SmArts

November 30 - December 6, 2015

To see an ‘Endless House’

By Molly Rector

I’m spending the next several days visiting a friend in New York. In keeping with the theme of my interest over the past several weeks, I’m planning on visiting the Museum of Modern Art to see an exhibit called “Endless House: Intersections of Art and Architecture.” According to the MoMA web site, the exhibit, which draws from the museum’s art collection as well as its design collection, is meant to showcase “how the [single-family] dwelling occupies a central place in a cultural exchange that crosses generations and disciplines.” Along this line of thinking, Jason Farago wrote in a review for the New York Times that the exhibit’s “very loose thesis is that the single-family home was as essential to the development of modern architecture as the tower block or the planned city.”

There’s a kind of fold in these two statements: first, the structure of the dwelling shapes interpersonal exchange and therefore culture, and then the demands of that culture and exchange shape the kinds of dwellings that emerge. I’m interested in this part of architecture in the notion that a building or a structure is, more than anything, a sociocultural object: representative of our social values and cultural fixations.

Though the exhibit itself hasn’t fared well with critics (according to many, it lacks a consistent narrative) I think that at least conceptually, it makes sense to think of the home as a powerful artistic symbol; as a point of creative departure for artists and architects alike, and of both art and architecture as means for examining cultural tendencies when it comes to questions of functionality as well as of pleasure.

Frederick Kiesler, whose “Endless House” project the exhibition is named after, believed that a dwelling should shift and change to meet the needs (or simply the desires) of its inhabitants. Because of this, the design for this project was never complete, and the project itself was never built. While this approach clearly did not, in this case, lend itself to the building of an actual structure, one wonders if this much less function-oriented approach might be more resistant than other kinds of structures to what Farago suggests, in his review, the social concerns our structures should focus on: privacy in the digital age.

I agree with Farago that I might rather see an exhibit focused on a particular problem (how do we deal with the notion of “protecting the home” when the things we need to guard against are no longer physical things, like burglars, but digital ones?). But I disagree with Farago and several other critics, who seem to want to be told exactly how to read the information being presented to them. I’m excited to see Endless House. Not least of all because I’m curious to see what kinds of ideas arise when I’m being told only loosely what to look for in the information being presented to me.

Molly Rector is a staff writer for the Daily Record. Contact her at molly@dailydata.com.