In the 1920s, Frederick Kiesler started to sketch designs for

an endless architecture that would collapse the boundaries

between art and architecture. His investigations led him in the late
1940s to the Endless House, a single-family residence that was
both a never-ending design process and a manifesto for a new
approach to dwelling. The first model for the project, on view here,
is streamlined and egg-shaped, with gently curving interiors that
blur distinctions between floor, ceiling, and walls so as to provide a
flexible layout. By 1960, Kiesler conceived the Endless House as
an organic arrangement of cave-like spaces, as seen in an eight-
foot-long model built for The Museum of Modern Arts influential
Visionary Architecture exhibition. The houses sensuous interiors
were illustrated in enormous photo murals, represented here in
archival photographs. The spaces were meant to combine different
textures, bathing pools, and a prismatic color lighting technology
in order to address both the spiritual and the physical needs
of the inhabitants. Radically re-envisioning the possibilities of
dwelling, Kiesler wrote that the house must be a cosmos in itself,
a transformer of life-forces.
For Frederick Kiesler, the architectural model was a creative tool
in its own right, independently of the built project. Following
this idea, groundbreaking single-family houses by modern and
contemporary architects are presented here through their models.
Drawn from MoMAs collection, these designs demonstrate a
particular willingness to push the discipline of architecture in new
directions. The earliest example here, and one contemporaneous
with the Endless House, is Ludwig Mies van der Rohes Farnsworth
House (194551). Mies shared Kieslers interest in an architecture
that is unified with nature, but differed in his ideas about the
materials and design strategies appropriate to a modern expression
of such unity. Other innovative projects include a house engineered
as a visionary structural shell and another that is a hybrid collection
of sculptural forms. There are houses that blur divisions between
public and private, houses that embrace contemporary live-work
habits, and houses that invite new construction methods that
incorporate digital technologies. Together, these designs reveal the
degree to which the single-family dwelling has been an unexpected
and fertile laboratory for architectural experimentation.
As a familiar presence in our everyday lives, tied to the experience
of belonging, the house plays a large role in the popular imagination.
In the works displayed along these walls, artists emphasize the
complex social, political, and cultural meanings the house embodies
as an archetypal space that mediates our relationship to the world.
In doing so, they often turn to recognizable architectural types
the pitched roof, the suburban lawn, the Victorian terraced
houseso as to address shared values. Martha Rosler and Sigmar
Polke draw on popular media to explore the house as a symbol
of a middle-class, consumer-driven lifestyle. Works by Louise
Bourgeois, Sandile Goje, and Laurie Simmons mine the cultural
and gender roles that characterize domestic life. Performance
acts by Gordon Matta-Clark, Rachel Whiteread, and Alex Schweder
and Ward Shelley publicly invert and make visible private interiors.
Thomas Schtte and Kevin Appel borrow existing architectural
elements and styles to imagine houses for new kinds of purposes.
Wearable, portable, and inflatable shelters by Lucy Orta,
Andrea Zittel, and Michael Rakowitz, respectively, highlight the
precariousness of a fixed definition of home given todays conditions
of global migration and urban instability.
Recent acquisitions by the Museums Department of Architecture
and Design present contemporary approaches to ideas of dwelling.
New York-based practice Asymptote Architecture is inspired by
mathematical models and the seamless geometries of yachts,
cars, and airplanes. Similarly to Kieslers Endless House, their
proposal for a single-family house near Helsinki culminated a
design process in which organic forms evolved through film sets
and furniture designs into an experimental architectural expression.
Chilean architect Smiljan Radic designed Casa para el Poema del
ngulo Recto through a process of bricolage, using forms drawn
from different artistic practices. The house combines a reinforced
concrete vault inspired by a print by Le Corbusier with a fragrant
cedar-lined interior that Radic tested in an earlier installation. In
contrast, German artist and architect Annett Zinsmeister creates
environments using images of the facades of Plattenbau
housing made in the former German Democratic Republic with
inexpensive, prefabricated concrete panels. Not unlike SITE, whose
work is also displayed here, she employs the visual logic of mass-
produced housing systems to create a disturbing spatial experience
that comments on the utopian vision of a home for everyone.