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.
The idea of being technologically wired runs through a lot of the houses in this exhibit. The architects Hariri & Hariri mention how in their Digital House, empty spaces are "no longer a waste of time" -- having digital screens as walls creates "opportunities for heightened awareness." What's with this ideal of 100 percent total engagement? Is there no longer a value in doing nothing, or having emptiness, or just plain relaxing?
Don't just do something. Sit there! [Laughs.] Well, people are going to have to learn how to manipulate technology to their own benefit. Every new technology offers promise -- and behind every promise there's a risk, just as behind every risk there's a promise, as the saying goes. I'm willing to believe that there's a more dignified way of living, and that technology is probably the answer, but you probably have to learn how to live with it. Take the loft in the exhibit that belongs to the couple who are traders on Wall Street -- they actually trade out of their home, around the world, so they might be working with foreign markets at 3 a.m.
When I would describe their lives, people would groan. They think this couple must be freaks, or automatons, or incredible economic animals. But the fact is, they're a good example of learning how to live with this stuff. They don't have a bunch of computers sitting around their bedroom; they've made a space for them, and you can see that space from a couple other places, but you can also close it off. You can do whatever people have done ever since radios, telephones, televisions were introduced to the house: Find some way of controlling them so they don't run your life.
But I think there's long been a popular fear, especially in the last 10 years, that technology is like this tsunami that's coming and is going to sweep over us and subjugate everybody.
Some people are concerned about being overwhelmed by technology, but at the same time, I don't think there's been another time in the 20th century when technology has had such a high degree of respect or popularity. After the world wars, there were these periods where technology was really seen as this evil force.
Also during the arts and crafts movement at the turn of the century, which was a reaction to all the new technology at that time.
That was a generation of people who were feeling the first shocks of the industrial age. And if I think our superhighways are ugly, the initial manifestations of the industrial age were indeed crude, loud, dirty -- the reason why we have zoning to keep factories away from residences. There was a huge disparity between contemporary life and another life that people knew so well, but was out of reach: the wife at home cooking meals, things being made as they had been for centuries, furniture hand-carved by specially trained people -- this whole notion of reality that was severely challenged by the Industrial Revolution. There was a crisis of authenticity when things started getting manufactured out of new materials, with stamping, casting, printing. It's hard for us to imagine how much it threw that culture into a tizzy.
You could say we're having a similar crisis of authenticity today. People choose electronic "wallpaper" for their "desktops." And then in so-called real life, you have enterprises like [furniture store] Restoration Hardware that capitalize on the crisis, building stories around mission lamps and old metal juicers. They hark back to a time that people today probably never knew themselves.
That's what Martha Stewart's all about, too. When she works with these very romantic, sentimental notions about domestic life, people know she's not referring to their parents' world -- it's clearly about how their grandparents lived, or going even further back. It's also about making things. Her deal works so well because making things has become very exotic in a Western industrialized world that is now basically all consumers. Nobody makes anything -- they don't make food, bread, fabrics.
So she embodies a more literal arts and crafts ideal for our turn of the century?
Well, the original arts and crafts people were trying to reinstitute a world that was still within memory. With Martha Stewart it's different -- she can show people how to bake bread, or make nails for that matter -- her magazine reminds us that at one time people actually did make these things for themselves.
What was once necessity has become an exotic form of leisure.
It is. It's like these people with gym bodies. They don't have muscles from hard work; they have muscles from having time off. And baking bread now is not about work, it's about leisure.
The BV house in England, where the children have their own separate house, reminded me again of mainstream mini-mansions, where the parents have a "master suite" set apart from the kids' areas. I wonder if another psychological shift is occurring where people are becoming less sentimental about children, or the ideals of childhood in general.
There are two houses in the show like that. At first these places seem crazy, you think what are these people doing? Do they not like their kids?
It's especially touchy in the wake of the Littleton high school shootings. People were horrified that these parents had no idea of what their kids were up to. What were they doing -- or not doing -- to their kids?
