The Media House

Author(s): Beatriz Colomina

Source: Assemblage, No. 27, Tulane Papers: The Politics of Contemporary Architectural
Discourse (Aug., 1995), pp. 55-66
Published by: The MIT Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3171430
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Beatriz Colomina
The Media House

Like many of us today, I have had difficulties thinking

about what to present here, in this conference "The Po
of Contemporary Architectural Discourse." What is tha
supposed to mean? Which discourse? Whose politics? W
all agreed to this conference, on this subject, last May.
my discomfort is, in a way, self-discomfort. No criticism

involved. More like, what was I thinking about? What w

we (the "assemblagers") thinking about? Everything see
much clearer six months away.
Beatriz Colomina teaches at the Princeton University School of
Architecture.

I asked around and the consensus was that we would do

whatever we happen to be working on, the "politics" would seem - would take care of themselves. So after mu

deliberation about whether I should return here to Eilee

Gray's encounter with Le Corbusier in E.1027, a site th

would have provided me the opportunity to discuss how

so-called (however problematically) postcolonial theory

feminist theory of the last ten years has informed archite

tural discourse, or at least, how it has informed my own w

ing, I decided to do something else. In fact, the theme w

have been appropriate on more than one count, because

current obsession of mine, for lack of a better word, devel

oped out of a footnote in an article in Assemblage 4. An

suddenly what was marginal in 1986, an aside, a footnot
1992 (as I was preparing the manuscript for my book Pri
and Publicity, and the old article in Assemblage had beco

the basis for the chapter "Photography") started to grow

grow until it reached the point where it could not remai
Assemblage 27: 55-66 ? 1995 by the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

there. After all, footnotes are not supposed to go on for

So first, that old footnote jumped into the main text, whe

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assemblage 27

of course, there was more room to move, and it kept grow-

me: One, and definitely first in my mind, was the media, the

ing. And then, at a certain point, I had to cut it from the

way in which the architecture of this century is produced in

book because it would not stop growing, it was out of con-

the space of photographs, publications, exhibitions, congresses

trol. So it ended up in Assemblage 20, Violence Space. I

(CIAMs, etc.), fairs, magazines, museums, art galleries, competitions, advertising. The other was the house. Yet the house

thought I had put it to rest. But it did not stop there. It kept
growing. It keeps growing today.

The piece somehow straddles the history of Assemblage. I

have been on the editorial board since issue number three.

understood not simply as one type among others, but as the

most important vehicle for the investigation of architectural
ideas in this century.

Many things have changed since the magazine started.

Some of us did not even have "real" (full-time) jobs yet.

ture more than the central role played by the private house.

Several people on the board now have tenure. Assemblage

is becoming "middle-aged" and somehow it has to face its
own mid-life crisis. I am reminded of what Le Corbusier

From Frank Lloyd Wright and Adolf Loos to Le Corbusier,

Frank Gehry, and Michael Graves, virtually all the major
architects of this century, on both sides of the Atlantic, have

says when he stops producing L'Esprit Nouveau in 1925,

after his break with Ozenfant: "Five years is a lot for a

the design of houses. Indeed, and this is where the two routes

magazine. One ought not to repeat oneself continuously.

Others, younger people will have younger ideas."

through their houses, whether they were built or not.

