Roy Huse Collins “Electric Sink,” circa 1927 for Kohler Co., is included in the “Home of the Future” exhibition. (photo courtesy of KOHLER Archives)

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art presents two exhibitions exploring design as an agent of social, political and economic transformation in modern domestic life. “Home of the Future, 19251985: Designing Domestic Utopias” and “The Kitchen and Its Discontents” run from Sept. 27–March 14, 2027, in LACMA’s Resnick Pavilion.

Over the course of the 20th century, Americans were offered an astonishing array of equipment aimed at improving domestic life, including self-cleaning kitchens, plastic houses assembled in a day, pushbutton appliances and desktop computers – all shaping aspirations about how to live. With more than 260 architectural models, drawings, photographs, films, paintings, furniture and objects ranging from sinks to televisions, “Home of the Future” explores the American home of tomorrow. The exhibition asks not only what futures were imagined, but also who imagined them, how they circulated and for whom they were intended.

“The Kitchen and Its Discontents” is a standalone exhibition embedded within “Home of the Future.” The presentation puts Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky’s “Frankfurt Kitchen” (c. 1926–30) and Charlotte Perriand’s “kitchen for Le Corbusier’s l’Unité d’habitation” (c. 1946–52) in conversation with other works from LACMA’s collection, highlighting the complex cultural and psychological significance of the kitchen space.

“’Home of the Future’ and ‘The Kitchen and Its Discontents’ explore experiments in architecture, design and ways of inhabiting the world,” LACMA CEO and Wallis Annenberg Director Michael Govan said. “We hope that audiences will find here a provocation: a reminder that the homes we inhabit today were once someone’s radical idea, an act of imagination and a leap of faith.”

LACMA is located at 5905 Wilshire Blvd. For information, visit lacma.org.