1950s Smart Homes and the Longevity of Design

Aesthetic modes can be surprisingly persistent, even as technologies change.

Electric light strips automatically illuminate as the young couple approach the house's front steps. They pause before a pearlescent circle embedded in the wood of the door – it's a tiny security camera, beaming their image onto a screen on the kitchen counter within.

Following a push-button approval from the woman inside, the door unlocks automatically. Success!

These are screenshots from a promotional film made by the Westinghouse Corporation in the mid 1950s. The film advertised Westinghouse's vision of the "Total Electric Home": one of the earliest and most detailed previews of what is now known as a smart home.

This home of the future doesn't just use technology to heat, cook, cool, and light. It also "entertains, encourages hobbies, makes it the easiest way ever for you and your family to be happier, healthier, to live fuller lives."

According to an accompanying booklet,

When guests approach your Total Electric Home, a soft glow of Rayescent (TM) lamps along the entrance path guides them up to the entrance. Additional lights go on automatically as they come near... When guests arrive at the door, a television camera takes their picture and transmits it automatically to closed-circuit monitors located throughout the house. As you view your guests, you'll be able to welcome them over the voice intercom.

Some of the innovations inside the home are not terribly impressive, even from the perspective of the 1980s.

For instance, the promotional video boasts that “the temperature of each room in the Total Electric Home can be set individually," via this overly-complicated "weather control center."

"The pride and joy of the man of the house is the 'weather control center.'"

 The barometric pressure read-out and the sidewalk de-icers are kind of cool, I guess:

"In summer, an automatic sensor starts the lawn sprinkers when the lawn gets thirsty."  

To my eyes, though, the actual smart home technology in this section looks garish and seems difficult to use. On the other hand, the blonde wood panelling on the walls is, to me, timeless and appealing.

The situation is similar when it comes to other parts of the house: bold technological claims that would sound prosaic within the lifetimes of the actors involved. The film hypes the washer/dryer unit as a "program computer... that can think," but it's actually just a push-button system that has different settings for different types of clothing.

"It’s the first home laundry… that can think.”

By contrast, the combination barbecue and fireplace (!) looks far less dated than the other elements in the house, as does the beautiful living room. The most futuristic elements of this home aren't the "thinking machines" – they're the elements of mid-century modern design, mostly made out of age-old materials like copper and wood. 

Detail from a Westinghouse promotional brochure.

The whole video is worth watching in full – don't miss the microfilm cookbook in the kitchen.

The Westinghouse Electric Home shown in this film was for show, but many elements of 1950s smart home design aesthetics and technology did end up in production. 

The science fiction author Robert Heinlein and his wife Virginia were profiled in one representative example in the June, 1952 issue of Popular Mechanics. The Heinlein's Colorado Springs house was their own take on a connected home of the future:

Their home in Bonny Noon, California, near the UC Santa Cruz campus, continued the same style.

Courtesy UC Santa Cruz Special Collections. (Fun fact – the other photographs in this folder were candid shots of a young L. Ron Hubbard!)

From my perspective, the most futuristic thing about these homes is not "cybernetic" circuitry and electronic gizmos of the technology itself – it's the design sensibility of such decidely non-high tech elements as wood, copper, and paint. 

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A home of the year 2119 will almost certainly not include "smart" products made by Amazon or Apple (when was the last time you bought a Westinghouse appliance?). But there's a decent chance that it will include furniture inspired by mid-century modern aesthetics. Aesthetic modes can be surprisingly persistent, even as technologies change – in historian Fernand Braudel's terms, design styles are often multi-generational "conjunctures" spanning several decades or even centuries. These can easily outlast the more rapidly-passing "history of events."

A favorite example: The "Crakow" or "Poulaine" style of shoe – you might not know the name, but you probably know the look. It's the curly-toed, long-pointed footwear that you might recognize from medieval manuscripts or from historical films, Renaissance fairs, and the like.

There's no technological rationale for these absurdly long shoes: they are simply a fashion choice. But it proved to be a fashion that was amazingly persistent, originating in the twelfth century and not falling out of style until the childhood of Henry VIII (that's over 300 years). 

Or take the design of radios and televisions throughout the first six decades of the twentieth century. 

Cutting-edge products of modern technology, yes. But a form of technology that gets disguised in carved wooden cabinets that look straight out of the nineteenth century. 

A 1951 magazine advertisement for a Zenith "Black Magic" television.

Perhaps the most prescient twentieth-century vision of a smart home isn't from a commercial or promotional video promising specific technologies. It's from Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, when the astronaut David Bowman finds himself in a sort of alien-designed observation room, where he lives out the rest of his life.

As Michael Benson writes in his excellent recent book about the making of 2001, Kubrick and Arthur C. Clark's vision of the final space in the film was "supposed to have overtones of a holding tank or zoo cage." They tried out various space-age design elements for this "hyperreal hotel room," but in the end they settled on something oddly traditional: Louis XVI furniture, muted paint tones, and decorative objects that look like something Queen Victoria might nod approvingly at. 

