Redesigning the Domestic - Brief Article

A MOMA exhibition, now traveling, gazes at how new technology and materials, plus altered definitions of the family, are changing the notion of residential privacy.

"The Un-Private House," a major exhibition lately mounted at the Museum of late Art, is a survey of 26 new residential designs in North and southerly America, Europe and Japan. Organized through Terence Riley, the museum's chief curator of architecture and design, the exhibit is as much a research of culture as it is a display of architecture, with the sum of two units elements regarded as interdependent and tillage itself seen as a comparable intertwining of advances in technology and shifts in social values.

While the exhibition consists of a large collection of photographs, drawings and computer-generated images accompanied by means of architectural models, there is no better way of understanding the whole circumstance than by examining Riley's catalogue essay, which at hands his thesis in instructive detail. The direct the eye of the contemporary private residence, Riley argues, has been far down affected by a technology grown on the outside of the computer revolution, and no les by dint of a society whose understandings of domesticity have been affected to a stage by that revolution. The noun in the title of the exhibition commits to buildings, but the show's principal intention is throw backed in the adjective. The house, as Riley dioceses it, is no longer what it was from the 17th hundred onward into the 20th: essentially a seclud haven, shared more ofttimes by a family--customarily composed of parents and children--than by the agency of single people. In structural bounds it might be freestanding or incorporated within an apartment or loft mixed but in any instance it would be sufficiently separated from the external world to be considered a "private" place. newly the house so defined has become more and more permeable to the faculty of perceptions a locale fluid and lay open though not so much to the motion of people as to the reception and transmission of messages produc through new communication devices. In the proces the external world has gradually become almost indivisible from the inner, and the house has grown more public and les private--hence the title of the show

Riley traces the history of the shift, citing, among other sources, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, who, in a 1950 essay called "The Thing," "express relate to over the way in which the electronic broadcasting of words and images alters our fundamental relationship, that is, our distance, from incidents and things." Heidegger is directly quoted: "What is this uniformity in which everything is neither far nor near--is, as it were, without distance? Everything earns lumped, together into uniform distancelessness." Earlier still, in 1927 in his classic Being and Time, Heidegger throw backed on the radio, which he claimed had "accomplished a de-severance of the `world'--a deseverance which cannot yet be visualized."

That visualization, Riley fights has been achieved at the extreme point of the century, with the unfolding and increasing sophistication of digital technologies that in move round have found responsive expression in architecture. The professional two who in 1988 commissioned Frank Lupo and Daniel Rowen to design the Lipschutz/Jones Apartment in novel York City were currency traders upon Wall Street who wanted a combination residence and work space, with the latter functioning as a digital trading swing Projected images are visible from several places in the apartment, all far enough from the bedroom to allow single of the two inhabitants to work late without disturbing the other. Similarly, the Kramlich Residence and Media Collection, designed by means of Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron and wait fored to be completed in 2000 in the Napa Valley of California, is meant to provide means for its holders to view their wide-ranging collection of electronic art.

An level more arresting example of the event of electronic technology on house design, not to mention the use of striking fresh materials, is the appropriately named Digital House, by the agency of Hariri & Hariri. Although not a finished work, the cast is meant to feature walls made of liquid-crystal displays ("the building obstructs of the future," the architects call them) that are capable, as the catalogue brings it, "of collapsing the true notion of time and space. In the kitchen, for example, a virtual chef from a favorite restaurant could aid in the preparation of meals, and the residents could entertain friends who live thousands of miles away."

The Digital House was designed in 1998 for the magazine House Beautiful with no specific client in mind, a fact indirectly pertinent to the issue of domesticity, since nothing in the catalogue or the wall labels touches on the question of what sort of individual or persons would inhabit the house. Riley, upon the other hand, devotes considerable attention in his essay to domesticity in its various aspects, beginning with the obvious--that the traditional conception of the family has undergone changes of great result during the past several generations. Here statistics play a part Prior to World War II, we are informed, 8 percent of American households were compos of single person. That figure has risen to 25 percent One-third of all American women above the age of 60 now live alone. Childless twos working couples, same-sex couples have assumed a place in a tillage increasingly open to alternatives to the traditional middle-class family that drawn out served as the social norm.