I went to MoMA's "Home Delivery" show a few weeks ago (Nicolai Ouroussoff's NY Times review here; a lot of good stuff in the show's timeline here), and managed to see everything but the main attraction -- the outdoor models -- which had a 200 yard long ticket line, even on that free-admission Friday. I shot the photo above through the chain link fence.
I've always been a fan of svelte shacks, and have lived in a few backyard shacks. I can identify with the utopian urge to efficiently build small, well designed housing.
But I don't buy the Home Delivery curators' claim that prefab housing is a "critical agent in the discourse of sustainability."It's the infrastructure of society -- the footprint of housing and commuting -- that matters. And unlike their street cousins in trailer parks, and excluding the few Katrina cabins that outlive disaster relief, prefab houses like the models at MoMA are likely to wind up on hillsides, in forest or on beaches, eating up the natural world just like McMansions. At best the MoMA prefabs are vacation homes for people with money and a conscience.
The show also reinforced my suspicion that people become architects because of the scale models, like the ones here. Above left: what looks like the business end of Archigram’s 1965 Living Pod. And below are two (by Richard Rogers and Su Rogers?) that look like hamster housing built from computer cases.
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