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AR Endless House

The document discusses the Endless House exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It summarizes that the exhibition features experimental house designs by architects and artists that push the boundaries of what a house can be. This includes Frederick Kiesler's original visionary but unbuilt Endless House from the 1950s as well as new designs using innovative materials, forms, and digital technologies. The house is explored as an archetype for examining universal human topics and experiences of dwelling.

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陳佳玲
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99 views9 pages

AR Endless House

The document discusses the Endless House exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It summarizes that the exhibition features experimental house designs by architects and artists that push the boundaries of what a house can be. This includes Frederick Kiesler's original visionary but unbuilt Endless House from the 1950s as well as new designs using innovative materials, forms, and digital technologies. The house is explored as an archetype for examining universal human topics and experiences of dwelling.

Uploaded by

陳佳玲
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Endless House: experimental archetypes of dwelling | Reviews | Archit...

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30 June 2015 | By Pedro Gadanho, Phoebe Springstubb

13/7/2015 9:27 AM

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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 design
invention in the work of architects. Endless House departs from the unrealized
project of the same name by Austrian-American architect and artist Frederick
Kiesler (18901965), 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 the
Endless 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, 195060. 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. 194551

Kieslers 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 Arts
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 Rohes
Farnsworth House (194551), with its compact layout and transparent glass
walls strongly contrasting in sensibility. In the Endless House exhibition, the
models 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 artists 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. Stck 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 typesthe
pitched roof, the shuttered window, the suburban lawn, the Victorian terrace
houseto 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, consumerdriven 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 actssplitting, casting, and swingingby Gordon Matta-Clark,
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Rachel Whiteread, and Vito Acconci publicly invert and make visible private
interiors. Thomas Schtte 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 todays conditions of global migration and uneven urban
growth.

Artists evoke the house through familiar


architectural types to explore the complex
social, political, and cultural imaginaries it
embodies as an archetypal space through
which individuals mediate their
relationship 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-based
practice 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 Radi designed the courtyard house Casa
Para el Poema del ngulo Recto through a process that draws on artistic
practices of bricolage. The house combines a reinforced concrete vault derived
from a form in Le Corbusiers suite of lithographs Le pome de langle droit
(1955) with a fragrant cedar-lined interior Radi developed in an earlier
installation. German artist Annett Zinsmeister creates virtual environments out
of representations of existing Plattenbau facadeshousing 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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