Sixty Years of the Ideal American Home Go on View at LACMA

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art has turned its galleries over to the house as an idea. "Home of the Future, 1925-1985: Designing Domestic Utopias" covers six decades, from the mid-1920s to the mid-1980s, and asks what designers thought everyday life at home could become. Running with it is "The Kitchen and Its Discontents," which takes up a single room and the hopes that have been placed on it. Together, the two shows treat domestic design as a series of proposals for a better way to live, not just as a run of finished objects. For collectors in Los Angeles, the pairing is an invitation to look at the design of the home as seriously as a museum does: as a record of ambition, made one room at a time. The span in the title alone suggests how much ground the galleries have to cover, and how long the question of the ideal house has held the attention of the people who design for it.

With reporting from Galerie.