10/11/2026
In 1983 you could pay a few dollars to walk through a Florida house that had been sprayed into existence out of foam. 🏠
Xanadu, the House of the Future, opened on Highway 192 in Kissimmee, and it was the third of its kind. The building method was the strange part. Workers inflated giant balloons in the shape of the rooms, sprayed polyurethane foam over them, let it harden, then deflated the balloons and pulled them back out. The result was a fifteen room house with no straight lines anywhere, curved white walls, domed ceilings and round windows, put up in a fraction of the time a conventional house would take.
Inside, designer Roy Mason filled it with what 1983 believed the year 2000 would look like. Computers ran the climate and the lighting. There was an autonomous kitchen meant to plan meals, a greenhouse growing food indoors, an electronic hearth, and a room described as a meditation space with programmed sound and light.
Admission was a few dollars and the tour ran about forty five minutes. Visitors were told that nearly everything inside was a working prototype rather than an actual finished product. For a while it worked as an attraction, pulling a thousand visitors a day off a highway already thick with them. Then the future got ordinary. Home computers stopped being exotic. The foam aged badly in Florida humidity and grew mold in the walls. Xanadu closed in 1996, sat empty and vandalized for years, and was finally demolished in 2005.
The whole idea of it is very Florida. Somebody looked at a scrubby pine lot on a tourist highway and decided the correct thing to build there was the year 2000. For about a decade, people happily paid to see it. 🌴
AI visualization based on historical context.
