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NezMo
location:
Worcester, Massachusetts
Gender: Male
 |  |  | Xanadu: Home of the future!!
< on 10/7/2005 6:08 PM >
|  | | | Any one ever been in one of these? There's one of em in Kissime Florida. Very interesting. It's a kind of old tourist trap place, supposedly the 'future" home. Kinda creepy.
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nightbird
        
Girl Moderator
location:
Buffalo, NY
Gender: Female
Gone abortin, BRB
| | Re: Xanadu: Home of the future!!
<Reply # 1 on 10/7/2005 7:43 PM >
|  | | | It's in the LDB.
WTF indeed. |
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Fubster
location:
Tampa Bay Area, Florida
Gender: Male
Though highly intelligent, guide dogs cannot interpret street signs.
| | |  | Re: Xanadu: Home of the future!!
<Reply # 2 on 10/8/2005 1:35 AM >
| | | | I went to the Kissimmee one. It was the one of the most absurd places I've ever been.
It was built with a series of ballons inflated to different levels, and spraying some sort of poly-stucco shit on it.
Sometimes, you need to march right in and demand your rights, even if you don't know what your rights are, or who it is you're talking to. Then, on your way out, slam the door. |
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HauntedPA
location:
Anywhere and Everywhere
Gender: Female
What do you mean the rum is gone?!
| | Re: Xanadu: Home of the future!!
<Reply # 3 on 10/9/2005 8:39 AM >
| | | | Posted by nightbird
It's in the LDB.
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Yep that it is...was right next door to the homebase for SEXFEST last year...
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Fubster
location:
Tampa Bay Area, Florida
Gender: Male
Though highly intelligent, guide dogs cannot interpret street signs.
| | | | Re: Xanadu: Home of the future!!
<Reply # 4 on 10/10/2005 8:35 PM >
| | | | Posted by HauntedPA
Yep that it is...was right next door to the homebase for SEXFEST last year...
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Both of them!
Sometimes, you need to march right in and demand your rights, even if you don't know what your rights are, or who it is you're talking to. Then, on your way out, slam the door. |
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HauntedPA
location:
Anywhere and Everywhere
Gender: Female
What do you mean the rum is gone?!
| | Re: Xanadu: Home of the future!!
<Reply # 5 on 10/12/2005 4:09 PM >
| | | | Posted by Fubster
Both of them!
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Hahahaha...at least #2 was nice LOL
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Psychosurgeon
location:
Long Island
Gender: Male
| | | | Re: Xanadu: Home of the future!!
<Reply # 6 on 10/13/2005 8:41 PM >
| | | | 
It was alot more overgrown and moldy than I saw in older pics.
I like the secret urban exploration ninja mafia better |
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lokiplease
location:
Sarasota, Florida [soon to be Orlando, Florida]
Gender: Female
silent hill! <3
| | | Re: Xanadu: Home of the future!!
<Reply # 7 on 11/10/2005 12:00 AM >
| | | | I'm planning to take a trip to see it next weekend. As I'll be in a hurry [a most unfortunate circumstance for explorers], can anyone tell me where exactly to direct my driver while we're looking for it? I'd appreciate that greatly.
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Wolfhound
location:
Orlando
Gender: Male
| |  | Re: Xanadu: Home of the future!!
<Reply # 8 on 11/10/2005 9:02 PM >
| | | | I found this on another webpage. It might be gone now. It was there about a year ago though when I went.
Notice the last sentence.
The 1980's had just begun, and the future was on its way to Central Florida. Specifically, EPCOT Center, the long awaited "Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow" that Walt Disney had promised the state in the early sixties, was finally opening.
That EPCOT was not the experimental city of Walt's dream but just another theme park is another story. (Celebration, the upscale housing development that the Disney Company finally built in Osceola County, isn't it either, for that matter.)
But the future was in the air, and it was the perfect time to build the home of the future, Xanadu. Florida's Xanadu, located in Kissimmee on Hwy 192, was actually one of three -- the other two were in Gatlinburg, Tennessee and Wisconsin Dells, Wisconsin.
Built of polyurethane foam sprayed over balloons to form the basic structure, Xanadu was energy efficient, cheap to build, and looked like a plastic barbie house left out in the sun too long. The interior rooms were a bit on the cramped side, and the built-in technology showed a decided tendency toward obsolescence. Like most oddly shaped "homes of the future" ever built, it never caught on, people preferring to continue living in box shaped dwellings where you could hang a picture on the wall and it would stay flat.
As the 1990's began these homes of the future died out like dinosaurs. Gatlinburg's succumbed first, followed by the Dells', and then, in 1996, Kissimmee's closed.
