by: Jessica Sheridan Assoc. AIA LEED AP
Home Delivery at MoMA.
Jessica Sheridan
As much as I have learned about prefabricated housing, never have I seen a comprehensive overview spanning eras dating back to the early 1900s. The Museum of Modern Art’s Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling exhibition does just that; however, the curators (Barry Bergdoll, the Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design, and Peter Christensen, curatorial assistant in the Department of Architecture and Design) present a one-sided review that seems to discredit contemporary efforts.
MoMA divides the exhibition into five eras broken down into categories relevant to the time periods — from prefabrication and the spirit of invention, through prefabrication and necessity, to postfabrication and the digital era. The exhibition’s strengths are in the survey of Modern architects exploring prefabricated ideas. Included are: a model of Thomas Edison’s Single Pour Concrete House (1906), Le Corbusier’s drawing on trace paper of Maison Dom-Ino (1914), and intricate details of the General Panel System developed by Walter Gropius and Konrad Wachsmann (1942). There is even a full-scale mock-up and images of a series of prefabricated homes exhibited in MoMA’s museum garden in the 1950s, placing MoMA at the center of prefab design.
With such a complete collection of drawings, models, ideas, and mock-ups, I got a real sense of the complex thought that has gone into developing prefabricated housing over the last 100 years. When I approached the contemporary examples, however, the complexity falls short. Full-scale prototypes exhibit how the digital age has influenced design. Wall prototypes made with laser cutters and CNC milling machines inhabit the space leading to the exhibition. In an empty lot down the block, Burst*008, one of five prototypes in the lot, by Jeremy Edmiston and Douglas Gauthier is comprised of laser-cut wood pieces, specified down to holes under the house to store umbrellas. KieranTimberlake Architects designed the Cellophane House, complete with solar strips integrated into the façade. But nowhere do we see the thought process — study models, sketches, ideas. Without this, the prototypes seem almost unplanned, as if the architects plugged a formula into a computer and out came a building.
Even though digital fabrication is interesting, I believe there is so much more that goes into prefab housing today than mass production. The eras represented in the exhibition are coming together to create contemporary prefabrication that exists out of necessity, invention, experimentation, as well as digital design. If MoMA had chosen to include examples of buildings that are built, or at least in planning phases, such as MVRDV’s Silodam in Rotterdam or the 150 Make It Right prototypes being built in New Orleans, the exhibition would have more relevance and urgency needed to put the many current prefab ideas into production.