Earlier this month on her New York Times blog, Allison Arieff posted a well-argued commentary on MoMA's Home Delivery show:
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.
Specifically:
...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.
She mentions:
In contrast, Arieff liked the Whitney Museum's now-closed show on housing pioneer Buckminster Fuller:
Eccentric to be sure, this visionary couldn’t have been more prescient with his concerns about the way we live.... 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.
I'm sorry that we missed that one.
Read the full post for more details; Arieff knows the field.
blog: By Design
publication: The New York Times
author: Allison Arieff
length: 1,400 words
publication date: September 15, 2008