Crazy home designs and compact living ideas of the past that inspired today’s trends
- New London Design Museum exhibition includes designs that may not have taken off, but paved the way for today’s interiors and furnishings
- Modern ideas are also on show, including the shape-shifting home by Hong Kong’s Gary Chang, who wants to replicate it in other cities
Nostalgia, it’s not what it used to be. So runs the old joke. Nevertheless, it is alive and well at “Home Futures”, the new exhibition at London’s Design Museum.
A visit to Home Futures feels like peering into one of those “not to be opened until” time capsules where inside is what we imagined the home of the future might contain.
Many of the prototypes and sketches of half-baked ideas on display never ended up in anybody’s house, for which we can be thankful. As food for thoughtful invention, however, they were invaluable.
The show illustrates that our past selves believed the future would be peppered with fanciful, bizarre and even tasteless objects. But some of the theories advanced have proved sound, begetting modern micro-living, the home office, and continuing technological developments in personal connectivity and communication.
The exhibition follows the loose trends of smart living in computer-controlled domestic settings; living with less; peripatetic existences; living in shrinking premises; and sharing space.
After the second world war, designers, architects and manufacturers were free to dream up new means of living, and it was then that some of those trends, increasingly familiar today, took root. People like Gary Chang, founder of the Edge Design Institute in Hong Kong, have since taken these ideas to new levels.