The Monsanto House of the Future (yes, that’s the Roundup weed killing people) stood as a challenge to the future at Disneyland in California for the ten years between 1957 and 1967.
Kind of like, this is what we think things are going to look like down the track so bring it on and let’s see how clever we are/or were.
Twenty million people visited the house and checked out futuristic appliances like microwave ovens before it was eventually pulled down. Well technically it wasn’t all pulled down because they built it so tough it took two weeks of hard slog with wrecking balls, jack hammers and the like to kill the reinforced polyester completely. Perhaps they should have just sprayed some Roundup on it and that would have done the trick.
Ironically the original foundation is now used as a planter box in the Pixie Hollow attraction…with no weed killer in sight I’m sure. Plastic seemed to be the main material of choice in the house which was basically a three-bedroom, two-bathroom affair in four separate wings. Growing up we only ever had one bathroom in our house, as did most of my friends, even when they had huge families. If anything, maybe that’s the big winner in all this – an extra bathroom for the master bedroom.
The outdoor living dome for external entertaining was an impressive extra but as that was probably also made of plastic, I figure most of us here in Australia would have melted by now with the sheer heat that has to be generated with the dangerous combination of heat and plastic. Takes you back to days spent stuck to plastic chairs in the infernal February heat that saw in the new school year.
What with all that plastic and weed killer, it’s a surprise we are all still here to look back with hindsight!