Despite the obvious relation between this piece on Eileen

Gray and Le Corbusier and the history of Assemblage, I

Many of these houses were actually produced for exhibitions,

publications, fairs, competitions, and so on, rather than for

have, in the end, decided against it. Today I will tell an-

traditional building sites. Even those houses that were built

for actual clients, on traditional sites, derived their main

other story, much less charged, about how this fall I found

Perhaps no one thing distinguishes twentieth-century architec-

elaborated their most important architectural ideas through

intersect, most architects of this century have become known

myself in an unusual situation. Unusual for me, accusimpact from their publication, before and after construction.
tomed to an audience of architects, of students, of scholars, Images of these houses have circulated around in all forms of
and a limited bunch at that. Let's face it, our work admedia, making a series of polemical propositions about the
dresses a very small and specialized audience, that reprereorganization of domestic space in the twentieth century.
sented by the readers of Assemblage, for example. Instead, These propositions were then usually extended to other
this fall I found myself in a foreign territory, so to speak, as forms of building. The debate about houses typically became
a consultant for MOCA (The Museum of Contemporary
a debate about architecture per se. Every aspect of architecArt) in Los Angeles on a mammoth exhibition being orga- ture, even the city itself, has been rethought in this century
nized for the end of the century, literally entitled End of the from the house.
Century, on the subject of the architecture of this century.
It is interesting in this respect, that MOCA had initially
And the question I have for this conference is how do we go
paired Jean-Louis Cohen's proposal to think the century
from our specialized discourses, from our specialized,
through the city, with mine to think it through the house
mostly academic, audiences, to the diverse audience pro(other people being responsible for other aspects of the cenvided by a big exhibition, traveling thorough several countury). The city, public space, can never be separated from
tries, through several cultures, and still retain a critical
domestic space. What goes on in the public square shapes the
position, in a political sense.
domestic space that seems to be detached from it, and vice
The theme of the MOCA exhibition, the architecture of this versa. But in the twentieth century, the two realms - private
century, is big, perhaps too big. In fact, so absurdly big that it and public - are completely intermingled. This interminbecomes interesting. In thinking about how to traverse this gling itself has a long history now. Modern architects (those
enormous field, two routes seemed immediately appealing to working during the first two decades of this century), for ex-

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Colomina

The House in the Media

ample, were completely obsessed with it. Their architecture
is unthinkable outside of this phenomenon and of their
Exhibitions

obsession with it. They engaged actively with the media,

using it to transform the condition of the house. Or more

precisely, the media was already transforming the condition

of the house and the architects were only responding to and
participating in this ongoing transformation, a process that
continues today when it has become a commonplace to
point out that the contemporary house, with its television,

computer networks, fax machines, and so on, has become a

much more public space than the streets of the city.
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Many of the most influential houses of the twentieth century

were produced for exhibitions. Think, for example, of Mies van

der Rohe's Brick and Concrete Houses or his Bachelor House

Gropius, Taut, and others for the Weissenhofsiedlung in

Stuttgart, Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion House, Le

Corbusier's L'Esprit Nouveau pavilion, Marcel Breuer's

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in the Berlin Building Exhibition, the projects by Le Corbusier,

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r(n*\\(rXlllrr?I~?r*?**:~~*r,(n~?)rcn?? --

.....:....

house for the courtyard of MoMA, the Case Study Houses in

Los Angeles, the Smithson's House of the Future, as well as
more contemporary examples such as Hejduk's wall houses or
Peter Eisenman's El Even Odd house, just to name a few.

:_ :::::::::l::::;i

So "What is a house?" to borrow the question that Arts 6

Architecture asked itself in 1944 as the editors prepared

themselves to launch its Case Study program in Los Angeles.

In the twentieth century, we are faced with two striking phe-

nomena (and the Case Study program is paradigmatic of

this): the house is in the media and the media is in the
house. Here we can start to see a way to enter into the houses
of this century rather than to present them as a series of

masterpieces. I will now sketch out this phenomenon with a

series of examples. This is, of course, not meant to be a com-

prehensive survey. On the contrary, it is made up with the

images that happened to be around my desk last week. I will

Consider, for example, the exhibition "Houses for Sale" at

touch each example only lightly before bouncing to the

next. These examples will show both sides of the relationship
house/media in this century, some of the different ways in
which the house has occupied the media and then some of

ways in which the media has occupied the house.

Leo Castelli Gallery in 1980. Reversing the traditional process whereby the client commissions an architect to design a
house, in this exhibition an international group of eight architects were invited to put their visions of the modern house on
"sale." The catalogue clarifies that "drawings may be purchased separately from the commission of the project." While

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assemblage 27

this exhibition can be read as a purely postmodern phe-

had been prepared by both t

tion and Dr. Erna Meyer, wh

nomena, one of many instances signaling the entrance of

architecture into the art market, the seeds for such an event

The New Household: A Guide

had been planted long before.

