‘Home Delivery’: Playing House at MoMA

This Sunday, after months of construction and crane deliveries visible from the street, the gates in a chain-link fence will swing open on the unusual residential village that’s risen on the block-through lot just west of the Museum of Modern Art. No fancy landscaping, just five contemporary houses shoehorned onto neutral blacktop as the life-size, outdoor section of MoMA’s innovative show, “Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling.” Selected from submissions from 500 architects and firms, each house demonstrates an aspect of prefabrication made possible by the latest computer and manufacturing techniques, often borrowed from the aerospace and automotive industries.Beyond conveying MoMA’s intended aesthetic, environmental, and technical messages, these exhibition houses are enticing — in the manner of dollhouses and playhouses — because of the possibilities and scenarios they propose to the imagination. Visitors will like picturing themselves living in them: a kind of adventurous fantasy life with the added benefit of making a painless fresh start. Dwarfed as the houses are by the surrounding cityscape, they gain magic from their apparent miniaturization, especially when they are illuminated, as they are at night.The show follows suit from MoMA’s popular postwar series, “House in the Museum Garden,” in which dwellings by Marcel Breuer (1949) and Gregory Ain (1950) demonstrated solutions for American suburban families, combining economy of space with elegance of form. A third structure in the series, the Japanese House, designed by Junzo Yoshimura, highlighted similarities between a 17th-century scholar’s residence and Modernist designs. The fact that these houses were built outside, in the museum’s Sculpture Garden, rather than in gallery space gave them a tangible reality. The Japanese House, which attracted more than 1,000 people a day, remained for the summers of 1954 and ’55 and was reassembled in Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park as a center for Japanese culture.MoMA’s current collection is distinguished by the variety of building types that can be interpreted as prefabricated. While prefabrication usually signals cost-effective design, heralding a new efficiency and simplicity, the selection here — organized by the museum’s chief curator of architecture and design, Barry Bergdoll, with a curatorial assistant, Peter Christensen — is more eclectic in appearance, with a strong emphasis on sustainability.Kieran Timberlake Architects’s Cellophane House is a freestanding, multi-story urban town house with balconies, constructed of a system of off-the-shelf aluminum frames snapped together with steel connectors, slide-in windows, and polyethylene-sheet side walls and flooring. What is not transparent is translucent: radiant blocks of light in a vertical formation, topped by solar connectors.The house called System3 is designed by Oskar Leo Kaufmann and Albert Ruf as a long, rectangular, single unit incorporating “serving spaces,” such as the kitchen and bathroom, which are manufactured separately as modular units and assembled on-site with open, “naked”-space living areas. (The catalog alludes to Louis Kahn’s famous “servant” and “served” areas.) It all fits handily into a shipping container for delivery, and includes furniture designed by the architects that gives the living space a quiet elegance. The units can be stacked to accommodate more rooms. Nothing is flimsy here; the thickness of the wooden walls is visible by means of the porthole windows that have been punched through them.In designing his one-room, post-Hurricane Katrina House for New Orleans, Lawrence Sass devised a system of high-speed, precise laser cutters to shape plywood panels into pieces with grooves and joints that can be hammered into place. This is a new approach to a vernacular form that incorporates all the decorative arabesques and scrolls found on the porch of a typical New Orleans shotgun house.In Australia, Jeremy Edmiston and Douglas Gauthier had already built a house similar to Burst*008, their dwelling in the MoMA show. So the computer programs were in place for the 3,000 laser-cut, nonidentical wooden pieces (from renewable forests) and 400 steel connectors they used to construct this two-story house, which sits atop a high, bleacher-style staircase. The design, painted in manila-folder buff, has a complex geometry that includes low slat windows and high clerestories that provide maximum cross-ventilation. It was assembled entirely on location.The only house that was delivered intact by crane, truly prefabricated, was Richard Horden’s Micro Compact Home. (Note the insistence on “home” rather than “house.” The architect himself stays in one, amid a cluster of others occupied by students, in Munich, Germany, where he teaches at Technical University.) A 9-foot cube, it has a timber frame clad in panels of flat, anodized aluminum sheets. The interior, in cool gray PVC and aluminum, serves all of the functions Mr. Horden devised with his students for an active but economical and clutter-free daily life: sleep, hygiene, food preparation, and work. Windows provide ample ventilation and views.In the nearly 60 projects that make up the indoor gallery section of the show, as well as in the catalog text, one can see that the history of prefabrication has not always been a smooth one. Brilliant designs by Breuer and Buckminster Fuller ultimately fell by the wayside due to cost overruns and lack of customers. The Maison Tropicale, designed by Jean Prouvé for French colonials in Africa, which was on view this year on the Thames River outside Tate Britain, was a raised louvered house of standardized metal components that also had no takers.Nevertheless, the exhibits here abound with some of the most thought-provoking ideas about architecture ever gathered in one room. One of them, by Estudio Teddy Cruz, is for a colorful prefabricated infrastructure, a kind of scaffolding on which residents of Tijuana could build with waste materials such as milk crates and corrugated metal. This would bode well for many parts of the world where communities improvise housing.Not a Web log reader myself, I was fascinated to follow the diary entries of the participating outdoor architects that MoMA placed on its Web site during the months of construction, especially the postings by Mr. Horden. In one entry, he describes his daily routine during stays in the Micro Compact Home, which awaits him “like a business class seat to soften my day.” He concludes: “I am fortunate to create and use … a new model for minimal, high-quality life style.” Isn’t that what we all want? Architecture, at its best, clarifies.Sunday through October 20 (11 W. 53rd St., between Fifth and Sixth avenues, 212-708-9400).

‘Home Delivery’: Playing House at MoMA

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