It's safe to say that Kubrick's alien hotel room is not a good guide to what the homes of the future will actually look like. But I think that Kubrick intuitively grasped something that his space-age peers did not: technology changes far more quickly than aesthetics does. 

We might not have fussy Victorian-style furniture or Danish modernist tables in space, but then again – maybe we will. 

A Renaissance Merchant's Life in Clothing

I've just finished reading Ulinka Rublack's Dressing Up: Cultural Identity in Renaissance Europe (Oxford, 2010) and came away from it with a newfound appreciation for how truly odd early modern clothing was -- and how important these clothes were in people's daily lives. Rublack, a Cambridge history professor, is very shrewd in noting that obsolete sartorial choices like codpieces, corsets or tight-fitting doublets were about more than adornment: they helped to structure the limits of physical movement while also expressing personal allegiances, social groupings, nationalities, and religious faith. What is more, early modern clothing offered a window into the inner emotional states of the wearer in a world that was far less receptive to emotional introspection than our own.

Matthäus Schwarz depicted by Christoph Amberger in 1542.

This, his wedding portrait, also includes his horoscope, 

visible above the wine glass.

To me, by far the most striking piece of evidence Rublack analyzes in her book is a vellum manuscript of some one hundred and sixty five watercolor illustrations from sixteenth-century Germany. Each one depicts the same man: Matthäus Schwarz of Augsburg (1497-1574), a successful merchant who worked as an accountant for the powerful Fugger banking house. What makes this book extraordinary is that it depicts Schwarz and his clothing in every stage of his life, from what he called his “first dress in the world” as a days-old infant to the somber robes he donned as an ailing man of sixty-seven. Schwarz began to commission the illustrations from local Augsburg painters starting when he was twenty-seven, and in its pages we see a man's life as if in a film: the small child in its early pages grows to become a proud 15-year-old riding a horse, then a young man wearing elaborate Italian suits of red silk. When Augsburg is threatened by attack, an older Schwarz is depicted in a suit of gilded armor protecting his city. When his employer Anton Fugger is married we see Schwarz as a handsome man of thirty attending the wedding in rich velvet with a dueling sword at his side; when Fugger dies, Schwarz is a sixty-three wearing black robes and a wintry white beard.

Schwarz even had himself depicted naked (front and back!) for reasons that scholars are still debating. Simply put, this is one of the most extraordinary early modern historical sources that I've ever seen. Rublack's publishers do a good job of including numerous color illustrations from what Schwarz called his Klaidungsbüchlein, or “Book of Clothes,” but a printed book can't possibly include all of them.

Below I've selected some more that stood out to me.

The opening pages of Schwarz's Klaidungsbüchlein, showing him as a twenty-three-year old.

Schwarz as a new-born infant. Note the five-pointed star on his cradle! Perhaps a charm against evil?

At five years and four months old, a pious child.

Riding in the back of a wagon with his parents at eight and a half years old.

Hawking in the countryside with a friend, nine years and four months old.

Schwarz trampling on his schoolbooks as a fourteen-year-old.

Proudly riding his horse at fifteen.

Hawking at nineteen and seven months in a fashionable suit with codpiece, sword at side.

A month later, working as a clerk to Jakob Fugger, one of the richest men of his era, and perhaps of any era.

Practicing at sword fighting, twenty-one and two thirds. Some bold color choices in this suit!

At an archery contest at twenty-two years of age, wearing a similar suit and a foppish ruffled hat.

A fop no more: Matthäus mourns the death of his father. All four figures in this picture depict Schwarz wearing
different varieties of mourning dress.

This is a particular favorite of mine. Here Schwarz is a businessman of twenty-six visiting Nuremburg, and looking
a little put out by the stray dog peeing at his right! Note the money-sacks at his belt and the fashionable cloak with arm holes.

Stark naked at twenty-nine. Schwarz noted in relation to this picture, "I had become fat and large."

Schwarz at forty-one displaying the new cloak he bought to celebrate his pending nuptials.

Wearing plate armor and bearing halberd in preparation for the attack of Emperor Charles V, age forty-six.

Now middle-aged and bearded at forty-eight, Schwarz walks with his squire (and perhaps son? I can't read the caption).

An old man: Schwarz suffered a stroke at fifty-two. He is shown here in recovery at home. I would guess that he suffers from partial paralysis of the left side in this picture, given the sling and staff.

The final portrait of Schwarz in the album.

Amazingly, these incredible images actually appear to be sub-par copies of the original paintings  - as I was writing this post I realized that the images in Rublack's book are slightly different, with a greater level of detail and brighter colors. I'd urge anyone who found this post interesting to pick up Rublack's Dressing Up. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. It's one of the most boldly-argued and insightful interpretations of early modern European culture to appear in the last few years, I think.