New York Times on the Disney Dream Home
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto on 07.10.08
We were previously appalled at the new Disney Dream Home (read Disney's New Dream Home: Worse Than We Dreamed or go direct to the appalling video on the hideous website with the nauseating music. We concluded that Walt is spinning in his cryogenic cylinder.
Now David Rakoff of the New York Times visits it, and comes to much the same conclusion. "All this is worlds away from Disneyland’s original utopian domicile, the 1957 Monsanto House of the Future, sponsored by that company’s plastics division. Meant to represent life in 1985, it was a paradigm-shifting, atomic age showplace of sleek surfaces and synthetic materials. “Hardly a natural material appears anywhere,” the original narration bragged."
If this is the future I want to get off now.
"In a strange coincidence, the very week that the Dream Home opened, at the other end of the Disney corporation’s spectrum, Pixar had just released the dystopian “Wall-E” — a film premised on a world choked by garbage and waste, and made uninhabitable, at least in part, by things like gargantuan homes that make little or no concession to the limited resources out there and our heedless lack of stewardship....
The feeling of the Dream Home is of a dwelling from 2004, before the subprime mortgage crisis and $140-a-barrel oil. It is an exurban mausoleum, representing the kind of house that can be reached only by a decreasingly affordable car.
Even the corporate planners’ equating of acknowledging reality with bumming people out seems kind of old school. The keepers of the Dream Home do not seem to recognize that we are shuddering breathlessly on the brink of a new cultural moment. After years of falsely elevated and baseless hopes, it now feels downright woodland-creature-chirpy to face tomorrow with eyes wide open."::New York Times see also slideshow David Rakoff on Disney's New Dream Home
More on Dream Homes of the Future on TreeHugger:
Disney's New Dream Home: Worse Than We Dreamed
New House of the Future Coming to Disneyland
It Was Fifty Years Ago Today: Monsanto House of the Future ...
Monsanto House of the Future
1939: The Electric House of the Future
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- New York Times Predictions for 2009, from 1909
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Leonardo DiCaprio's Eco-Charity. Plus Tommy Lee's Rockin' Green Life and Jesscia Alba's A Green Mom
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Nice to see there are other people who live in reality as well :) I was worried people would actually see this home as something that will be obtainable (or useful).
It looks like the Mohegan Sun casino in CT.
How depressing. It makes me all the more excited about people that are designing in the other direction (toward sustainability). Yep, this is ridiculous and excessive in every sense of the word (and ugly to boot). I would prefer kitschy '50s decor over this McMansion poo. Since when did adding technology mean "Dream Home"?
Cluttered & rigid at the same time, it looks like a hotel with pointless product placement.
Does it have a 4 Hummer garage?
Whoever designed the house must have no taste, and a stupid vision of the future.
1. What's with the clash of different types of furniture, and walls from different decades? Some look very 70's, while other pieces are today. Some look 90's or 50's. It's like somebody rummaged through the old house, a garage sale, and Best Buy to get these pieces.
2. Too many digital photo frames. 2-3 is enough. 7 or more is already too excessive. Photos slide by anyways, so you're bound to see it sometime. How can you look at every single photo frame?
3. If the Dream Home is for "everybody", I'd be surprised if the poor or the middle class could afford this monstrosity.
4. I've seen better homes incorporate technology, modern furniture, and even design into a better configuration of tomorrow than this. This is a joke.