Housing the Universe

It’s hard not to love R. Buckminster Fuller. I mean, who else would send a telegram to explain E=MC².

That amazing document (sent by Fuller to his friend Isamu Noguchi in 1936) is one of the many engrossing bits of ephemera on display through Sept. 21 at the Whitney Museum’s current Fuller exhibition, “Starting with the Universe,” and it tells us volumes about Fuller. Whenever he had something to say, he said it, often for days at a stretch. His brain was constantly consumed with the serious issues of his day — issues that are still very much ours.

Fuller was obsessed with how people were housed:

“Our beds are empty two-thirds of the time.

Our living rooms are empty seven-eighths of the time.

Our office buildings are empty one-half of the time.

It’s time we gave this some thought.”

He was interested in exploiting geometry for the sake of maximum efficiency. Much of his career was spent creating utopian systems for housing (though he would have described them as utterly attainable), from the flying saucer-ish Dymaxion (an amalgam of Fuller’s most commonly used words: dynamic, maximum and tension) House to the stunningly efficient Standard of Living Package to the Geodesic Dome.

While Fuller excelled at creating magical forms, he failed miserably at gauging the public taste for them, as the headline for a 1932 article about the Dymaxion House in The New Orleans Tribune suggested: “When We Live in Circles and Eat in Merry-Go-Rounds.”

Fuller was undeterred, and as this engaging exhibit reveals, he continued to devote his life to doing more with less. How small could a space be and still allow people to live efficiently within it? Could a home, complete with everything from tables to toilets, be packed and delivered in a single crate? Could an entire city fit into one multipurpose modular building…that floated on water? All his explorations, however outlandish or wacky they may have appeared, were imbued with a laser-sharp sense of purpose: how to optimize the way we live.

Arguably, that’s the promise of modern prefab: to provide well-designed, more efficiently built homes. But that’s not where “Home Delivery,” the exhibition currently on view (through Oct. 20) at the Museum of Modern Art, sets its sights.

The puzzling thing about “Home Delivery” is its focus on homes that you can’t actually have delivered. The exhibition is chock full of gorgeous and historically significant architectural drawings and models, but the curatorial agenda of the show is muddled.

Curators Barry Bergdoll and Peter Christensen are enamored of digital fabrication, but that’s ultimately to the show’s detriment. They want to advocate for prefab on some level but the reasons for wanting to do so are unclear, and their decision to focus on the “curse of the prototype” that has plagued prefab for decades is confusing.

There has been wave after wave of groundbreaking proposals for prefab homes over the last century. Major architects and designers including Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, Charles Eames, Fuller and even Philippe Starck have tried their hand at factory-produced housing; none succeeded in producing in volume.

Knowing that, it’s hard to understand the decision to exclude from the exhibit the small but significant group of architects who are actually producing prefab homes on a significant scale today — a few microseconds of video clips in the sixth floor gallery notwithstanding.

Where are the modern prefab houses of Michelle Kaufmann, who has seen her business triple this year in response to a greater public awareness and desire for greener homes? (If you’d like to see one, travel to the installation of her Smart Home on view at Chicago’s Museum of Science & Industry through 2009).

Why no inclusion of Resolution: 4 Architecture, the Manhattan firm that designed the highly influential (and since very replicate-able) Dwell Home?

Where is designer Rocio Romero, who has delivered sleek kit homes that are every DIYer’s dream to clients in 26 states?

Or the BoKlok (which means “live smart”) homes from IKEA, for that matter? The masters of flatpack have built thousands of affordable prefab housing units in Europe in the last decade.

While studying for my art history MA, I recall reading revisionist texts that persuasively argued that the Impressionists were not just garret-dwelling dreamers but, in fact, very savvy marketers of their art. Quelle horreur! Many in the field took great offense at the notion that these great painters might actually want to sell their work. “Home Delivery”’s treatment of the current state of prefab seems to reflect a similar distaste for production and commerce.

Indeed, Bergdoll seems to have approached this non-art-historical subject in a traditional art-historical way. He holds onto the notion of the aura of the work of art (in this case, architecture) and seems to feel that mechanical production (if I can play around here with Walter Benjamin, who uses aura to describe the sense of awe and reverence one presumably experienced in the presence of unique works of art in his seminal 1936 text, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”) is somehow inferior. I’d like it if the show would have at least addressed the issue of prefab stigma more clearly.

If the intent of the exhibit was to fetishize the object (this is MoMA, after all), then fair enough. Presented as aesthetic objects, works by the likes of Archigram, Michael Jantzen and Greg Lynn succeed brilliantly. But the historic section lacks a clear purpose: Bergdoll presents prefab’s greatest 20th century one-offs (Prouve’s Maison Tropical, the Eames House, Kisho Kurokawa’s Nakagin Capsule Tower) together with a few examples of homes that were produced in limited but significant numbers (i.e., the all-steel Lustron Homes of the 1940s, the more than 170,000 World War II era Quonset Huts) but the show never connects the dots.

Bergdoll’s inspiration for “Home Delivery” was architect Marcel Breuer’s House in the Garden, commissioned by MoMA and installed in their Sculpture Garden in 1948. While Breuer’s home was meant to illustrate his vision of how the average American family could live in a well-designed, affordable modern home, the reasons for the assortment of homes commissioned for MoMA’s 2008 exhibit are far less clear.

The gorgeous System 3 module by Oskar Leo Kaufman dispels any notion of prefab construction as shoddy or low-rent, and the Housing for New Orleans prototype points to the potential to mix decoration/customization with CNC (computer numerically controlled) technology. Richard Horden 73-square-foot Micro Compact Home takes its cues from Fuller’s insistence that a compact space can be highly functional (if highly Spartan). The only nod to sustainability comes in the form of a seemingly gratuitous solar panel atop the Kieran Timberlake Cellophane House (which looks as if it was a section cut out from a Tribeca highrise). With its 1,100 non-identical plywood pieces, Jeremy Edmiston and Douglas Gauthier’s Burst *08 reminds me of nothing so much as a recent quote I read from Alice Waters about how the eternal quest of the chef is to make the simplest thing more complicated. But the average visitor isn’t given the tools to intuit any of this or to understand the reasons (beyond a desire to play with sophisticated software) that architects have been so drawn to prefab.

The timing of the Fuller show couldn’t have been better. Eccentric to be sure, this visionary couldn’t have been more prescient with his concerns about the way we live. “Starting with the Universe”’s cohesive curation lets us learn a lot from Fuller (and I wish I could take a contingent from the National Association of Homebuilders for a guided tour). In contrast, “Home Delivery” has tons of cool stuff to look at, but it really does feel odd that a show about homes has so little to say about the experience of actually living in one.