Apparently, of all of the arch

A crucial issue here is the differ-

recommendations seriously. H
kitchen, which he presented
of the efficient kitchen. Dr.
extensively in her lectures an
tions of her book.

ence between exhibitions of models and drawings, which is the

language that architects use to

talk to other architects, and exhibitions in which houses are actually built in order to

communicate to a wider public.

An instance of the first could be the De Still exhibition in
the Galerie L'Effort Moderne in Paris in 1923, where van
-8~~ii~ - ~

Doesburg and van Eesteren's influential models of experimental houses were shown; of the second, Le Corbusier's
Pavillon de L'Esprit Nouveau in the Exposition des Arts
Decoratifs of 1925. The first in what would now be understood as a commercial gallery, the second in a public exposition, in fact, a fair. With the Pavillon de L'Esprit Nouveau,
the house itself became an
exhibit. The space of the
exhibition and the exhibit

were the same thing. Indeed,

Le Corbusier exhibited his
Splans for the city within the

structure of the pavilion. The

domestic house became the
site for a whole architectural

10

Likewise, in the Berlin Building Exhibition of 1931 full-scale

models of houses by Marcel Breuer, Otto Haesler, Mies van der
Rohe, Lily Reich, Karl Voelker, and others were constructed
within an exhibition building and surrounded by a materials

8 philosophy.

Another example of the house as an exhibit that can b

walked through is the Weissenhofsiedlung in Stuttgart

1927, which formed part of an even bigger exhibition o

the dwelling organized by the German

Werkbund that
12
embraced every aspect of the house, from kitchen equip
ment to construction techniques. Despite the large scal
Houses siedlung
in Los Angeles, begun initself th
the overall exhibition, it was the built
1945
and
sponsoredand
by Arts 6 Archihad such a dramatic influence on popular
professio
tecture
under
John
Entenza, the
debates. An important issue of the exhibition,
until rec
exhibition of houses role
was no longer
overlooked by historians, was the woman's
in the
enclosed
inside
a
building,
in
home. Kitchen design and domestic economy aswere
a m
Berlin, or each
confined to a architect
suburb, as in
focus of the organizers. They provided
w

guidelines on the design of kitchen

and
utility
13 Stuttgart,
but scattered
throughout areas th
13

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Colomina

sophisticated Crysthe city. The houses were open to the public for six to more
eight
tal House was built for
weeks and then occupied.
the reopening of the fair
in 1934, and featured
Buckminster Fuller's

Fairs
Experimental houses have also
been constructed within fairs.

Take George Fred Keck's House of

Tomorrow built in the Century of
Progress International Exposition
in Chicago in 1933. The fair was
intended to depict the effects of
science and technology on indus-

try and everyday life. One of the 14

prototype Dymaxion car.

Museums
Another context for the 18

exhibition of the house

throughout the century has
been the museum. The Museum of Modern Art in the

1930s, under Philip Johnson,

most popular attractions was a
and in the 1940s and 1950s,
series of thirteen model homes built along the Lake Michiunder Eliot Noyes and Edgar
gan waterfront. Financed by trade organizations, these
J. Kaufman, Jr., devoted enorhouses were to show the "impact of modern technology
mouson
attention to domestic
residential architecture." Keck, who recognized the exposiarchitecture. In 1949 MoMA
tion as a great opportunity to promote modern architecture,
began to exhibit a series of
built two. The House of Tomorrow, sponsored by General
fully built houses in its court- 19
Electric and Goodyear Tire, was a three-story, twelve-sided
yard, which included designs
house with glass walls and an airplane hanger on the
by Marcel Breuer, Gregory Ain, and Frederick Kiesler. In the
ground floor. Pierce Arrow supplied a Silver Arrow automo1950s the Guggenheim built one of Wright's Usonian Houses.
bile, which was kept in the garage alongside the "sport
Even before MoMA, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis
biplane" supplied by Curtiss Wright. Keck's technologically
had built an "Idea House" behind the museum in 1941. A
second "Idea House" was built in 1947.

