from Hacker News

The 1950s miracle kitchen of the future

by redshirt on 4/21/22, 12:15 PM with 30 comments

  • by DoreenMichele on 4/24/22, 7:04 PM

    "whether you're tiny, typical or tall."

    I love the alliteration here in place of short, average, tall.

    Dad is proud of this letter, the one that told him he was too innovative, even for the most Jetsons-like of dream kitchens.

    I think that's a cool thing to be proud of. I also wish we would kind of go in the opposite direction and find solutions that work well for most people while being simpler and having fewer moving parts, a la modern faucet design that handles both hot and cold with one handle.

  • by rasz on 4/21/22, 11:43 PM

    How about Monsanto's Plastic "Home of the Future" at Disneyland (1957) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1NQ5OlY40bA
  • by bombcar on 4/24/22, 12:52 AM

    It’s interesting to me that most people, even when renovating their kitchen in a home they never intend to sell, don’t bother adjusting the counter heights to that most compatible with the user.

    Multiple heights are appearing in more designs now.

  • by contingencies on 4/24/22, 11:01 PM

    It's funny the way things have panned out vs. the 1950s suburban utopia.

    Gender-wise, ladies are out working, and cooking is now for anyone. Architecturally, many houses no longer have a traditionally segregated kitchen, they instead have a shared kitchen-living space. Increasingly, many houses also no longer have a formal dining table. It is clear that in future many houses will not have any kitchen at all, instead just a sink and prep area within the living space. These changes parallel macro-trends such as reduction in family unit size, increase in rent vs own, and aging populations, which are valid across many cultures in Asia as well as the west.

    Recently we've seen a huge amount of money thrown in to the commodification of last-mile delivery for ready-to-eat foods globally, as well as a COVID-concentrated invest-fest in rapid groceries. Both are hitting limits. Perhaps the future is autonomous food prep, retail and delivery, because future, post-millenial, mobile and short-term-renting consumers may have reduced cooking skills, see appliance ownership as a drag, can't be bothered planning ahead for groceries for a household of 1-3, and don't own a car. Eventually cooking your own meal from scratch will be like building your own furniture: a quaint hobby for well-resourced enthusiasts. RIP, kitchen.

  • by bxparks on 4/24/22, 2:45 AM

    This Miracle Kitchen would be my Kitchen-from-Hell. Every unnecessary moving part is something that needs to be maintained, and is something that will eventually break and will need to be repaired or replaced.

    When I moved into my current house, I found many screws holding the hinges of the kitchen cabinet doors were loose and needed to be tightened. One hinge had become completely disconnected because its screws had stripped from the side board. The previous owners had not performed the most basic maintenance of just tightening some screws. I suspect that a motorized cupboard with motors, gears, rails, and rollers would be a maintenance nightmare. A sink that moves up and down means plumbing pipes that move, which gives me images of water leaking slowly behind the cabinet and destroying the subfloor.

  • by Corvus on 4/25/22, 5:19 PM

    A much-better “Kitchen of the Future” article was posted on TreeHugger in 2021. Decrying kitchen designs by people who don't cook, the article referred to a lesson by the USDA about applying experience from the US Army to home kitchens; the video is available at https://youtu.be/2N9RCQjPqh4.

    It introduces the now-common idea of a “work triangle”; organizing everything needed to cook a meal around a single station.

  • by euroderf on 4/24/22, 7:36 PM

    Ma & Pa Kettle had their run-in with the home of the future.
  • by mnemotronic on 4/25/22, 1:38 AM

    I've lived in condos and apartments that were smaller than that kitchen.
  • by userbinator on 4/24/22, 12:35 AM

    That robotic vacuum cleaner certainly has the mid-century look.
  • by JasonFruit on 4/24/22, 10:07 PM

    I love the quotes from Khrushchev, who was clearly not naive. A kitchen race to match the space race!
  • by aaron695 on 4/24/22, 1:12 AM

    I would say a big reason air fryers have become so successful is you don't have to bend down like an oven to use or clean.

    Air fryers are a good example of a post-internet kitchen change.

    There's nothing obviously logical about air fryers in a lot of houses. I'll use mine over my far more advanced, self cleaning oven whenever I can.

    Looking after your back is also big in this kitchen, which is interesting. But in the end it wasn't at the project stage for ovens, it seems it was a modular device end users could buy.