IN THE MUSEUMS
EAST
Fabricating the Modern Dwelling
July 20 – October 20
Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY
212/708-9400, www.moma.org
The Museum of Modern Art has a illustrious history of fostering modern residential design, starting with Marcel Breuer’s “House in the Garden” of 1948, which modeled modernity, affordability and good design during the postwar housing boom. Then the problem — and the holy grail of many mid-century architects — was affordable housing. Now it’s affordable housing, global warming, population growth and a shrinking planet.

Increasingly, interest has turned to prefabricated, modular, industrially produced dwellings that generate efficiencies in labor and materials that are reflected in lower costs for homebuyers and the environment. Inexpensive housing for emergencies and underdeveloped regions has also fueled creativity, along with the conviction that all that is needed is the right design; the Cooper-Hewitt Museum’s recent show, “Design for the Other 90%,” displayed not only simple shelters, but also ingenious water purifiers and carriers, load-bearing bicycles, ceramic urns for refrigeration and other low-cost tools that posit the need for designers to focus less on aesthetics and more on the grim realities of the majority of the world’s population.
The Museum of Modern Art’s forthcoming exhibition, “Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling” explores the roots of today’s modular, prefab experiments — Thomas Edison’s SinglePour Concrete House System (1906), Frank Lloyd Wright’s American System-Build Houses (1911–17), George Fred Keck’s Crystal House (1933) and Jean Prouvé’s Maison Tropicale (1949–51), as well as the all-metal Lustron houses and Sears & Roebuck mail-order kit houses — and highlights the best efforts of today.

The most exciting aspect of the exibition is the five full-scale houses installed in an outdoor space adjacent to the museum. Selected from 21 entries, they include the four-story urban Cellophane House by Kieran Timberlake Architects of Philadelphia, with steel frames that snap together, windows that slide into place without welding or sealing and highly technical translucent and transparent walls that generate electricity via embedded photovoltaic panels. The stackable wood and steel modular System3 house, by Oskar Leo Kaufmann and Albert Rüf of Austria, fits inside a shipping container for transport. Computer-designed laser-cut plywood panels fit together with grooves and joints to construct the Digitally Fabricated Housing for New Orleans, by Lawrence Sass, a professor of architecture at MIT. The 196-square-foot one-room shotgun house, that references traditional New Orleans homes, was designed to quickly house victims of Hurricane Katrina. The flexible BURST*.008, by Jeremy Edmiston and Douglas Gauthier, uses a computer formula to develop elements for customized versions. British architect Richard Hodern’s micro compact home is a fully-equipped, 76-square-foot aluminum-clad cube. Already on sale in Europe, it is delivered by helicopter or crane and generates electricity with a photovoltaic-paneled roof and walls incorporating wind turbines. MoMA is hosting a fascinating website that follows the construction of the houses in detail (www.momahomedelivery.org).—Andrea Truppin