15

20

16

17

21

But
this
Walker
A
terly
to
c
ment
in
o
In
a
speci
ments
ex

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assemblage 27

Even the so-called International

r-A-7

MoMA launched its department

rily an exhibition of houses. Th

Johnson put it in an internal m

"The most interesting exhibit fo

house." He singled out the priv

the popularization of the style,"

exhibition to those architects

who presented houses. In the

end, the exhibition was made

23
22

up almost entirely of domestic

being used. In 1949 Kaufman

architecture. .i

initiated the "Good Design"

program at MoMA in collaboration with the Merchandise Mart

Department Stores
29

of Chicago. Subtitled "A Joint

Program to Stimulate the Best
Modern Design of Home Furnishing," the show's were made
to coincide with the winter and
summer housewares markets at 24

What is less known about this famous exhibition is that

Johnson and Hitchcock organized a series of lectures

throughout the United States not only in other art institutions, but also in department stores. The exhibition itself was

the Mart. MoMA, too, produced many publications to

displayed in Sears, Roebuck in Chicago, Bullock's in Los

Angeles, and many other department stores. The modern
house was presented as a product to be sold like any other.

popularize the modern house, including Elizabeth Mock's

Those who could not afford the house itself were offered small
If You Want to Build a House in 1946 and Kaufman's own
fragments, tokens of modern domestic life, produced by col-

What Is Modem Interior Design? in 1953.

laborations between designers and manufacturers: furniture,

fabrics, lamps, and other fittings. The department store be-

came an ongoing exhibition site for the modern house.

25 uLtIt In USSA: 26
#ost-war

rchitecturei

..... I l ,f

30

28
27

Again, this was not unprecedented. In 1929 the Marshall

Field department store in Chicago had imported a collection
of modern furniture from France. To attract attention to the
furniture, the store management asked Buckminster Fuller to
set up and demonstrate a model of a house he had recently

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Colomina

The most literal form of this is . . .

designed for mass production. It was the first public

actual advertisements, as those

presentation of the

of the companies involved in

Dymaxion House. Fuller

the Pavilion de L'Esprit

Nouveau. Likewise, the
Werkbund had been founded

gave a series of lectures

about the house in which
he stressed its technical

as an alliance of designers and

manufacturers, and the Case

merits (earthquake, flood

and tornado proof); he also 31

Study Houses were subsidized
stated that it was equipped with all the latest media technolby the manufacturers whose
ogy (television unit, radio, loud speakers, and microphone).
materials would be publicized. An interesting reversa
when architecture offers itself as the stage for an adve

32

34

ment, as when Le Corbusier's building in the Weisse

lung in Stuttgart of 1927 acted a
the backdrop for a Mercedes Ben
ad. While the car conspicuously
placed in Le Corbusier's photographs of his houses provided the

context for an "advertisement" of

the contemporary good life that

wanted to associate with his arch
tecture, the houses at Stuttgart
became the context for an adver-

33

Even manufacturers transformed their showrooms into

galleries for the exhibition of houses. Prior to the exhibition

of the Endless House at MoMA in 1960, Kiesler had exhib-

ited a full-scale model of his Space House in the showrooms of the Modern Age Furniture Co. in New York in
1933. Similarly, Robert McLaughlin, a graduate from
Princeton University and founder of American Houses, a
company dedicated to the mass production of houses, introduced the "Motohome," a prefabricated house at
Wanamaker's department store in New York in 1935, all

tisement of luxury cars.

36

Magazines
The commercialization of the modern house becomes evident

in the production and dissemination of modern architecture in

the popular magazines. All the developments of the architecture of the century were sooner or later represented there. It

;'?-?;?-;- ; ; ;-?_:ili~l~::-i-ili :;::'::::-:iai:;:::: ?j;:-:i::~- i:::;--ii:;lbii'::jj:~l~iB "::::' :" . ... .. .. ... . . i~~ii:~

wrapped in cellophane and tied up with a huge red ribbon.

tow::::::I::i::::r:j::

Advertisements
Manufacturers played a crucial role throughout the century
in promoting modern architecture. In every example I have
offered so far this is the case. The discourse around the
modern house is fundamentally linked to a commercialization of domestic life. In the end, all these different forms of
exhibition were advertisements.

