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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
less House: experimental archetypes of dwelling | Reviews | Archit... http://www.architectural-review.com/8685471.article?WT.tsrc=emai...
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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
less House: experimental archetypes of dwelling | Reviews | Archit... http://www.architectural-review.com/8685471.article?WT.tsrc=emai...
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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
less House: experimental archetypes of dwelling | Reviews | Archit... http://www.architectural-review.com/8685471.article?WT.tsrc=emai...
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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
less House: experimental archetypes of dwelling | Reviews | Archit... http://www.architectural-review.com/8685471.article?WT.tsrc=emai...
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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,
less House: experimental archetypes of dwelling | Reviews | Archit... http://www.architectural-review.com/8685471.article?WT.tsrc=emai...
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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
less House: experimental archetypes of dwelling | Reviews | Archit... http://www.architectural-review.com/8685471.article?WT.tsrc=emai...
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Asymptote Architecture. Wing House, Helsinki. 2011
Source: MoMA | The Howard Gilman Foundation
less House: experimental archetypes of dwelling | Reviews | Archit... http://www.architectural-review.com/8685471.article?WT.tsrc=emai...
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Leon Krier. House for Colin Rowe. 1975
Where: Museum of Modern Art, New York
When: until 6 March 2016
less House: experimental archetypes of dwelling | Reviews | Archit... http://www.architectural-review.com/8685471.article?WT.tsrc=emai...