Wired News is reporting that Disney is hard at work on a new 'House of the Future' for tomorrowland, scheduled to open in May. The original House of the Future, a plastic pod looking like something out of The Jetsons, was torn down in 1967. Wrecking balls reportedly bounced off the structure, which then had to be disassembled by hand. This new collaboration with Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard and others raises an interesting question about theming the future. Tomorrowland, with its original 1955 opening day projection of the future in the year of the return of Hailey's Comet, 1986, has always been problematic for Disney. The trouble with projecting the future is two-fold: either you're horribly wrong, or you're so close to target that your representation becomes dated almost immediately after ground is broken. The troubles of Tomorrowland are somewhere in the middle. In an attempt to keep pace the original Anaheim model has been updated three times; in 1959, 1967 and 1998. As architecture critic Beth Dunlop notes in her seminal volume, Building a Dream: The Art of Disney Architecture, "Walt Disney himself was known to refer to [that area of the park] as Todayland."
A large problem with theming the future is that theming is closely tied to nostalgia, and how can you feel nostalgic about what hasn't happened yet? Theming also is tied closely to control, and unlike the Wild West or a Tropical Paradise, you can't control what the future will look like.
In response to the design challenges of re-imagining Tomorrowland for European audiences at Disneyland Paris in the late 1980s, the folks at Disney hit upon a solution. Called "Discoveryland," this would be a tribute to future visions of the past. Recalls project lead Tony Baxter, “We conjured Discoveryland as homage to the moment in time when the dream of exploring space flourished...We’re not trying to say that this is the future, but that this is a dream.” Fellow imagineer Tim Delaney put it this way: “we decided to bring together different visions [that] allowed us to create a history of science fiction that evokes a truly timeless world.” Disney had hit gold; they could re-introduce nostalgia and control, and develop a land with the same quaint ‘years gone by’ charm of the rest of the park.
Although Discoveryland was conceived and built from scratch, the new philosophy quickly spread throughout the other parks, and the Tomorrowland at Walt Disney World received a similar makeover in 1994. Billed as “the future that never was is finally here” the design draws inspiration from the buck rogers era of American science fiction, rather than on the victorian visionaries of Discoveryland. Disneyland’s 1998 Tomorrowland reboot, although far more superficial than Orlando’s, touches on the same theme of a ‘retro future,’ and the recent Tomorrowland at Hong kong Disneyland follows suit. The only Tomorrowland to remain trapped in 1967 is in Japan. When Tokyo Disneyland was conceived in the early 1980s, the existing Walt Disney World configuration was lifted almost directly. The Japanese actually find their own quaint nostalgia in this white concrete 1960s corporate utopian vision of the future, so it’s unlikely to be remodeled any time soon.
But with a return of the house of the future to Anaheim, Disney is once again braving the rocky seas of prognostication. How long will it be before this new model becomes outdated? The last one took ten years to grow stale...Perhaps in this internet and cell phone age, Disney will be working on version 2.0 In time for the holidays.