Disney’s ‘Dream Home’ is Tacky, Lame, and So Not Green
July 8, 2008 · Print This Article
I’ve just seen the future, and it’s lame. Luckily, it’s nothing more than Disney’s ‘Dream Home’, not an actual vision of how we’ll be living our lives in the years to come. Unlike the innovative, futuristic 1950’s version, this ‘home of the future’ looks like a typical suburban McMansion, but with even more worthless electronic junk. Lloyd Alter of Treehugger agrees, and he’s written a scathing review of the home:
The builder said “The 1950s home didn’t look like anything, anywhere. It was space-age and kind of cold,” “We didn’t want the (new) home to intimidate the visitors. We want the house to be real accessible to our guests.” So Disney designer Tom Zofrea made it a mix of Art Nouveau and Craftsman Style. “The design celebrates the inventive thinking and optimism of both yesterday and today” But there seems to be nothing inventive at all, just more electronic junk than I have ever seen in one place, most of it off the shelf Microsoft and HP stuff. As one commenter said in an earlier post, “Instead of fantasizing about advancements in science and technology, we are once again led to simply fantasize about being rich.”
This ‘dream home’ is the antithesis of what a true dream home of the future should look like. Instead of moving in the direction of more pointless empty space, energy inefficiency, and dozens of gadgets plugged into the wall, we should be seeing something far smarter. I choose to treat this like an alt-timeline version of the home of the future: “Look at the tacky homes we could have been living in if we hadn’t started on the path to smart green design.”
Lloyd truly said it best:
Watch the appalling video on the hideous website with the nauseating music. Walt is spinning in his cryogenic cylinder.
Link [Treehugger]
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None of this stuff is really new and what’s with the family all wear strange yellow soccer shirts?
Does this house go into the Disney community in Florida? I wonder how that is going. When it launched, it was hailed as a new urbanism, built with walking in mind, neighbors in mind, etc…
I think this is Celebration Florida. Did that work out?