What Will Future Homes Look Like? Filmed in the 1960's - Narrated by Walter Cronkite

home of the 21st century what would it be like how will we choose to live in the next 30 40 years we might fill our home with furniture like this our beds tables and chairs all made of paper our home may be lighted by electricity from fuel cells and the wood and leather of the day replaced by chromium and plastic our favorite easy chair might be inflatable like a huge balloon the kitchen of tomorrow could look more like a laboratory than a place to bake a cake advanced technology already has begun to find a place in the home but new developments and food preservation amel might be stored for years and then cooked in seconds under a barrage of high-energy radio waves robots may help us with their housework it's all possible in the home of the 21st century [Music] [Music] [Music] everyone dreams of a home some way surrounded by natural beauty and a lot of land before the year 2000 and 160 million new homes will be built some of these visionary homes of tomorrow exist today this is what people dream about for the 21st century what will be the reality the search for a place to live in the 21st century already has begun today people are pushing away from the crowded congestion of present-day cities and congesting the surrounding countryside many of them end up in homes like these at the ugly edges of urban sprawl the search for a home nestled in nature often ends in the empty repetition and taste the stability of a suburban tract development instead of delighting in natural beauty urban sprawl defiles the age-old American dream of a home away from it all could create a 21st century nightmare what is the future of the single-family home architect Philip Johnson this idea that you should talk little houses around on tracks there will go I think there's no it's totally wrong use of land everybody has a little bit of lawn on four sides of his house nobody has any privacy no one has a garden of their own no one no architect built houses now it's all done by builders and developers and they build them all alike as you know they call the ticky tacky houses in the song but there's no future to that because the cost of servicing the house is growing by such leaps and bounds that the taxes on that how can nowhere near pay but for the services the town has to put there with their water sewage roads so the house is a thing of the Carnot century [Music] if the individual house is a thing of the 20th century the search for the home of tomorrow might end an enormous brick beehives like these it has been projected that by the 21st century 90% of the American population will make their homes in urban areas can we find a compromise between intelligent use of land and personal privacy city planner Konstantinos doxiadis we forgot in the 20th century and especially in this country the necessity for privacy I don't believe in picture windows which allow people to inspect my house from outside but I also believe in squares playgrounds benches statues out of my house which will give me the chance to meet with my neighbors when I want the Japanese have the smallest gardens in the world but they are the most beautiful and some of them are symbolic of the whole cosmos of the whole world a small pond perhaps 3 feet square replaces we see a rock replaces the mountain and the open sky replaces or is there for the great cosmos a very smaller tree means the forest in this very small garden we have the symbolism of the world that the Japanese can retire in this country and think and meditate and this we have to give 12 saps the Japanese home is an ancient solution to the problems of urban living at Expo 67 in Montreal Canada a bold new experiment in housing is in progress it is called habitat 67 habitat may be a prototype for the home of 2001 this unusual urban complex is a cluster of 354 of these concrete boxes or modules together these modules will make up 158 individual homes each with a private garden and terrace they are precast on the construction site and placed it into place by giant crane the population density of this project will be ten times greater than the average suburban tract but much less than conventional high-rise apartments abbott ats building block construction attempts to apply the efficiency of modern mass production the problems of urban living combining economical use of land and imaginative design habitats young Israeli architect Moshe softy what habitat tries to do was build the high-density environment and still give the family the kind of amenities which they go to the suburbs for which they go to a single-family house like privacy like a garden like fresh air and sunlight and view and all the things people want in a house so it's trying to preserve these amenities within a high-density multi-story development this is a single repetitive unit which measures approximately 17 feet by 13 feet and it's cast on the plant and prefinished and then the crane lifts it into place and interlocks it and these units are load-bearing so that the forces go right through the units to the ground then one two or three of these make apposite so that this may be a house or that may be a house and there's the garden there and the cluster the clusters which are formed by eight units along the street have a common area of entrances and play playgrounds on the other side and then on the ground you have the car level and you have the pedestrian level and the pedestrian level bridges to the river and to the harbor and the car level and the pedestrian level never crossed probably less than half of the 60 million new 21st century homes will be one family dwelling this doesn't necessarily mean the end of the individual home many city dwellers may build a second home in the country with electronic communications and high-speed transportation they would spend most of their time in large urban clusters and then really get away from it all autumn a truly isolated self-sufficient second home no one knows where the search for the home of 2001 will ultimately end we do know some of today's possibilities like these do Monessen panels let's push our imaginations ahead and visit the home of the 21st century this could be someone's second home hundreds of miles away from the nearest city it consists of a cluster of prefabricated modules this home is as self-sufficient as a space capsule it recirculates its