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assemb.lage 27

launching this whole architectural and urban project. Many

modern architects, from Mallet-Stevens to the Eameses, have

would be worth looking at the role of the modern house in

Life magazine, for example, which first published Julius

designed stage sets for movies. This would, in turn, suggest

that we reexamine the use of the modern house as a stage for
film, as when Abel Gance uses Le Corbusier's Villa Stein as

Shulman's famous photographs of Neutra's Kaufman

(Desert) House in Palm Springs and also presented an amazing display of Mies's apartment house on Lake Shore Drive
in Chicago. Other magazines to note in this regard include
Better Homes and Gardens, House Beautiful, Fortune, and

backdrop for the horror movie La Fin de Monde of 1931.

Mallet-Stevens saw in film the most effective medium for pro-

House and Garden. Some popular magazines such as the

Ladies' Home Journal also sponsored architectural competi-

moting modern architecture. He argued that it could reach

more people than an exhibition or a journal: "It permits new
forms to reach the most distant corners of the earth. . . . Modern

tions for the modern house. It was in this context that the

first publication of Frank Lloyd Wright's Prairie houses took

place in 1901.

architecture will no longer amaze, it will be understood by

everyone; the new furniture will no longer seem eccentric but

normal." For a long time, Mallet-Stevens only did stage designs.

When his first house was built, the Villa Noailles at Hyeres of
1924, the client, Charles le Vicomte de Noailles, commissioned
Man Ray to shoot a film using the house as the stage set.

38

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39

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ii' E *i'iiii '--:*

42

40

41

Film

to its use as a prop for the media.

Once the famous Shulman photo-

graphs of the Pierre Koenig Case

Study House presented an ideal
image of modern domestic life,
the house became the stage set for
over a hundred movies. As the

Le Corbusier thought film

was the ideal medium to
represent his houses. In
1929 he made a film with
Pierre Chenal called
L'Architecture d'aujourd'hui,
in which he moves from his
villas of the 1920s to his
plans of the city. Yet again,
the house is the vehicle for

In fact, one can repeatedly see a shift through the century

from the representation of modern architecture in the media,

owner put it to me last summer,

the house is still producing a
steady income. The house is both
a product to be consumed and a

source of income. 44

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Colomina

Television

Corbusier's camera turns out to be cinematographic. As has

often been noted, the promenade architecturale is cinematic.
Similar arguments can be Furthermore, specific details like the horizontal window are
made about television, start- unthinkable outside of cinema.
ing with Wright, running
through TV series on architecture, and the use of the
modern house as the set for

Today we find architects engaging

directly with televisions and computers. Think, for example, of the apart-

domestic dramas. Once

again, the Museum of Modern Art took a particular interest

ment designed by Donna Robertson

and Robert McAnulty for the exhibi-

in television. In relation to the "Good Design" program,

Edgar Kaufman, Jr., appeared daily on Margaret Arlen's

tion "Room in the City" at City

Gallery, New York, in 1987. In this

Morning Show for two weeks in early 1954. Furthermore, the

project, the flaneur's perception of

museum, with the help of a television production company,

the nineteenth-century city is under-

planned a game show entitled "Good Design at the Table."

stood to have been replaced by an

47 aimless cruising through television

channels. The television is a window

Media in the House

through which the spectacle of the city can be seen in a state

The way the house occupies the media is directly related to of distraction. But this window is not only about receiving a
view. The antenna alongside the satellite dish allows the
the way the media occupies the house. At one level, the architecture is transformed by the media in which it is exhibited. house to broadcast its intimacy to the outside, in an age in

On another level, the design of the house concerns the mediawhich the home video is no longer the video seen in the
itself. Peter Blake described his Pinwheel House of 1955 as a home but the video of the home seen in public. Television
camera: "Most vacation houses are designed to work roughly not only brings the public indoors, it also sends the private
like a camera: a box glazed on one side, with the glass wall into the public domain.
pointed at the view. The designer felt that he could make the
project more interesting if he could find a way to open the
house to a variety of views with a possibility of shutting out a

view occasionally .... Because this house can be adjusted to

any orientation and any view or combination of views, it is a
universal vacation house for almost any site."

