The Un-Private House - Softcover

Terence Riley

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0810961997 ISBN 13: 9780810961999

Publisher: Museum of Modern Art, 1999

How would you build a house for a cyborg? The Un-Private House examines this and other questions confronting domestic architecture as the 20th century turns into the 21st. Changes in family structure, shifting concepts of privacy and domesticity, the home as workplace, and the revolution in communications and media have created totally new relationships between exterior and interior worlds. Photographs, plans, and drawings present 26 projects by architectural firms in the United States, Europe, and Japan. Their innovations include spectacular new materials, including "smart skins" through which houses themselves transmit information, as well as structural forms. The houses presented here, and their architects, are not only reconfiguring the domestic landscape but also launching the first architectural debates of the new century.

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Review:

The Un-Private House exhibition is only the second significant exploration of residential architecture lodged by the Museum of Modern Art, and the first one was way back in 1934. This book is well timed and should prove fascinating to any and all who are interested in considering the infinity of ways in which we might live.

This writer's favorite object of contemplation from the book is located in Tokyo and is called the "Curtain Wall House." It stands three stories tall, all with mostly open floor plans on a corner lot. An enormous curtain of fabric hangs along the two sides of the house that face the corner of the lot. In order to close the house in and make it private, one must draw the curtain around the multistory space. When the curtain is open, all the workings of the home are revealed. This is an extreme dwelling with an apparent simplicity that confounds its real meaning.

The Un-Private House is the catalog for a show of the same name at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Terence Riley, chief curator of architecture and design at the museum, put the show together and provides all of the text for the book. He suggests that for centuries one of the highest functions of the single-family home has been seclusion from the public realm. Here Riley has compiled a fabulous collection of cutting-edge solutions to this condition. --Loren E. Baldwin

About the Author:

Terence Riley is Chief Curator of Architecture and Design at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Before joining the museum he established an architecture practice with John Keenen, and was Director of the Arthur Ross Architecture Galleries at Columbia University, where he has been an adjunct faculty member since 1987. Riley's curatorial work has focused primarily on major figures and themes in contemporary architecture, and includes Frank Lloyd Wright: Architect, The Un-Private House, Fabrications, and, most recently, Mies in Berlin.

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