Monsanto House of the Future

For the article on the "home of the future", see Xanadu House.

Monsanto House of the Future
Disneyland
Land	Tomorrowland
Attraction type	Walkthrough Attraction
Theme	Futuristic House set in 1986
Opening date	1957
Closing date	1967
Replaced by	Alpine Gardens
Sponsored by	Monsanto Company

The Monsanto House of the Future (also known as the Home of the Future) was an attraction at Disneyland in Anaheim, California, USA, from 1957 to 1967.

History

It was sponsored by Monsanto Company. The design and engineering of the house was done jointly by Monsanto, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Walt Disney Imagineering. The fiberglass components of the house were manufactured by Winner Manufacturing Company in Trenton, New Jersey, and was assembled into the house on-site.

The attraction offered a tour of a home of the future, set in the year 1986, and featured household appliances such as microwave ovens, which eventually became commonplace. The house saw over 435,000 visitors within the first six weeks of opening, and ultimately saw over 20 million visitors before being closed.

The house survived the introduction of New Tomorrowland in 1967, but closed shortly after, as Monsanto's attention shifted to their new sponsored attraction, Adventure Thru Inner Space. The building was so sturdy, that when demolition crews failed to demolish the house using wrecking balls, torches, chainsaws and jackhammers, the building was ultimately demolished by using choker chains to crush it into smaller parts. The reinforced polyester structure was so strong that the half-inch steel bolts used to mount it to its foundation broke before the structure itself did.

The reinforced concrete foundation of the House of the Future was never removed. It currently exists in its original location, now found in the Pixie Hollow attraction. The foundation has been painted green and is currently in use as a planter.

Rebirth

In February 2008, Disney announced it would conceptually bring back the attraction with a more modern and accessible interior. The $15 million Innoventions Dream Home is a collaboration of the Walt Disney Company, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, software maker LifeWare, and homebuilder Taylor Morrison.^{[citation needed]}

In 2010, MIT Museum Architecture Curator Gary Van Zante gave a presentation on campus where he showed archived drawings and photographs of the plastic house. The talk, titled Back to the Future: A 1950s House of the Future, was part of the Cambridge Science Festival.^[1]

See also

• List of past Disneyland attractions

References

1. ^ http://alum.mit.edu/pages/sliceofmit/2010/04/30/monsanto_mit_house/

• Stephen Phillips, "Plastics: MOHF," Cold War Hothouses, ed. Beatriz Colomina, et al. (Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 2004)

External links

• Monsanto House of the Future at Yesterland
• Jetsetmodern references to: House of the Future, Xanadu etc.
• Homes of the Future of the Past The pages listed on this list of links are partly not available anymore
• Sun Sentinel article 2008

Coordinates: 33°48′45″N 117°55′06″W / 33.8125°N 117.91833°W / 33.8125; -117.91833