This talk explores the present-day fascination with the "Smart" (fully digitized) home as it is represented in both architecture journals and popular culture. I look at representations of high-tech domesticity in the context of a longer history of modernist architecture, media, and the discourse on the "home of tomorrow." Since the late 1920s, the home of tomorrow has been a popular mode for conceptualizing the future of everyday life in western culture. By the late 1930s and through the 1950s, numerous electronics manufacturers and home builders popularized the image of tomorrow's home at fairs, in department stores, and in advertisements aimed at the white middle class family. Within these homes of tomorrow, communications media have always had a central role in mapping out a vision of futuristic family life.

In the contemporary U.S. context, the home of tomorrow has been re-mobilized in relationship to digital environments where computers control everyday experience for residents. Everything from cell phone to robots to VR to digital music on command help orchestrate the resident's consciousness. These homes provide a mobile form of domesticity ( first imagined with portability and miniaturization in the 1960s) and now available through a host of interactive media and remote digital technologies. These mobile communications have (at least since the advent of portable TV) been promoted and conceptualized through tropes of freedom, liberation, and even escape from family life even while they address the middle class family as the dominant and normative living arrangement . Today, the discourse on the smart home expresses this ambivalence between an escape from domesticity on the one hand, and on the other, a kind of nostalgic longing for family life and middle-class comfort.

My argument in this talk is that our present-day futuristic visions of smart homes are nostalgic--not just for middle class family life per se--but for the possibility of the future itself. Much as Fredrik Jameson has argued that postwar science fiction can no longer imagine utopia, we might also argue that the discourse on high-tech homes can no longer imagine a future--at least a future apart from the "kitschy" futures of 1950s SF films. Instead, our contemporary images of digital households and media technologies nostalgically recall the future of the cold war past, a future replete with clunky robots, space age housewives, and all the trappings of cold war futurism, albeit re-packaged for a new age. This future, I intend to show, updates a previous utopian longing for 'mobile" (and supposedly liberating) forms of domesticity that are now promised through new technologies from cell phones to VR imaging.

Lynn Spigel is Professor of Cinema-Television at the University of Southern California. She is author of Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America, co-editor of numerous anthologies, and author of Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs, forthcoming Winter 2001 from Duke University Press