MoMa ~ Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling

This morning I went to catch the tail end of the Dali exhibit which is closing today only to find a far more interesting exhibition on the opposite side of the floor! Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling will be shown until October 20, 2008.


The architecture floors are also filled with designs using materials and ideas like those we discussed in class last week. And a fact I did not know but am really excited about now: PRATT STUDENTS GET IN FREE! You just have to show your Pratt student ID at the desk closest to the 54th Street entrance to the building. Nothing I like more than finding my heavy tuition bills have hidden perks...which I would like to be informed about rather than stumbling blindly upon them. But I digress. I have decided this could be made a reality now...granted the shipping containers would make it classier.


The description is below (taken from official MOMA website):

Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling comprises a selective survey of prefabrication in architecture (represented by the Timeline) and a building project of contemporary prefabricated homes on the Museum's west lot (as chronicled in the Installation Journal Archive).

The Timeline begins in the opening decades of the nineteenth century, when factory-produced buildings and building components were integral to the development of the American heartland and to the settling of far-flung colonies by Britain and France. From there, the Timeline spans almost two hundred years of architectural history, focusing on the European and American avant-gardes of the 1920s and 1930s, movements whose explorations have returned to the forefront in every new dialogue about architecture's relationship with serial production: in the golden decade after World War II, with its economic prosperity and baby boom and corresponding housing shortage; in the 1960s, with the introduction of new materials; and again in the past decade, as the computer has dramatically changed the conditions of production.

The Installation Journal Archive is a record of the weekly journal postings by the architects of the five contemporary prefabricated houses erected on the lot to the west of the Museum. The Installation Journal offers a "behind the scenes" look into the entire process of creating and erecting prefabricated architecture. The firms and individuals chosen to participate contributed weekly progress updates, beginning several months in advance of the exhibition, demonstrating how the processes of design, fabrication, shipping, and assembly unfolded to create five finished homes in time for the exhibition's public opening. The architects of each of the five houses were assigned a day of the week: KieranTimberlake Associates of Philadelphia (Mondays); Jeremy Edmiston and Douglas Gauthier of New York (Tuesdays); Oskar Leo Kaufmann and Albert Rüf of Dornbirn, Austria (Wednesdays); Massachusetts Institute of Technology School of Architecture and Planning / Associate Professor Lawrence Sass (Thursdays); and Richard Horden, Horden Cherry Lee Architects in London and Lydia Haack and John Höpfner of Haack + Höpfner Architects in Munich (Fridays). In addition, members of the MoMA curatorial team submitted commentary each Saturday.