At MOMA, Homes for a World in Flux

Since its birth in an unremarkable 53rd Street townhouse in 1932, the Museum of Modern Art’s department of architecture and design has done more to promote 20th century architecture than any other museum program in the world. Yet it is hard to remember the last time the department launched a truly revolutionary show--one that not only offers up important work, but also challenges our perception of architecture’s cultural role.

“The Un-Private House,” which opened Thursday at MOMA, is such a show. Most of the designs for the 26 houses represented here--depicted largely through models, photographs and computer-generated drawings--are eloquent investigations of contemporary domestic life, skillfully composed, packed with social meaning. Along with major projects by such pillars of contemporary architecture as Rem Koolhaas and the team of Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, the show includes a heavy dose of work by emerging young architects of remarkable talent. But most striking is the vast range of competing values and psychic truths these projects represent. There is no dominant dogma or architectural style. Instead, each work evokes an intensely personal exploration of the links that bind each of us to a broader culture.

One of the pleasures of the show, in fact, is how completely it reasserts architecture’s social relevance. Organized by Terrence Riley, chief curator of the MOMA’s department of architecture and design, the show’s unspoken theme is the family values debate that has dominated American cultural politics for more than a decade. As the shifting global society and technological advances continue to reshape our world into the next century, traditional boundaries that once defined domestic life--between private and public, solitude and community, the intimacy of family and the interdependence of global culture--will continue to erode. Clearly, the family is no longer a static institution. It has become a cultural battleground.

The show eases into these themes with a touch of irony, presenting the work in a homey setting with iconic images drawn from a more stable America. An electronic welcome mat marks the entrance. A faint band of wallpaper--in a pale-blue pattern designed by the turn-of-the-century Arts-and-Crafts architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh--lines the galleries. Architectural models are paired on a dining room table and a king-sized bed. At the center of the exhibition, two soft sofas stand on either side of a coffee table covered with thick architectural monographs. Such gestures give the show an unusually intimate feel. The show’s images are meant to be brooded over, discussed over dinner, angrily denounced, passionately defended.

To further encourage public interaction, the museum collaborated with Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab to design an interactive table that also enables visitors to study the projects more closely. Sitting on a cozy wooden chair, one can pluck thick plastic coasters from a Lazy Susan at the table’s center and place them on the corner of a series of place mats, activating a screen that displays explanations of individual designs. Feel like sharing? Touch a corner of the screen and the image will jump to the center of the table. This is more than a gimmick. It reminds us that a critical component of architecture--and culture--is debate. Like the show, it places architecture back on the public agenda.

But it is the designs that will spark the discussion. Among the most startling are those that seek to reinvent the single-family tract house--the central emblem of the sprawling suburban landscape that the late critic Reyner Banham once slyly dubbed “the Plane of Id.” In Joel Sanders’ 1998 unbuilt design for a bachelor’s home in Minneapolis, for instance, a banal bungalow becomes a flamboyant tool for expressing the occupant’s public image, like a fashionable suit. The once-sacred front lawn is submerged below ground, transformed into a lush green carpet of Astro Turf that sweeps right under the main living space into a lower-level master bedroom. Mirrors reflect various images of narcissistic bliss--dressing room, exercise and tanning area. In Sanders’ carefully manipulated world, identity is entirely manufactured; we are always on display.

A 1994 house by Los Angeles-based Neil Denari is equally ambivalent about the suburban dream. Framed by a garage in front and a pool in back--icons of suburbia--the house is a labyrinthine puzzle of interlocking floors, linking outer and inner worlds, work and leisure. Its cocoon-like metal skin evokes both postwar America’s naive faith in technological progress and its paranoid withdrawal into suburban isolation.

Collapsing Boundaries Between Life and Work

This obsessive insistence on exposing the hidden tensions of contemporary life runs through the show. A panel of video monitors displaying the latest stock market readings, for instance, dominates Frank Lupo and Daniel Rowen’s 1988 design for a Manhattan apartment. The couple, both financial analysts, can gaze at the video bank through openings in their kitchen wall, presumably as they sip decaf espresso. The monitors compete with a sweeping view of the city outside that offers competing views of economic power--one concrete, the other illusory. Here, the boundary that separates life and work has entirely collapsed, as has that between public and private identity.

