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30 June 2015 | By Pedro Gadanho, Phoebe Springstubb

less House: experimental archetypes of dwelling | Reviews | Archit... http://www.architectural-review.com/8685471.article?WT.tsrc=emai...

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Both artists and architects have used the single-family home to explore

universal topics and expand their disciplines in new ways

The single-family house and related archetypes of dwelling often feature as

leitmotifs in the creative endeavors of architects and artists, from a figurative

space to explore universal topics in the work of artists to a catalyst for designinvention in the work of architects. Endless House departs from the unrealized

project of the same name by Austrian-American architect and artist Frederick

Kiesler (1890–1965), one of the paradigmatic 20th century experiments into the

house. Influenced by surrealism and the scientific theories of his day, Kiesler

imagined ‘dwellings [that could] be as elastic as the vital functions.’

He began in the 1920s to sketch an endless architecture that could collapse the

boundaries between art and architecture, giving this form in the 1950s in theEndless House, a single-family residence that was both a discrete project and a

manifesto for a wholly new approach to dwelling. Objecting to what he saw as


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the limitations of the then predominant sensibility in modern architecture –

‘Machine-age houses [that were] one box next to another’ – Kiesler proposed an

environmental house animated through its synthesis with painting, poetry,

dance, theater, and sculpture.

Source: MoMA | New York/ George Barrows

Frederick Kiesler. Endless House. Project, 1950–60. Exterior view of the model, 1958

Source: MoMA | ARS, New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn


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Mies van der Rohe. Farnsworth House, Plano, Illinois. 1945–51

Kiesler’s Endless House was shaped through a long conceptual process using

diverse materials. The first model (1950) was streamlined and egg-shaped with

gently curving interiors that blurred distinctions among floor, ceiling, and wall

to provide a flexible layout. Revised continually in drawings and writing, by 1960, the Endless House was envisioned as an organic arrangement of cave-like

spaces in an eight-foot-long model built for The Museum of Modern Art’s

influential Visionary Architecture exhibition, where it held court alongside

designs by Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, and R. Buckminster Fuller. The

sensuous interior spaces were to be a composition of different textures (from

pebbles to sand), bathing pools, and a prismatic color lighting technology to

address both the spiritual and the physical needs of the inhabitants. To radically

reformulate the house, Kiesler wrote, it ‘must be a cosmos in itself, a

transformer of life-forces.’

For Kiesler, the architectural model was a generative tool in its own right—

something that could have its own conceptual existence independent of the

built project. Contemporaneous to the Endless House is Mies van der Rohe’s

Farnsworth House (1945–51), with its compact layout and transparent glass

walls strongly contrasting in sensibility. In the Endless House exhibition, themodels on display push their discipline in new directions: from a house

engineered as a visionary structural shell to a hybrid collection of sculptural


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forms; from a house submerged in a pastoral landscape to a continuous interior

blurring domestic divisions between public and private; from artist’s houses

revised to embrace contemporary live-work habits to a testing ground for new

fabrication methods incorporating geometric models and digital technologies.

Source: MoMA | Haus-Rucker-Co


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Haus-Rucker-Co. Stück Natur (Piece of Nature). 1973

Source: MoMA | Philip Johnson Fund

Hans Hollein. Beach House. 1963

As a ubiquitous presence in our everyday lives, profoundly tied to the

experience of belonging, the house plays an outsize role in the cultural

imagination. Artists evoke the house through familiar architectural types—thepitched roof, the shuttered window, the suburban lawn, the Victorian terrace

house—to explore the complex social, political, and cultural imaginaries it

embodies as an archetypal space through which individuals mediate their

relationship to the world. Martha Rosler and Sigmar Polke draw on media and

popular press to explore the house as a symbol of a middle-class, consumer-

driven lifestyle. Rodney Graham, Mario Merz, and Haus-Rucker-Co depict the

house as a self-contained world shaped by literature or memory.

Anthropomorphic houses by Louise Bourgeois, Sandile Goje, and Laurie

Simmons mine the cultural and gender roles that characterize domestic life.

Performance acts—splitting, casting, and swinging—by Gordon Matta-Clark,


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Rachel Whiteread, and Vito Acconci publicly invert and make visible private

interiors. Thomas Schütte and Kevin Appel appropriate architectural elements

and styles, from pitched roofs to LA-modernism, to fashion fictive houses for a

new set of users. Wearable, portable, and inflatable shelters by Lucy Orta,

Andrea Zittel, and Michael Rakowitz highlight the precariousness of a fixed

definition of home in today’s conditions of global migration and uneven urbangrowth.

‘Artists evoke the house through familiararchitectural types to explore the complexsocial, political, and cultural imaginaries it

embodies as an archetypal space through which individuals mediate theirrelationship to the world’

Contemporary approaches to the house highlight it as an endlessly productive

form through which to innovate new construction techniques, to experiment

with the design of living spaces in response to the needs of contemporary

households, and to critically reflect on historical antecedents. New York-basedpractice Asymptote Architecture, inspired by mathematical models and the

complex, seamless geometries of yachts, cars, and nautical fuselages, uses

recent digital technologies to propose an unusual single-family house near

Helsinki. Chilean architect Smiljan Radić designed the courtyard house Casa

Para el Poema del Ángulo Recto through a process that draws on artistic

practices of bricolage. The house combines a reinforced concrete vault derived

from a form in Le Corbusier’s suite of lithographs Le poème de l’angle droit (1955) with a fragrant cedar-lined interior Radić developed in an earlier

installation. German artist Annett Zinsmeister creates virtual environments out

of representations of existing Plattenbau facades—housing estates in the former

German Democratic Republic built cheaply and quickly using a construction

system of large, prefabricated concrete panels. By inverting this modular facade

system to create new spatial scenarios, she comments on its historically

embedded utopian vision of a home for everyone.

Text written for the MoMA Endless House exhibition and edited by the AR

Source: MoMA


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Asymptote Architecture. Wing House, Helsinki. 2011

Source: MoMA | The Howard Gilman Foundation


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Leon Krier. House for Colin Rowe. 1975

Where: Museum of Modern Art, New York

When: until 6 March 2016


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