A number of architects, among them Liz Diller and Ricardo

Scofidio and Michael Webb, are rethinking the house as part
of the ongoing attempt to rethink
the modern technologies of communication, beginning with the car.

This is an idea that was already in Le Corbusier, who

equated the window with the camera and argued that, like a
camera, you could take your house anywhere. Le

46

48

49

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assemblage 27

In each moment of the twentieth

S Yet again, this is not simply

a high art phenomenon,
but one anticipated by
popular culture and exhibited throughout world fairs
in "houses of the future"
that were not necessarily

50 designed by signature ar-

chitects. Think of the

EISENMAN century, the house has been made

GRAVES to stand for different things and in

GWATHMEY each case this polemical use of the
HEJDUK home depends on a particular use
MEIER of the media. Even that architecture whose whole philosophy
turns around its formal composi-

52 tion uses the media. Take, for

Daily Mail annual "Ideal Home" exhibition, symptomati-

instance, the enormously influe

cally sponsored by a newspaper, but also of tial

built
developwork
of the New York Five in the 1970s. The fir
ments, like Levittown, which were organized
notice
around
is that
the
this work is all houses. The second thi
notice designed
is that it is all media. A bunch of young arch
television. Levittown was the first generic house
with a built-in television set.
present their drawings and models in a famous boo

Colin Rowe's and Kenneth Frampton's analyses, a b

More recently, in the last ten years, there has been an escalawill have many translations. In fact, the book emer
tion in reconfiguring the house around the computer. A new
series of discussions sponsored by MoMA. The infl
generation of architects is emerging who design with and
this work, and the pleasure that we still take from it
about the computer. Their work is exhibited on CD-ROM
separated from this publicity campaign.
or encountered in virtual reality installations. The plans of
Thomas Lesser's Twin House, for example, began as traditional drawings, but were then digitized and transformed in

the computer. Likewise, the three-dimensional images have

been transformed to lie somewhere between a model and a

computer image. Having been digitized, the house then

comes to life within the computer. Even though the house is
to be built on a particular site for particular clients, it already
occupies the space of the computer and will carry the traces
of this occupation when it is finally constructed.
We find ourselves at the end of the century faced with a
formidable transformation in the dominant forms of percep-

tion, perhaps of similar dimension to that encountered by

those living in the early

53

54

In
conclu
examples

century
discourse
and
low

years of the century. As

then, speculations about

the condition of the

their

house are being presented as speculations on

cultural life in general.
The question of the
house is today understood as a question of

po

the
twen
interface

identity politics. 51
64

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Colomina

Figure Captions

house, and behind it, Lily

You Want to Build a House,

Reich's house.

1946

1, 2. "What is a House?" Pages

from Arts & Architecture, July

12. Lily Reich House, Berlin
1944.

Building Exhibition, lady's

3. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe,

sketch for a glass house on a

bedroom

38, 39. Buckminster Fuller,

Wichita House, designed for

mass production on Beech Air26. Cover of Henry-Russell
Hitchcock and Arthur Drexler, craft assembly lines in 1944, as
published in Fortune, 1946
Built in USA: Post-war Architec-

ture, 1952
40. Frank Lloyd Wright, Ladies'
13. Charles and Ray Eames on
Home Journal House, 1901
27. Twitchell and Rudolph,
House, Case Study House 8,
House for W. R. Healy, 1950, 41. Robert Mallet-Stevens, depublished in Drexler, Built in sign set for Marcel L'Herbier's Le
Los Angeles, 1949
USA: Post-war Architecture
Vertige, 1926
14. Gilbert Rohde, industrial

hillside, 1934, first published in the steel frame of the Eames

Philip Johnson's Mies van der

Rohe of 1947, a book made to
coincide with the Mies exhibition at MoMA

designer, "Unit for Living" re- 28. Cover of Edgar J. Kaufman,42, 43. Man Ray, stills from Les
flected in mirror, New York
Jr., What is Modern Interior
Mysteres du Chateau du De,
Farnsworth House model, Mu- World's Fair, 1940
1928, filmed in Mallet-Stevens's
Design?, 1953

