In the early twentieth century, during the Machine Age, the house became "a machine for living." That was how Le Corbusier saw it anyway. There were machine-like designs for houses and other buildings during the 1920s and '30s. I think that's what fictional architect Quintus Teal means when he brings up the modernistic "Service Station School" in Robert A. Heinlein's short story "'--And He Built a Crooked House--'", originally in Astounding Science-Fiction in February 1941.
The house as a literal machine for living became a popular idea after World War II when people thought that science was going to solve all of our problems. I won't make a distinction here between the house as a machine for living, the house of the future, and the house of tomorrow. All were based on ideas about science and progress that began in the early 1900s and continued into the 1940s, '50s, and '60s. Inasmuch as science fiction is the literature of progress and science, that genre contributed to the development, as concepts, of the machine-house, the automated house, the robot-house, the house of tomorrow, and the house of the future. There were houses of the future at the 1939 World's Fair in New York, and, if I understand things correctly, the 1962 World's Fair in Seattle and the 1964 World's Fair, again in New York. The future was in the air at all three fairs, but it was during the 1939 World's Fair that the first World Science Fiction Convention was held. The convention-goers also went to the fair. They probably saw the house in which they might have imagined they would one day live.
Warner Brothers made at least one animated cartoon about the house of the future. Entitled House Hunting Mice, it was directed by Chuck Jones and released in 1947. Tex Avery followed suit with a cartoon called The House of Tomorrow, released in 1949. Ray Bradbury wrote a short story, "There Will Come Soft Rains," in which the house of the future goes about its work even after its inhabitants have all been killed off in a nuclear war. The late Mr. Bradbury's story was published in the May 6, 1950, issue of Collier's magazine. It also appeared as a chapter in his novelized collection of short stories, The Martian Chronicles, also published in May 1950. In the book version, "There Will Come Soft Rains" begins on August 4, 2026, a date that has just passed. I wish I had remembered the date. If I had, I would have written something here in observance of it.
Wally Wood drew a comic book adaptation of "There Will Come Soft Rains" for Weird Fantasy #17, published in January/February 1953 by EC Comics. (Illustration below.) The house of the future, complete with a robot maid named Rosie, reappeared in the animated TV series The Jetsons, originally broadcast in 1962-1963. Now I learn that the architectural style shown in The Jetsons has a name. It's called the Googie style. The first Googie-style building was designed in the 1940s by architect John Lautner (1911-1994). It was a popular look in the 1960s and '70s. I seem to remember that Howard Johnson's had restaurants built in that style. I remember seeing Googie-style signs for shopping centers and bowling alleys, too, even into the 1990s. You can still sometimes see signs and buildings in this style, but I think they're mostly gone now. What a shame.
The machine-house or the house of the future was in art and in the real world from as early as the 1920s to as late as the 1960s and '70s. But the "future" of real life couldn't quite keep up with the future of the imagination: despite all of the hopes and promises of the past, the house of the future has never really arrived. Several years ago, I read that the last major household appliance that was developed was the microwave oven. That was in the 1960s. There have been refinements to that and other appliances since then. There are even house-of-the-future-type vacuum cleaners in existence now. Yesterday (August 23, 2026), I saw a robot lawnmower going about its boustrophedon work. (I hope it wasn't being paid for the subpar job it was doing.) But there aren't any of the houses of the future, and the house has not become a machine for living. If it is anything other than a house, the twenty-first American house is actually an investment. Don't live in your house too hard, and definitely don't personalize it in any way. That might damage its resale value.
Concurrent with the mid-to-late house of the future--i.e., the house of the 1950s to the 1970s--there was another kind of house that became more prominent in our culture. This one was far older, and it was the kind of house against which the architects of the futuristic house were rebelling. This was of course the Gothic house, or the house of the past. Gothic fiction or the Gothic Romance goes back to the 1700s, but in the 1960s and '70s, there was a kind of Gothic revival in popular culture. I have never read a history or chronology of this Gothic revival. (That's my own name for it. I wonder if there is another.) I don't know when it began. The immediate origins of it may have been in Universal monster movies and the original Weird Tales magazine of the 1920s to the 1940s. Monsters had their own revival in the late 1950s and early 1960s, especially on television. In the early to mid part of the century, there was of course Southern Gothic fiction, but there was also an Eastern or New England Gothic. Shirley Jackson (1916-1965), who lived in New York and Vermont, was an exemplar. She wrote The Haunting of Hill House (1959) and We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962), among other works. As I wrote not long ago, Peyton Place (1956) by Grace Metalious (1924-1964) also has Gothic elements and may be considered a Gothic fiction. The Peyton Place of the title is an abandoned castle. Tom Tryon (1926-1991) was another New Englander who wrote Gothic fiction about his native region. He had a book called Harvest Home (1973), but that title refers to a festival, not a place. Stephen King (b. 1947) is a current practitioner of New England Gothic. His second novel, 'Salem's Lot (1975), is about an old house called the Marsten House. These fictional houses can be counted among the houses of the past.
To be continued . . .
Text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley
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