MoMA's Home Delivery gets a glowing review from the NY Times

The New York Times architecture critic provided a glowing review of MoMA's Home Delivery in this morning's paper:

"Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling," which opens on Sunday at the Museum of Modern Art, is a delightful surprise....In a tour de force Mr. Bergdoll [the show's curator] was able to build five full-scale model houses for the show in a lot just west of the museum. The effect is startling: expressions of a suburban utopian world surrounded by Midtown’s looming skyscrapers.

Mr. Bergdoll has not only managed to track down some unexpected gems, he has also arranged them in a way that allows us to see them with fresh eyes. He makes a convincing case that prefabricated housing was both a central theme of Modernist history and a dream that remains very much alive today.

We've provided extensive coverage of the full-scale homes; this review adds details on the accompanying exhibits:

[the show] presents more than 80 projects, from humble experiments in suburban living to stunning works of cretive imagination.

Here's a sample: (plus some external links we dug up)

• wall fragments from architects Rahim, Hina Jamelle, Jesse Reiser and Nanako Umemoto
• One Week: "a 1920 Buster Keaton film in which fumbling young newlyweds try to assemble a prefabricated house"
• the Manning Portable Cottage: an 1833 prefab that "could be conveniently packed in a ship's hold and reassembled."
• the 1931 Copper House: "designed by the Modernist master Walter Gropius. It was conceived as a system of insulated copper wall panels that could be easily transported and assembled on site in 24 hours."
• Jean Prouvé's Maison por l'Institutrice: "a reworking of his 1948 Maison Tropicale, a masterpiece of prefabricated design."
• the Lustron House: "modern technology draped as nostalgia"
• Archigram's 1965 Living Pod: "an amoeba-shaped capsule with mechanical systems plugged into the side"
• Kisho Kurokawa's Nakagin Capsule Tower, which was slated for demolition last year
• Primitive Huts by Wes Jones
• works from Greg Lynn and Teddy Cruz
• Thomas Edison's Simple Concrete House System

Read the full article for more details and a new slideshow with 12 images.

One correction to the article: the frame of the Cellophane House is aluminum not "lightweight steel."