The building stood for years, growing ever more derelict as vandalism and several passing hurricanes took their toll. It was finally demolished in October, 2005. The home of the future is now a thing of the past.
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HauntedPA
location:
Anywhere and Everywhere
Gender: Female
What do you mean the rum is gone?!
| | Re: Xanadu: Home of the future!!
<Reply # 9 on 11/13/2005 12:16 PM >
| | | | Here's another recent article on it. Sadly it looks like it's gone. Sorry to report the bad news...
Xanadu, 'home of the future' now outdated
Daphne Sashin | Sentinel Staff Writer
KISSIMMEE -- From West U.S. Highway 192, the strange cluster of white domes beckoned to Dean Dyer like a creature from the sea, an alien spaceship or an "evil bad-guy headquarters," he recalled.
On their honeymoon earlier this month, Dyer and his wife arrived at Xanadu, the defunct attraction once billed as the "home of the future," just in time to watch its demise.
"Here we thought we were going to come and take pictures of a weird place, and they were tearing it down," Dyer said this week from his home in Wilmington, Del. "We felt pretty lucky that we caught it before it was gone."
In a sign of the times, the longtime owners of Xanadu demolished it to build a "midrise" condominium building fronting Lake Cecile, said Realtor Sonny Buoncervello, a consultant to the owners who helped manage the attraction in the 1980s.
Xanadu, built in 1983, was conceived by architect Roy Mason to showcase how technology could one day transform the American household. It also demonstrated a novel construction technique: Modules of the house were made by spraying plastic foam over big balloons that were later deflated; that was cheaper and more energy-efficient than standard building methods of the day.
The 15-room house was cooled by tubes of chilled water running through the walls. It featured a range of high-tech features, including a closet that used ultraviolet light to dry-clean clothes and a sensory-deprivation bathtub that a person could use for 10 minutes and supposedly feel as if he or she had slept for four hours.
Xanadu invited comparisons to a cluster of massive toadstools or a UFO, but it lured thousands of tourists a day at its peak, Buoncervello said.
"They did tours that would begin at 10 in the morning until 10 at night, and it was amazing how many people we'd get," he said.
But the attraction lost its appeal as many of the Xanadu's space-age features hit the market. Using a computer to order groceries and pay bills electronically, or a faucet that turned on automatically, were no longer things of the future.
One of three Xanadu attractions in the nation, the home on U.S. 192 was the last to close, in 1996. It sat for years gathering mildew, and homeless people squatted inside, until Dyer watched it get bulldozed Oct. 7.
He swiped the "Exit" sign as a souvenir.
"It really was a neat thing, and now it's gone," Dyer lamented.
Some local officials reacted differently upon learning of the bulbous home's demise.
"Cool! Yes! I've been waiting for 15 years for them to tear this thing down. It was an eyesore," Osceola County Commissioner Atlee Mercer said when told the news on Friday. "You couldn't figure out whether that was a mound of snow, or someone's Play-Doh experiment that went sadly wrong, or an ice cream cone that melted." |
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lokiplease
location:
Sarasota, Florida [soon to be Orlando, Florida]
Gender: Female
silent hill! <3
| | | Re: Xanadu: Home of the future!!
<Reply # 10 on 11/19/2005 5:25 AM >
| | | | Terribly sad that it's gone. And I never once got to go there...nice pictures, though.
Anyone know when the old, non-Orlando Xanadu was demolished?
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HauntedPA
location:
Anywhere and Everywhere
Gender: Female
What do you mean the rum is gone?!
| | Re: Xanadu: Home of the future!!
<Reply # 11 on 11/19/2005 1:27 PM >
| | | | Posted by lokiplease
Anyone know when the old, non-Orlando Xanadu was demolished?
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Back in the late 80's sometime. Didn't have a very long life at all.
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wackymacs
| | Re: Xanadu: Home of the future!!
<Reply # 12 on 11/24/2005 9:41 PM >
| | | | If anyone wants detailed information about the Xanadu homes, I have written an article all about them, their history, and creators at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xanadu_House(it also has pictures of Xanadu when it was still being maintained by an owner in the early 1990s).
Enjoy.
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Ishi
Gender: Male
| | Re: Xanadu: Home of the future!!
<Reply # 13 on 11/25/2005 8:07 PM >
| | | | Posted by wackymacs
If anyone wants detailed information about the Xanadu homes, I have written an article all about them, their history, and creators at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xanadu_House(it also has pictures of Xanadu when it was still being maintained by an owner in the early 1990s).
Enjoy.
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Great article. I enjoyed the links to the other sites that was on the encyclopedia article. Seeing the pictures of the place when it was open, as well as the demolition pictures, really made me really want to see this place.
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