Kick back in your inflatable plastic chair and enjoy a 1967 CBS tour of “future homes”
While some futurists from decades past managed to come up with pretty good predictions for how we’d be living these days, their visions are nowhere near as fun as those centered around the flying cars, teleportation devices, and robot maids (sorry, Roomba) we still don’t have. A 1967 CBS special about the “future homes” of 2001 splits this difference, giving us both fairly accurate imaginings of what a 21st century house might look like and hilariously incorrect examples of the world we most definitely are not living in.
“The 21st Century: At Home 2001” (available in black and white or a color version) outlines the wild sci-fi houses that the people of the late ’60s believed we could end up inhabiting. An expert believes that identical suburban homes have “no future” and the show suggests we may live in pseudo-apartment buildings made up of concrete “modules.” Once we’re inside these neat housing cubes, narrator Walter Cronkite shows off what kind of cool stuff we’d use in our daily lives.