Search Salon

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Recently in Salon Arts & Entertainment

Philosophy of the bedroom
Mary Gaitskill, Greil Marcus, David Gates, Lisa Zeidner and A.M. Homes weigh in on "Eyes Wide Shut."

[07/23/99]

Movie Review
"Drop Dead Gorgeous"
A mockumentary about a Midwestern teen beauty pageant turns out to be the guiltiest of this summer's guilty pleasures.
By Mary Elizabeth Williams
[07/23/99]

Music Review
Sharps & flats
The evanescent Spinanes sharpen two songs from the Rolling Stones' catalog, chronicling the impulse to fight emotional weariness and the temptation to succumb to it.
By Charles Taylor
[07/23/99]

Movie Review
"The Haunting"
Catherine Zeta-Jones playing a lesbian in a fur-trimmed vest? That's not scary -- that's hilarious.
By Stephanie Zacharek
[07/22/99]

Music Review
Sharps & flats
A new Astralwerks compilation takes the electronic pulse of underground urban America.
By Amanda Nowinski
[07/22/99]

Complete archives for Arts & Entertainment

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Terence Riley, curator of the new MOMA exhibit "The Un-Private House," talks about Martha Stewart, changing domestic ideals and why walking around your house naked is increasingly a public issue.

- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Julie Caniglia

July 26, 1999 | It was 100 years ago that Swedish artist Carl Larsson published his classic paean to domestic life, "A Home." Loving watercolor depictions of his family abode were accompanied by wistful musings, such as the one about his "Cozy Corner," where he "experienced that unspeakably sweet feeling of seclusion from the noise of the world."

Today, "Home sweet home" seems like an antiquated notion. The nuclear family is no more. One-quarter of all Americans currently live alone, and a third of the couples living together are doing so without children. As for seclusion? From radios on up to satellite dishes and Web TV, the stream of media into (and out of) the home has grown constant. Meanwhile, borders between work and home are shifting, if not disappearing altogether.

"The Un-Private House," a new exhibit at New York's Museum of Modern Art, showcases 26 homes that take these changes to heart. Dispensing with cherished ideals and traditions of homemaking, they attempt to update Le Corbusier's idea of the home as a "machine for living." A house for a Minneapolis bachelor is a radical reworking of a suburban residence, tucked behind an unchanged '50s facade. Sprawling over an English hillside, an imposing six-bedroom home has thatch on the walls instead of the roof -- and an entire, separate dwelling for the children. A loft for two Wall Street traders features digital screens, strategically placed across from the kitchen and living room, so the owners can keep constant tabs on the market.

Indeed, many aspects of these un-private homes are unsettling: One home has the garage located on the roof, with a sloping walkway sliced into it that leads down to the front door. (So when it rains, do you welcome a big puddle of runoff into the house upon opening the door?) Another has a round, floor-to-ceiling door/window in a child's bedroom, akin to a vault door, but hinged on its axis. It seems like a nifty idea, until you realize it opens out into thin air, with a drop down two stories.

If some of the home designs seem off-putting or downright alienating, the design of "The Un-Private House" is a mix of comfortable domestic references and high-tech accouterments. Large-scale digital images of the homes serve as wallpaper in the exhibit, while sturdy beds and tables act as pedestals for architectural models. Virtual home tours play on the latest flat-screen TVs. The centerpiece of the exhibit is a living room-like reading area with irresistibly cushy seating and a small library of architectural titles; but the show's pride and joy is a large round table where people sit down together to feast on digital information. At the center, a Lazy Susan holds 26 coaster-sized disks, one for each house: Set one on a "placemat" at the table, and an interactive guide to the house appears on the Corian surface, projected from above. If visitors revert to their couch-potato selves in the exhibit's living room, here at the dining table they're like eager kids reveling in a deluxe Lego set.

I sat down with the curator of "The Un-Private House," Terence Riley, to talk about people's fierce attachment to domestic ideals, the secret of Martha Stewart's success and how the blurred lines between private and public extend beyond the home.

You framed "The Un-Private House" around the idea that home life has changed more in the past 30 to 50 years than in the previous, say, 400 years. But in the larger picture, most homes have changed so little. Are we really thinking all that differently in terms of our domestic lives?

The biggest change I see that is really going to drive domestic architecture, as well as society, is the notion that the man gets up in the morning and leaves the house, goes out in the world and lives out this role as a public person -- leaving the women and children in the home as a kind of cocoon. This is such a fundamental part of traditional middle-class culture. But virtually all those things have changed. For instance, it's entirely likely that a household these days has no kids, whereas some people have argued that the ultimate goal of the bourgeois was to raise children to inherit your property -- a kind of capitalistic means of overcoming death.

Some segments of society are addressing these changes, but it seems there's another segment that is actually retrenching on the domestic scene. Everybody supposedly needs these SUVs, for instance, which are bigger than any '50s station wagon. They're driving them into gated communities and parking them at the mini-mansion. How does all this relate to your vision of the un-private house?

Gated communities are the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. housing market. They're fantasies -- self-delusions, really -- being played out on a mass scale, with massive amounts of dollars. But does a gated community really reinforce this notion of the private house? These mini-mansion guys aren't secluded from the world. They've got their Bloomberg computers to watch their stocks, their satellite dishes, cell phones, security systems. It's not so much keeping anything in or out, as keeping everything.

The mini-mansion may look traditional, but inside are televisions with cabinets that open and close automatically. These houses are wired to the max, and yet their owners are more comfortable with the imagery of pre-technological revolution houses. [Urban historian] Witold Rybczynski and other people who don't really care for modernist imagery, they'll say: What's wrong with hiding technology? Plumbing gets hidden in the walls -- even modernists didn't insist on putting the pipes out!

There's another argument that stems from new urbanism, that we need front porches and peaked roofs and obvious entries to homes -- these forms are hard-wired into our psyche as symbols of home, they help stabilize us in an unstable world. I've even read that traditional, vertically oriented windows are better than horizontal picture windows because they echo a standing, active human body -- as opposed to a lying-down, presumably depressed or even dead person.

Well, I don't think anybody's DNA has a peaked roof in it. I'd say that's an acquired association. There are plenty of examples in Europe and elsewhere where the principles of the new urbanism are played out just fine, they're in practice in many places in the world. But adding a sort of stylistic mandate to them just seems kind of crazy.

The point is that good urbanism comes in different scales, different styles, and it also comes from having unexpected or new things. It's not just this canned, closed set of references. The Dutch row houses in the show are individualized statements about the people who live there, what they do and what they need, but they're also building blocks designed to be modified and put elsewhere. They fit into the city's fabric, even though they're not traditional. The new urbanists have it right, that pieces should fit together and make something -- it's the presumed aesthetic program and a lot of the values that thereby get grafted onto new urbanism that I have a problem with. In Europe, you can see how they've dealt with a lot of those urban issues that making living in the cities great. It doesn't have to mean picket fences, or front porches done in ye olde lemonade stand-style. Porches can be whatever they want to be.

Next page | America's crisis of authenticity