Breaking Down Walls to Houses of the Future

It’s hard to imagine a better setting than Los Angeles for the “Un-Private House” exhibition, which opens today at the UCLA Hammer Museum. Curated by Terrence Riley, head of the department of architecture and design at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, where it opened in 1999, the show looks at how architects are reinventing the house in an age of rapid-fire technological change, social instability and eroding privacy. And no city has broken more ground in the design of residential architecture than Los Angeles.

Yet the show almost didn’t arrive here. Riley initially approached the Museum of Contemporary Art about the show two years ago but got no response; the Hammer snapped it up about six months later, after most of the original tour was set.

It was a wise decision. Based on its subject matter alone, the show should be a raging success. And much of the work is dazzling. Presented in models, photographs and computer images, the best of these houses work as both social commentary and powerful architectural compositions. They reaffirm that the house--in its ability to express the most intimate desires and the broadest cultural values--remains one of architecture’s most potent subjects.

That would have been enough for most museums. But the Hammer wanted more. As if to acknowledge Los Angeles’ role as a laboratory for residential architecture, the museum invited four UCLA faculty members to create a series of theoretical proposals for the house of the future. The show, “Live Dangerously,” seeks to push the debate a step further, presenting work that was nurtured in the laissez-faire atmosphere of academia rather than the hard realities of professional life.

With the help of unlimited student labor, these projects dwarf their neighbors in sheer output, with reams of computer-generated drawings and large-scale models. And the proposals can hold their own against the bulk of the projects in “The Un-Private House.”

But the auxiliary show is not a critique of the New York show; “Live Dangerously” should be seen as an addendum to it. As such, it raises more questions than it can answer. Does Los Angeles still have an architectural identity that distinguishes it from other cities? What role can architecture schools play in pushing the limits of the profession?

Meanwhile, the core show has undergone one significant change in its move west. At MOMA, 26 projects were packed into 3,700 square feet of gallery space. Here, they are spread out over 6,400 square feet. The advantage is that viewers will be more able to concentrate on a single work at a time. It is also easier to weed out the projects that can’t sustain the scrutiny.

Among the most groundbreaking works here, two or three are outright masterpieces. Rem Koolhaas’ 1998 Bordeaux House, for instance, perfectly sums up how far we’ve moved from the architectural utopias of the recent past. Instead of creating a perfectly balanced social organism, its seemingly rational forms reflect an intricate diagram of a family’s conflicting psychological and physical needs.

The ground-floor, glass-enclosed living area recalls Modernism’s fascination with transparency and light, but it also evokes a voyeur’s fantasy. One floor up, children can peer into their parents’ bedrooms across a long, narrow slot that cuts the house in two. Meanwhile, the father, who uses a wheelchair, travels from floor to floor on a movable platform that is the only access to the wine cellar and bookcases. When it rises, it leaves a gaping void below.

Similarly, Herzog and de Meuron’s Kramlich Residence, planned for Napa Valley, is a surreal blend of privacy and exhibitionism. Depicted in one of the show’s most elegant models, the living room and bedrooms are all located on the ground floor, their undulating glass walls interlocking to form a series of surreal chambers, some translucent, others completely transparent. The owner’s video art collection, meanwhile, housed in what is conceptually the most public part of the residence, is submerged below ground, in an intimate bunker-like room. Privacy here is an elusive state.

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Other projects are more concerned with the intense pressure external forces can exert on private life than on the inner psychological workings of the family. The delicate perforated metal facade of Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa’s M House barely shields its inhabitants from the street. Bedrooms are sunken below ground, illuminated by deep light wells. The play of light gives the house an aquatic feel, as if you were retreating into the well of the unconscious. In Shigeru Ban’s Curtain Wall House, meanwhile, the line between inner and outer worlds is reduced to a piece of fabric, which can be peeled back to put the entire interior ondisplay.

Not all of the work looks as apt here as it did in New York. The apartment designs, for instance, look oddly out of place in the context of Los Angeles, a city that has always been a temple to the single family house. But that aside, designing an apartment is more about struggling with issues of reuse and efficiency than exploring the boundaries between public and private spheres. Here, they look like a feeble effort to make the show relevant to New Yorkers.

Several of the projects in “Live Dangerously,” on the other hand, would have fit snugly within the parameters of the original show, despite their theoretical bent. Greg Lynn’s Embryonic House is at once a prototype for a computer-generated, mass-produced house of the future, and a womb-like form that evokes both a safe sanctuary and an architectural opiate. Blob-like rooms, dubbed “soft balls,” are squashed and stretched to fit their function and context, and then slipped inside a blanket-like shell. Creations of a computer world, they are never seen in a real context.

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Like Lynn’s proposal, Wes Jones’ is a take on mass-produced housing, a long-standing concern of the Modernists. But Jones’ work is rooted in utopia’s dark underbelly, in the stereotypes of postwar California, with its monotonous developments, Valium-induced calm and blind faith in the American military industrial complex. Jones’ houses are composed out of the metal shipping containers found in industrial ports and on long-distance trucks. Supported on heavy steel frames and stacked into vertical towers or arranged around open-air courts, they are an ironic fantasy of suburbia.

But even Jones’ design keeps one eye focused on practical realities. It goes to great lengths to prove its viability, including offering a Web site that advertises the availability and cost of the containers. And as a challenge to conventional suburban norms, it is closer in spirit to an adolescent jab than a meaningful political statement.

It was only a few decades ago that design teams like Britain’s Archigram could gleefully propose “walking cities” that resembled gigantic, mechanical buffalo and were meant to function as escape pods from conventional society. Today, even in the relative freedom of a university studio, architects are intent on working within the boundaries of the culture at large. More subversive than militant, they consider themselves less naive than their predecessors. As such, they function in a perpetual state of imbalance, straddling the fine line between their dreams and what society can tolerate.

And that may be what’s most fascinating about the two shows. Our most talented architects both inside and outside the academy now must struggle to change the world from within the halls of power. “The Un-Private House” and the UCLA show is as good a place as any to judge both the breadth and limits of their accomplishments.

* “The Un-Private House,” “Living Dangerously,” UCLA’s Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., (310) 443-7000. Through Jan. 7.