from the House of the Future to a house of today
4 April to 13 Juni 2004
Witte de With, Rotterdam
Striving to adapt the progressive ideas of the pre-war modern movement to the specific human needs of post-war reconstruction, Alison and Peter Smithson were among the most influential and controversial architects of the latter half of the twentieth century.
As younger members of CIAM (Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne) and as founding members of Team 10 they were at the heart of the debate on the future course of Modern Architecture. Their polemics and designs - addressing issues such as the rising consumer society and the orientation of urban planning - laid the foundations for New Brutalism and the Pop Art Movement of the 1960s.
An important adaptation made by the Smithsons and their generation was the rejection of modernism's machine aesthetics. The new notions of place and territory were juxtaposed to Le Corbusier's machine à habiter. To the Smithsons a house was a particular place, which should be suited to its location and able to meet the ordinary requirements of everyday life and to accommodate its inhabitants' individual patterns of use.
This exhibition examines the evolution of the Smithsons' approach to this everyday "art of inhabitation." It does this by extensively documenting most of their designs for individual dwellings, especially their optimistic House of the Future of 1956 and the series of renovations of and additions to the fairy-tale-like Hexenhaus in Germany from the late 1980s onward.
The Smithsons' interest in the everyday and ordinary originated from various circumstances, such as their experience of wartime and the poverty and scarcity during the post-war reconstruction period. More or less forced by circumstances, the Smithsons were determined to make the most out of what little there was available. They called this approach "As Found:" aiming at a revitalization of the ordinary and the most humble of things. The ordinariness of inhabitation, its triviality and self-evidence, was a constant source of amazement, inspiration and energy for the Smithsons. They wished to look at "ordinary life and ordinary objects with an eye that sees the ordinary as also magical." It often set them thinking about bigger issues. Singing the praises of cabinet doors could therefore easily result in an exemplification of the house-town correlation.
Current interest,
in both the everyday and the magic of the ordinary, stems from a quite
different situation. In the Western world, most people now live a life
of unprecedented plenty. The society of the spectacle and the consumer
culture that were just remote prospects in the 1950s have become our everyday
reality. The everyday and its earthiness function as a critical moment,
breaking down the illusions and desires produced by the media industry.
Besides being a site for possible resistance, the everyday and the ordinary
offer an alternative approach. First, by providing a space into which
one can retreat; a refugium, a place for calmness and reflection, a breathing
space. Secondly, by providing the opportunity to once again reconsider
the relations between media, consumer society and inhabitation. The point
at issue in both cases is the construction of new places for dwelling.
Emphatically, the everyday neither provides an idyllic spot nor regains
us our lost innocence. On the contrary, it constitutes a site of contestation
of values, where new relations between realism and idealism may be established.
Witte de Withstraat 50
3012 BR Rotterdam
wdw.nl