This pop­u­lar attrac­tion at Dis­ney­land, Cal­i­for­nia, opened in 1957, the result of a part­ner­ship between Dis­ney, the Mass­a­chu­setts Insti­tute of Tech­nol­o­gy and the Mon­san­to com­pa­ny. Design­ers were asked to imag­ine what hous­ing might look like 30 years in the future. The futur­is­tic fiber­glass struc­ture was set on a pedestal, with a kitchen and bath­room in the cen­tral part of the home and the bed­rooms and liv­ing spaces branch­ing out like spokes. The exte­ri­or shell of the house, floors and ceil­ing were all made out of plas­tic — an inex­pen­sive way to pre­fab­ri­cate hous­es and min­i­mize the har­vest­ing of trees for lum­ber. As a house of the future, it includ­ed a flat-screen TV — a nov­el­ty at the time.

In 1967, the House of the Future closed for good at Dis­ney­land, with more than 20 mil­lion peo­ple hav­ing vis­it­ed it dur­ing the ten years it was stand­ing, but recent­ly Howard Johnson’s opened its own House of the Retro Future Suite in Ana­heim that pays homage to the defunct Dis­ney­land attrac­tion, where guests can pay about $2,000 for a two-night stay and enjoy a nos­tal­gic view of the future.

The Futuro House was con­ceived by Finnish archi­tect Mat­ti Suuro­nen in 1968 as a portable ski chalet. Often nick­named the Fly­ing Saucer or the UFO House, the idea behind this pre­fab house was born when his child­hood friend Jaako Hidenkari was look­ing for some­one to design a light­weight cab­in that was eas­i­ly trans­portable through all kinds of ter­rain. Built of fiber­glass rein­forced plas­tic, it was con­struct­ed of six­teen pieces bolt­ed togeth­er and posi­tioned on a steel frame. It could fit a cozy eight peo­ple and fea­tured an elec­tric heat­ing sys­tem which could go from ‑20 to 60 degrees Fahren­heit in just 30 minutes.

From 1968 to 1973, about 100 of the Futuro Homes were built world­wide, and sold for about $12,000 to $14,000 each. Aside from being hous­es, they have been used as banks, restau­rants, children’s play­rooms, tar­gets for shoot­ing prac­tice and even a dog ken­nel. Today, about 68 of them still stand, in var­i­ous states of con­di­tion, with the biggest con­cen­tra­tion being in the Unit­ed States (eigh­teen struc­tures). So, while the hous­es were a sci-fi vision of the future, they turned out to be a curios­i­ty rather than a force for change.

Bios­phere 2, the world’s largest con­trolled envi­ron­ment, locat­ed on a three-acre site in Ora­cle, Ari­zona, and con­struct­ed between 1987 and 1991, had as its mis­sion to cre­ate the equiv­a­lent of a self-sus­tain­ing colony on anoth­er plan­et. Described as a ​“live-in ter­rar­i­um”, the organization’s first exper­i­ment had a crew of eight ​“Bios­phe­ri­ans” liv­ing in a mul­ti-bio­me bub­ble that was meant to last 100 years (It last­ed only two years.).

Today the giant ter­rar­i­um (man­aged by the Uni­ver­si­ty of Ari­zona since 2011) is final­ly becom­ing a site for new and risky research. It cur­rent­ly is study­ing how trop­i­cal ecosys­tems might weath­er late-21^st-cen­tu­ry heat and drought. And in March of this year, it unveiled a project to mim­ic a plant-filled habi­tat on a life­less alien world like Mars.

Archi­tec­ture stu­dio Lake Fla­to has com­plet­ed a 3D-print­ed, mod­ern ranch-style home in East Austin, Texas that is a mod­el for the future of hous­ing by join­ing beau­ty, sus­tain­abil­i­ty and tech­no­log­i­cal effi­cien­cy. The ​“House Zero” sin­gle-fam­i­ly res­i­dence, built in col­lab­o­ra­tion with ICON, a con­struc­tion tech­nol­o­gy com­pa­ny, uses 3D print­ing and robot­ic con­struc­tion to dis­pense lay­ers of Lavacrete, a cement-like sub­stance that is air-tight, to con­struct the walls of the 2,000-square-foot home. The build­ing took 10 days to print, and the home was built using bio­philic design prin­ci­ples which allowed the soft curves of the walls to cre­ate pleas­ant cir­cu­la­tion routes through­out the home. Build­ing hous­es with this tech­nol­o­gy means that homes like this could be con­struct­ed faster and at a low­er cost.

Skid­more, Owings & Mer­rill (SOM), in part­ner­ship with the Euro­pean Space Agency and MIT, has designed Moon Vil­lage, a con­cept for the first full-time human set­tle­ment on the lunar sur­face. The chal­lenge with a colony like Moon Vil­lage is to sus­tain human life in an oth­er­wise unin­hab­it­able set­ting, requir­ing the design­ers to con­sid­er issues such as radi­a­tion pro­tec­tion, pres­sure dif­fer­en­tials and how to pro­vide breath­able air.

This bold ini­tia­tive calls for three- to four-sto­ry struc­tures with work­spaces, liv­ing quar­ters, envi­ron­men­tal con­trols and life sup­port sys­tems. These inflat­able struc­tures would pro­vide resis­tance to extreme tem­per­a­tures, pro­jec­tiles and solar radi­a­tion. SOM’s con­cept enables Moon Vil­lage to car­ry out its pur­pose as a sci­en­tif­ic, indus­tri­al and enter­tain­ment development.