4. Mies van der Rohe with the

seum of Modern Art exhibi-

15. George Fred Keck, House

tion, 1947

29. Installation view of "Mod-

ern Architecture - Internaof Tomorrow, Century of

5, 6. Covers of the first and sec- Progress International Exposi- tional Exhibition" (otherwise

ond editions of the exhibition

tion, Chicago, 1933

catalogue Houses for Sale, Leo

Castelli Gallery, New York, 1980

7. De Stijl exhibition, Galerie

known as the International

Villa Noailles

44. Pierre Koenig, Case Study

House 22, Los Angeles, 1959.
Photograph by Julius Shulman in

Style exhibition) in the Mu- 1960.

seum of Modern Art, 10 Febru45. Edgar J. Kaufman, Jr., and
ary-23 March 1932
Margaret Arlen during
17. House of Tomorrow, interior

16. House of Tomorrow, garage with biplane

30. Installation view of the same

L'Effort Moderne, Paris, 1923,
Kaufman's guest appearance on
view of gallery with models of 18. Keck, Crystal House, Cen- exhibition in Bullocks-Wilshire
the Morning Show, 1954
experimental houses by Theo tury of Progress International department store, Los Angeles,
46. Peter Blake, Pinwheel House,
van Doesburg and Cornelis van Exposition, Chicago, 1934, with23 July-30 August 1932
Long Island, 1955
Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion 31. Buckminster Fuller with the
Eesteren. Right: model of
car
47.
Robertson + McAnulty,
Maison Rosenberg; back right:
model of the Dymaxion House
Room in the City, 1987
model of Maison d'Artiste; left:
19. Edgar J. Kaufman, Jr., di32. Frederick Kiesler, Space
model of Maison Particuliere. rector of the Department of
48. Diller + Scofidio, Slow House,
House, 1933. The shell of the
1991
8. Le Corbusier, Pavilion de
Industrial Design, Museumhouse
of was in continuous tenModern
Art,
New
York,
1951.
L'Esprit Nouveau, Exposition
sion, a construction principle 49. Michael Webb, Drive-In
House, 1988
des Arts Decoratifs, Paris, 1925, 20. Gregory Ain, Women'sdeveloped to reduce dead load
interior view showing, on the
Home Companion, exhibition
and to eliminate column sup50. La Casa telematica (the
right, a diorama of the Ville
house in the Museum of Modport. The column seen here
Telematic Home), International
Contemporaire de 3 millions
could not be removed from the
ern Art's courtyard, 1950
Fair of Milan, 1983
d'habitants and, on the left, a
exhibition floor.
diorama of the Plan Voison de
21. Frederick Kiesler, plan of
51. Thomas Leeser, Twin House,
the Endless House for the MuParis
33, 34. Space House, details of 1991
seum of Modern Art, 1960
the carpet and the twine curtain
9. Grete Schutte-Lihotzky,
52. Cover of Five Architects,
1972
22, 23. "Climate at your fin- 35. "Twindow." Advertisement
Frankfurter KOche, 1926,
model kitchen for low-income
gertips" and "Daily Living is for picture window in a stan53. Peter Eisenman, House II,
dard house, 1958
housing estates designed by Pleasanter," Idea House II,
Hardwick, Vermont, 1969. This
Walker
Art
Center,
1947
Ernst May in Frankfurt
36. Advertisement for
house, which was actually built,
10. J. J. P. Oud, kitchen,
24. Lobby entrance to "Good
Mercedes Benz, Model 8/38
is made to look in the photoWeissenhofsiedlung, Stuttgart,Design" exhibit, Merchandise
graph
as if it were a model.
37. Richard Neutra, Kaufman
1927
Mart, Chicago, presented in
54. Lawrence Kocher and Albert
(Desert)
House,
Palm
Springs,
collaboration with the Mu11. Berlin Building Exhibition,
1946. Photograph by Julius
Frey, Week-end House (project),
seum of Modern Art, 1950
1931. On the left is the Board1932
Shulman published in Life,
ing House, on the right, Mies's 25. Cover of Elizabeth Mock, If
April 1949.