own water supply and draws all of its electricity from its own fuel cell as we approached our arrival could be observed by an automatic closed-circuit television system which would notify our hosts once inside we might find ourselves in a glass enclosure where the lint and dirt we've accumulated during our trip is removed electrostatically now we stepped into the living room what will the home of the 21st century look like inside well I'm sitting in the living room of a mock-up of the home of the future conceived by local Ford and designed by Paul McCobb this is where the family of the 21st century would entertain guests this room there is just about everything one would one a big some might say too big throw color 3d television screen a stereo sound system that could fill the room with music and comfortable furniture for relaxed conversation now in the 21st century you might bring your favorite chair along with you when you go for a visit to do this you wouldn't need a small trailer just a little bit like this there's a full-size chair in here a chair that blows up like a balloon here's the way it looks after it's been fully inflated when guests arrived he just pulls out his inflatable chair a small pressurized air capsule would inflate it and it would be ready for use at the end of the evening he'd just pull out the plug and put the deflated chair back into his little bag sounds preposterous but some people are convinced it will happen and here here's another piece of furniture that might be found in the living room of the 21st century home when you're finished with this little children's chair just throw it away it's made out of paper in the 21st century living room there's no reason we can't have something old and familiar in it to remind us that both the present and the future are really really extensions of the past even before that chair was made technology had begun to change our way of living technology is opening a new world of leisure time one government report projects that by the year 2000 the United States will have a 30 hour work week and month long vacations as the rule a lot of this new free time will be spent at home and this console controls a full array of equipment to inform instruct and entertain the family of the future the possibilities for the evenings program are called up on this screen we could watch a football game or movie shown in full color on our big 3d television screen the sound would come from these globe like speakers or with a push of a button we could momentarily escape from our 21st century lives and fill the room with stereophonic music from another age [Music] everything in this home of the future has been designed for comfort today's air conditioners for instance are only the beginning the home of the 21st century might have a completely controlled environment for example those wall panels can change themselves to darken the room or let in more light they're controlled by this switchboard [Music] now this is where the family the 21st century would relax over here is where work would be done this is where a man might spend most of his time in the home of the 21st century this equipment here will allow him to carry on normal business activities without ever going to an office away from home this console provides a summary of news relayed by satellite from all over the world now to get a newspaper copy for permanent reference I just turned this month and out it comes when I've finished catching up on the news I might check the latest mother this same screen could give me the latest report on the stocks I might own a telephone is this instrument here any mock-up of a possible future telephone this would be the mouthpiece now if I want to see the people I'm talking with I just turn the button and there they are over here as I work on the screen I can keep in touch with other rooms of the house through a closed-circuit television system with equipment like this in the home of the future we may not have to go to work the work would come to us in the 21st century it may be that no home will be complete without a computerized communications console the domestication of the computer already has begun in Phoenix Arizona the Charles cross Shaw family has learned to live with a computer terminal in their kitchen this taller typewriter is connected by ordinary telephone lines to a computer complex in New York City 2400 miles away Charles cross Shaw a general electric engineer works on technical problems his wife Barbara uses the computer for various household chores here the computer has expanded the proportions of a recipe for sex into a recipe for 14 by the 21st century home computers may be as common as today's telephone what are you doing the children of the 21st century might be educated by a computer at home across Shaw daughters do some of their homework this way today try 148 for tomorrow's home computer won't simply do old jobs and new ways are the time to cross your daughters have families of their own we may have created jobs for computers that we haven't even dreamed of today even with a computer in her kitchen mrs. Kraus Shaw still cooks her family's meals cooking might be different in the 21st century industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss I like to think that the art of baking a homemade pie won't be lost but maybe the one that comes out of the supermarket is going to be better than the one that you can make at home it has we've lost the art I think that packages for quick food and this doesn't just have to be in the kitchen the package might very well have they a disposable electric plug as part of it and you just plug this in the package would heat you eat the food and you might even need the package all of wasted paper in the world it's conceivable that when the package was heated it returned into part of the food I people like to eat and I don't think really that everybody's going to eat out of a deep freeze I think some people like to cook and we should take this away from them all those who still enjoy cooking for themselves the kitchen of the 21st century may offer many new ways to prepare a meal microwave cooking for example microwaves are high frequency electromagnetic waves higher than the waves that carry normal radio signals but lower than the frequencies we know as light microwaves vibrate energy and food absorbs this energy as heat many materials like the glass