture. Disney's Monsanto House of the Future, built almost entirely of plastic and packed with push-button appliances, showed some 20 million visitors a world that was lighter, brighter and easier to clean; Charles and Ray Eames's Case Study House No. 8, built from mass-produced industrial materials, was at once beautiful, flexible and highly personal. This section also continues to examine how access to the postwar future was restricted by racial and gender discrimination. The third period, 1950–1970, "Cold War Command Centre", focuses on the nuclear threat and social upheaval, when domestic life and geopolitics became inseparable, producing alternative living fantasies underground, underwater and in outer space; Eero Aarnio's Ball Chair offered a different kind of retreat — a safe cocoon wrapped in Space Age aesthetics.

The Kitchen and Its Discontents is a separate exhibition embedded within Home of the Future. It places Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky's Frankfurt Kitchen (c. 1926–1930) and Charlotte Perriand's kitchen for Le Corbusier's Unité d'Habitation in Marseille (c. 1946–1952) alongside other works from LACMA's collection, highlighting the kitchen's layered cultural and psychological meanings. Michael Govan, LACMA's chief executive, said he hopes visitors will take away a provocation: a reminder that the homes we inhabit today were once someone's radical idea, an act of imagination, a leap of faith. For SEEEEART, these two shows speak directly to China's rapidly expanding home and whole-house customisation market — they return the kitchen from a question of style to a question of labour and power.