65

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assemblage 27

Figure Credits
1, 2. Arts 6 Architecture (July 1944).

and Ray Eames, Eames Design:

22, 23. Everyday Art Quarterly 5

The Work of the Office of Charles

(Fall 1947).

and Ray Eames (New York: Harry

N. Abrams, 1989).

3. Philip Johnson,Mies van der

Rohe (New York: Museum of Mod-

14. The Architectural Forum (July

ern Art, 1947).

1940).

4. Mies Reconsidered: His Career,

15. The Architectural Forum (July

Legacy, and Disciples (Chicago: Art

Institute of Chicago, 1986).
5, 6. B. J. Archer, ed., Houses for

Sale (New York: Rizzoli, 1980; 2d

ed., 1981).
7. Yve-Alain Bois and Bruno

Reichlin, eds., De Stijl et

l'architecture en France (Brussels:
8. Le Corbusier and Pierre Jean-

neret, Oeuvre complte, vol. 1, 1910-

1929 (Zurich: Girsherger, 1930).

Post-war Architecture (New York:

16. George Larson, Chicago Architecture and Design (New York:

Harry N. Abrams, 1993).

Museum of Modern Art, 1952).

29, 30. Terence Riley, The Interna-

18. Narciso Menocal, Keck & Keck,

tional Style: Exhibition 15 and the

Museum of Modern Art (New York:

Abroad (New York: MoMA, 1994).

11, 12. Sonja Giintha, Lily Reich

versity of California, Santa Bar-

1885-1947 (Stuttgart: Deutsche

Verlags-Anstalt, 1988).

bara, 1980).
21. Ulrich Conrads and Hans
Sperlich, Fantastic Architecture

(London: Architectural Press, 1963).

41. Robert Mallet-Stevens: Architec-

ture, Furniture, Interior Design (Cam-

bridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990).

42, 43. Robert-Mallet-Stevens,
architecte (Brussels: Archives

44. Arts 5 Architecture (February

17. The Architectural Forum (Feb-

19, 24, 45. The Museum of Modern

Executed Buildings (1910; Palas Park,

Ill.: Prairie School Press, 1975).

d'Architecture Moderne, n.d.).

ruary 1934).

Art at Mid-Century: At Home and

40. Frank Lloyd Wright, Studies and

28. Edgar J. Kaufnman, Jr., What Is

Modern Interior Design? (New York:

Museum of Modern Art, 1953).

9, 10. Das neue Frankfurt 5 (192620. The Architecture of Gregory Ain

27).
(Santa Barbara: Art Museum, Uni-

13. Photograph by John Entenza.

John Neuhart, Marilyn Neuhart,

26, 27. Henry-Russell Hitchcock

and Arthur Drexler, Built in USA:

1933).

Architects (Madison: Alvehjemn

Museum of Art, 1980).

Mardaga, 1985).

25. Elizabeth Mock, If You Want to

Build a House (New York: Museum
of Modern Art, 1946).

37. Life (11 April 1949).

Rizzoli, 1992).
31, 38, 39. Fortune 33 (April 1946).
32. D. Bogner, Frederick Kiesler

(Vienna: Locker Verlag, 1988).

33, 34. Architectural Record (Janu-

ary 1934).
35. The Saturday Evening Post (26
April 1958).
36. A&V (Monograffas de
Arquitectura y Vivienda) 6 (1986).

66

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All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

1960).
46. Arts 6 Architecture (June 1955).

50. Gianfranco Bettetini et al., La

casa telematica, exhibition catalogue

(Milan: International Fair, 1983).
47-49, 51. Courtesy of the architects.
52, 53. Five Architects (New York:

Wittenborn, 1972).
54. Architectural Record (January

1934).