that surrounds a souffle are unaffected by microwave energy the glass remains cool while the food gets hot the food is cooked on at once instead of having to absorb heat slowly from the outside this to play normally cooks in 40 minutes with microwave that's ready in 90 seconds this might be part of the kitchen in the home of the future preparation of a meal in the 21st century could be almost fully automatic frozen or irradiated foods are stored in that area over there meals in description of the future are programmed the menus given to the automatic chef by a typewriter or punched computer cards the proper prepackaged ingredients are conveyed from the storage area and moved into this microwave oven where they are cooked in sense when the meal is done the food comes up here but a meals ready instead of reaching for a stack of plates I just punch a button and the right amount of cups and saucers are molded on the spot when I finished eating there be no dishes to wash use plates will be melted down again the leftovers destroyed in the process and the melted plastic will be ready to be molded into clean plates when I need them next in 2001 we might eat out in automated restaurants today American machine & foundry has a system for automated drive-ins called AM fair press a button and the computerized kitchen cooks by itself [Music] by [Music] robots are coming not to rule the world but to help around the house on the 2001 machines like these may help cook your breakfast and serve it too we may wake up each morning to the patter of little feet robot feet we spoke with the professor who is experimenting with computerized robots at London's Queen Mary College mw3 professors bring what are these these are the first prototypes of small-scale models of the domestic house maid of the future the domestic house moves they've made of all work to do all the routine work of the house all the uninteresting jobs that the housework housewife would prefer not to do you also give it instructions about decisions that it mustn't run over the baby and things like that and then it remembers those instructions and whenever you tell it to do that particular program it does that program what is the completed machine going to look like they're going to look like a human being now there's no reason at all why it should look like a human being the only thing is it's got to live in a human house and work in a human house it's got to go through doors and climb up stairs and so on but there's no other reason why it should look like a human being for example you can have three or four hands if it wants to it can have eyes in its feet it can be entirely different it would have the full run of the house and indeed these ones here are examples of machine that would actually walk upstairs just as the human being has this built-in sense of balance we can build in a sense of balance into the machine so that the body part of it is always upright even when the carriage is going up the stairs so the machine conceivably make a mistake and just walk out of the house go through the wrong door it could it's very easy to allow for this though because you can have a large red button conveniently placed so that anybody can punch this button and immediately immobilize the whole machine there is no need to be frightened of it so that the fold itself up where we got to provided a room in the house it would put itself away in a cupboard when is it finished it would also recharge its batteries the 21st century home is still only a dream as utopian and probably as unattainable for the average man as these far-out homes of today [Music] [Music] [Music] there comes a time when our dreams of the 21st century must be weighed against the realities of today architect Philip Johnson we're talking about where you and I going to live and we're going to live in these in these mass-produced buildings and just mass-producing little plop plop or adding a flexible type thing do-it-yourself is not a would now what is going to work an individual want to be like Phil roll and go off to the Maine woods and get an axe and build your own house that will go on for some centuries perhaps but that is no longer germane what is interesting is the push to the city that's nothing that accelerates is Jefferson's time and this is the strength to get around to another subject this is the reason why it's so difficult to persuade the American people that do their cities over is because we still believe in Jeffersonian agrarian ideals you spend all your data in a labyrinth you see well you're going to spend all night there too we're just going to make it as terrible as we can can we find a compromise between our increasingly urban way of living and the pride and privacy of the individual home these children will raise the families of the 21st century they will live in homes with all the gadgetry of a New Age 3d television automated cooking and robot house maids but machines don't make a whole people do a home is Winston Churchill once observed is more than just a living unit it will take decisions that go beyond technology decisions its quality of going to leave to answer the question are will we live in the 21st century [Music]

Channel: 16mm Educational Films

Views: 1,233,182

Rating: 4.8898692 out of 5

Keywords: What Will Future Homes Look Like, At Home 2001, Future Homes, Homes in the Future, Homes of the Future, how homes will look, walter cronkite, Stay at Home 2020, shelter in place, covid 19 lockdown, 16mm educational films

Id: 2ivp442RLS8

Length: 24min 33sec (1473 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 04 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Nakotadinzeo]

Some things are pretty accurate to a degree, some things are way way off.

Why don't we have reusable melty plastic plates?

[u/vectorizer99]

Thanks for this. The 21st Century was a TV series in the late 60s speculating on the future, with the future home featured in this particular episode. I watched this as a boy ~10YO, and the entertainment room left a deep impression on me, especially the idea that you could see movies at home. This was a time when all I had at home were 2.5 channels of TV. Seeing this show was an inspiration to build a very modest home theater with a projector (and just a wall for a screen) when I was able to afford it some 40 years later. Thanks again, I looked more than once for a copy of this particular episode.