Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling

July 20–October 20, 2008

MoMA, New York

Home Delivery at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is a two-part exhibition that includes a historical survey of prefabricated houses in a museum gallery and five full-scale contemporary houses in the outdoor space west of MoMA

Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling offers the most thorough examination to date of both the historic and contemporary significance of factoryproduced narchitecture from 1833 to today. The long history of prefabricated housing is presented in a gallery exhibition of some 60 projects represented by drawings, ephemera, models, photographs, patent applications, films, computer animations, and partially assembled full-scale houses, as well as four new commissions of wall fragments that could be used in designing prefabricated buildings. In the outdoor space to the west of the Museum, five contemporary architectural firms have been invited by MoMA to display full-scale, prefabricated houses which attest to the popularity and innovation of factory-produced architecture today. The exhibition is organized by Barry Bergdoll, The Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design, with Peter Christensen, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Architecture and Design, The Museum of Modern Art.
Home Delivery is a survey of prefabrication, a dream of modernist architects since the turn of the twentieth century. Today, with increasing concern for issues such as sustainability and a swelling global population, prefabrication has taken center stage as a prime solution to a host of pressing needs, and continues to spur innovative manufacturing and imaginative design. This exhibition traces the major driving forces of the avant-gardes of the 1920s and 1930s, which have
episodically returned to the forefront in every new dialogue about architecture’s relationship with serial production: in the golden decade after World War II, with its economic prosperity and baby boom and corresponding housing shortage; in the 1960s with the introduction of new materials; and again in the past decade as the capacity of the computer has dramatically changed the climate of production.

Mr. Bergdoll explains, “In architecture, the history of prefabrication is, in some senses, the
history of modernism. The prefabricated house continues to be one of architecture’s most radical
pursuits. Prefabrication is a reflection on the house as a critical agent in the discourse of
sustainability, architectural invention, and new formal research.”
The houses erected in the outdoor space at MoMA are designed by Kieran Timberlake
Architects (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania); Lawrence Sass (Cambridge, Massachusetts); Jeremy
Edmiston and Douglas Gauthier (New York, New York); Oskar Leo Kaufmann and Albert Rüf of
Oskar Leo Kaufmann Architects (Dornbirn, Austria); and Richard Horden (London, England, and
Munich, Germany) with architects Lydia Haack + John Höpfner, (Munich, Germany).

The sixthfloor galleries also display four new commissions: fragments of Water Block House (2007) by Kengo Kuma (Tokyo), and three fragments of digitally fabricated walls by the architecture firms Reiser Umemoto (New York), Contemporary Architecture Practice (Philadelphia), and Marble Fairbanks (New York).

photos by Martijn Deurloo