Not all the designs here, however, share this sense of analytical detachment. In another design, for a residence now under construction in the Napa Valley, Herzog and De Meuron conceived the ground floor as a series of intersecting glass walls, whose surfaces will reflect views of the surrounding natural landscape, the daily life of the house’s inhabitants and various video installations--an attempt to create an idyllic blend of life, art and nature. In Simon Ungers and Thomas Kinslow’s T-House, completed in 1992 in Wilton, N.Y., on the other hand, life and knowledge are rigorously segregated: The simple volume of the upper-level library is set perpendicular to the living space below, quietly detached, a brooding image of monastic solitude.

Still other works seek to balance the particular psychological and emotional needs of unconventional families. Among the most exquisite of the designs is a small 1992 suburban home on the outskirts of Antwerp, Belgium, by architect Xavier de Geyter, which literally turns the conventional suburban house on its head. A glass garage glows like a welcoming beacon on the house’s roof, while the living spaces are partially submerged below ground. A long entry ramp leads down into the house, which is arranged as a collection of independent pavilions for parents, children and work, all bound together by Zen-like internal courts.

Such themes recur in Rem Koolhaas’ 1998 Bordeaux House, where the entire house--and the physical relationships between family members--can be reconfigured by moving a mechanical platform between floors. Or in Homa and Sima Farjadi’s 1999 design for the BV House, where a couple and their college-aged children--all from earlier marriages--are segregated into separate buildings strung together as fragments of a communal compound.

People will choose to read such interpretations of family life in one of two ways, of course--as symbols of the breakdown of the social fabric, or as the natural outcome of political and social freedom, the seeds of a more open society. The point is that the stability--imagined or not--that was assumed in postwar America has faded. There are no more universal models. We live in a culture defined in parts by narcissistic self-interest, a growing tolerance of social and cultural differences and a reactionary faith in the traditional family. This is no longer the rigid stability of 1950s America.

The show, in effect, charts the struggle to locate the individual’s place within a broader social context. What is the balance between intimacy and independence? Where is the line between work and home? How do children fit in? These questions apply to us all, not just the patrons of high-end architecture. Freedom can be terrifying. But such choices also reflect the potential of genuinely open culture. They suggest culture’s ability to embrace the unconventional, the outcast--to allow for human weakness.

Perhaps no project sums up the secret longings and subsequent unease buried beneath such questions better than Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio’s unbuilt 1990 design for a Long Island beach house. Dubbed the Slow House, its curved, funnel-like form frames a simple procession from the front door to the perfectly framed view of a sandy beach and the Atlantic Ocean in back. Using built-in video equipment, the view can be recorded and projected into the various rooms--a calming ocean, say, during stormy nights, a hard rain during lazy afternoons. Live views can also be projected back into the couple’s New York loft, a crystalline image of unfulfilled longing. That distant image is an apt metaphor for our century’s failure to achieve Utopia. Real life remains messy, insecure, uncertain.

What this show makes clear is that a growing group of architects is bent on deciphering the psychological and social needs of human life in an age where values are elusive. Rather than search for universal meanings, these architects focus on the fundamental complexities of everyday existence. The exhibition suggests that we are entering an era of competing values, of unformed ideals. Its focus on context and psychological nuance is no less ambitious than the Utopian undertakings of the early Modernists.

It is a glorious vision.

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* “The Un-Private House,” Museum of Modern Art, 11 W. 53rd St., New York, (212) 708-9400. Closed Wednesdays. Ends Oct. 5.

Home Sweet Home?: It’s not the refuge it used to be. Not when social shifts and technological advances are breaking down traditional boundaries in domestic life. Architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff reviews MOMA’s “The Un-Private House.” F2.