Remembering the Awhatukee House of the Future, a "shining home of dreams" that became a $3 tourist trap

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/01/28/white-cyberelephant.html

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They don’t call it Awhatukee for nothing, just don’t go there.

I have spoken.

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If only someone had told me years ago that my ex boyfriends were cheap $3 amusements they could’ve saved us all a lot of trouble…

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Full text of story at the Internet Archive:

https://archive.org/stream/RayBradbury-SoftRains/There%20Will%20Come%20Soft%20Rains%20-%20Ray%20Bradbury_djvu.txt

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FYI

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Beat me to it

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In that year, you’d be hard pressed for more than 6809s (not that they weren’t great chips). Probably RS-422 rather than ethernet.

There weren’t too many voice synth possibilities then. I’ve got a PC ISA card probably with the same SC-01 chips. (Fortunately it can run stand-alone with an RS-232 input if I want to resurrect it.)

That part certainly sounds like a one-off job. 300 baud modems, no encryption (not even DES), could be eavesdropped with a cassette recorder on the phone line.

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According to Dwell - Google-kirjat they were Motorola MC6800.
Motorola 6800 - Wikipedia

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if you want an attraction beat this fakery

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My dreams are weird enough without refracting them. I wouldn’t reccomend using, say, the strange epic about time-travel, Russian prison camps and highway-length rollercoasters as a guide for construction, for example.

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My enthusiasm for Frank Lloyd Wright waned when I learned about “Falling Water”. Apparently the client was a tall man, and his wife was short, as was FLW. FLW and the wife were having an affair. The house is peppered with little inconveniences to anyone who is tall - for instance the ceiling of the telephone nook is low - tall people rushing to answer the phone will bump their heads. Clever, but mean and spiteful.

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The Day Time Ended (1979) was filmed there. That film then appeared in season two of Netflix’s reprisal of MST3K.

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This house is awesome. How have I never heard of this?

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For some reason this house makes me immediately think of MST3000 The Day Time Ended. Ha!

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Most FLW houses are built with inconveniences for tall people. FLW and Liliane Kaufmann lived several states apart and had lttle contact over the 9 months between when they first met and the house was built, so I suspect this story is apocryphal.

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Beat me to it! I knew I recognized that house from some really cheezy film.

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Hmm, a house built in a sleepy Phoenix suburb that cost the $5.4 million in today’s money? Small wonder they had a tough time selling it. And that’s only if they sold for cost.

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One of my favorite Bradbury shorts

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And it looks like they filmed the real interior. Quite the cheesy treat!

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Ahwatukee not Awhatukee