Xanadu, a house made of foam

Two days ago I found a well thumbed paperback in my grandfather’s library entitled Xanadu: The Computerized Home of Tomorrow and How It Can Be Yours Today! This very interesting book was written by Roy Mason, Lane Jennings and Robert Evans and was published by Acropolis Books in November 1983. The literature documented a foam house! Imagine - a house designed and constructed almost entirely out of polyurethane foam.

When I went online to learn more about this amazing structure I was surprised to discover that Xanadu was demolished in October, 2005. It seems the future has come and gone and left behind only a cloudy memory.

Architect Roy Mason built Xanadu in Orlando, Florida in 1983. It consisted of domed pods that he constructed by spraying polyurethane foam onto removable molds. The quick-setting material apparently hardened in a couple of days, forming perfect seals around the doors and windows. The resulting structure was said to be so well insulated that it required only a quarter of the energy needed for heating and cooling a similar-sized conventional house.
 
Yet Xanadu's most revolutionary feature was actually found inside the foam shell. It was crammed with every electronic gadget imaginable. "No one's really looked at the house as a total organic system," said Mason in 1983; he was also the architecture editor of The Futurist magazine. "The house can have intelligence and each room can have intelligence."

Xanadu's kitchen, for example, was equipped with dietitian programs that could plan and prepare well-balanced meals for all family members depending on their height, weight, sex, age, and levels of activity. If you came home from a busy day at work and informed the computer-dietitian that you skipped lunch and nibbled on a candy bar instead, it would prepare a supper based on the nutrients you missed. An “auto-chef” moved food from the refrigerator to the microwave oven to the dining table, and computers kept track of the grocery inventory so you know what to replace. The auto-chef even regulated the ambience of the dining room to match the meal, adjusting the lighting and background music to complement a Mexican dinner, for instance.

Some of that food was even grown by the house itself. Xanadu had a built-in greenhouse. Naturally, a microcomputer monitored the watering of plants, artificial sunlight, ventilation, humidity, soil content, and the shutters and awnings.

So what happened? 

Although the house attracted thousands of visitors everyday, nobody was impressed enough to order one for themselves. The rooms were too small and the plumbing was never that good. Apparently tour guides began to start making excuses in the late 1980’s and the frequency of complaints increased as the micro computers inside this futuristic attraction grew more and more outdated. When mold appeared inside the domes the whole installation soon became very smelly... It was finally closed to the public in July 1996 and a family of squatters made it their home until 2001. Actually police complained that they couldn’t keep the vagrants out - they could literally break and enter the structure in a dozen different places.

Today polyurethane foam is everywhere – it’s used as insulation in our buildings, its inside the mattresses that we sleep on, in our sofas and car seats, and there's even some pretty funky shoes being constructed entirely out of foam these days. Nobody seems surprised at seeing things made from PU foam anymore. Perhaps that’s because Xanadu, the foam house, was the grand experiment that made all these other applications seem commonplace.