The houses in the show do tend to have more public spaces. When the kids aren't in their rooms -- which, unlike [in] the mini-mansion, aren't really these huge suites, just more functional sleeping rooms -- they're in these big, open social spaces. So there is a kind of balance there. But there's another way of looking at that sentimentality issue. My own mother became a mommy 10 months after she became a Mrs., but a lot of couples these days are having kids later in life. They may have lived for 10 years as a couple with a romantic life, a private life together. And I think when they have kids, there's a hesitation to completely give up this notion of themselves as a couple. This doesn't come at the expense of the devotion to children -- when this kind of couple decides to have kids, it tends to be a very conscious decision. They're serious about being parents, but they also realize that people are capable of some separation as well: a little bit of autonomy, a little bit of privacy.
That ideal is worked into the design of their houses, and also in more mainstream houses, to a less obvious extreme. Maybe because people still seem wary of it.
It's this thing about institutionalizing it that gets people antsy. People think in the back of their minds, even though they could never bring themselves to say it, that women should stay home. Families with two parents working are dealing with things as best they can, and hopefully not producing more Trench Coat Mafia kids, but people fear there's something wrong with this way of living -- even if they themselves are doing it. It isn't "right" enough to be enshrined in the house.
It shows how the house can be an emotional battlefield, not just for its residents, but people on the outside. Wasn't there a backlash against Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's glass house -- both the house and the woman who lived there?
They were suspicious of the house itself, and the fact that its owner was a single woman in her 40s -- and a doctor. Obviously, Mrs. Farnsworth would hardly be a freak today, and the Farnsworth House would probably go down as one of the more elegantly conservative homes.
And yet she eventually decided she didn't like living there, which brings up the issue of physical transparency in these un-private houses. Take the glass house in Houston, and the pair of row houses in Amsterdam -- or the most dramatic case, the house in Tokyo that has a giant, two-story curtain running along two of its facades. These are all in urban neighborhoods. Since you've visited these houses and the people living in them, how do they actually get along there?
Two things. Almost every glass house I've seen has curtains. It isn't that there's no privacy, it's an operable kind of privacy -- you modulate it depending on what's happening in the house. Plus, the Farnsworth house is completely out of view of other houses. In a more dense atmosphere, like in Houston, Amsterdam or Tokyo, it's more of an issue. But it's not just you in the house -- it's the public.
And if you're prone to walking around naked in your glass house with the curtain open -- are you making other people uncomfortable, or angry at you for encroaching on their sense of modesty? It's a two-way thing that society negotiates. The curtain-wall house in Tokyo is actually a surprise, because the tendency there is to be more reserved, whereas in Amsterdam they have prostitutes in shop windows and sex is a commonplace dinner topic.
I saw how much people -- myself included -- were enjoying themselves in the living-room area of the exhibit, plopped down on these sofas like they were their own. Starbucks had to start competing with the cozier independent shops by putting comfy chairs and reading areas in their stores. And you see movie theaters putting in love seats ... maybe this is a kind of more physical transparency for people who don't live in an architect-designed un-private house -- they're gravitating toward being more at home in public.
I think they definitely are. In Paris at the turn of the 20th century, there was a cafe for every 67 people. Parisians had this very developed notion of the neighborhood as a public living room. And Americans are starting to feel more comfortable with that, even though we're normally thought of as generally very reserved, private people.
The design for the bachelor pad in the suburbs is striking because it touches on this whole other architectural wave: retrofitting a suburban house for other needs than raising a family. For one or two people, a house like that could be a small palace -- and with all these demographic changes, it seems likely that we could end up with a huge glut of suburban family homes on the market.
I think that's happening now, actually. People have already transformed the way they live. The question is now, do they want to make a decision about the way their house looks that reflects that, or not? For probably one of the first times ever, "resale" -- the idea that you never want to do anything out of the ordinary with your house, because then it won't sell -- is not so much an issue. When so many households are couples without children, and 25 percent of people are living alone, quite frankly, resale doesn't mean as much. There are a lot of people out there who may very well want what you have.
