As part of the exhibition Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling, which will be on view at MoMA from July 20 to October 20, 2008, The Museum of Modern Art has selected five architects to display full-scale, prefabricated houses in the outdoor space to the west of the Museum building.
The houses are designed by the firm Kieran Timberlake Architects (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) and architects Lawrence Sass (Cambridge, Massachusetts), Jeremy Edmiston and Douglas Gauthier (New York, New York), Oskar Leo Kaufmann and Albert Rüf of Oskar Leo Kaufmann Architects (Dornbirn, Austria) and Richard Horden (London, England, and Munich, Germany).
Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling is organized by Barry Bergdoll, The Philip Johnson Chief Curator, Department of Architecture and Design, with Peter Christensen, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Architecture and Design, The Museum of Modern Art. The exhibition will include a total of 63 projects: the five houses on view in the outdoor space next to the Museum, and 58 projects on view in the sixth-floor International Council of The Museum of Modern Art Gallery, offering the most thorough examination to date of both the historic and contemporary significance of factory-produced architecture from 1833 to today.
The five projects to be displayed in the outdoor space next to MoMA were chosen after an initial consideration of some 400 architects and firms, from which 21 proposals were solicited. The proposals were evaluated by a jury of internal Museum curators and staff, as well as members of the architectural community, who advised the curatorial team in making the selections. The five houses represent designs by emerging and established architects, different styles of homes that use varied manufacturing techniques, and houses that span the economic market. Cooper Robertson Partners will act as Consulting Architects in assembling the houses for the exhibition.
These five contemporary projects continue MoMA’s rich history of exhibiting full-scale houses, which includes The House in the Museum Garden (1948), a house by Marcel Breuer that was erected in the Museum’s Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden; Exhibition House by Gregory Ain (1950); and Japanese Exhibition House (1955).
The architects participating in Home Delivery will have the rare opportunity to present commercially viable domestic creations, prototypes, and entirely new designs produced specifically for the exhibition. The selected designs showcase a variety of approaches to prefabrication. These include a green urban dwelling made of recyclable materials by Kieran Timberlake Architects, a section of a multistory house with floors that fit into shipping containers and can stack together like blocks by Oskar Leo Kaufmann and Albert Rüf, a house for New Orleans to help those displaced by Hurricane Katrina by Lawrence Sass, a computer-generated house built from a computer program that automates a blueprint by Jeremy Edmiston and Douglas Gauthier, and a tiny cube intended for use as athletic or student housing by Richard Horden.
An exhibition Web site launching in mid-March will include weekly diary postings from each of the five architects and from the curators of the exhibition, recording the process of fabricating, delivering, and assembling the houses leading up to the July 20 opening. The site will underline the importance of prefabrication as a matter of process and product. -- www.moma.org
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