The long awaited MoMA Home Delivery exhibit has been open for over a week now. If you’ve had the chance to visit or even examine their site, we’d really like to know what you think. Has the exhibit succeeded in extolling the virtues of the modernist prefab movement? How is it effective? How isn’t it? What were you hoping to see?
In March we posted about KieranTimberlake Associates‘ Cellophane House which is now featured at the MoMA’s Home Delivery exhibit. In the comments on that post, a few readers have been kind enough to lend us their thoughts about the home.
For the average middle-class American, however, prefabricated housing has always lacked sex appeal. The masses tended to prefer a traditional style, no matter how shabbily designed, and never really bought into it. Nor did most of the industrialist tycoons with the money to make the dream real.
So “Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling,” which opens on Sunday at the Museum of Modern Art, is a delightful surprise. Organized by Barry Bergdoll, MoMA’s chief curator of architecture and design, it presents more than 80 projects, from humble experiments in suburban living to stunning works of creative imagination. In a tour de force Mr. Bergdoll was able to build five full-scale model houses for the show in a lot just west of the museum. The effect is startling: expressions of a suburban utopian world surrounded by Midtown’s looming skyscrapers.
The microCH has been installed at the MoMA’s Home Delivery exhibit. If you’re in New York, be sure to check it out.
