House Housing, in Pieces

Between 2013 and 2016, a team at GSAPP’s Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture attempted to answer a series of questions: What is the relationship between architecture, real estate, and the imagination? How are designers implicated in the profit-driven development that significantly shapes how we live? How did this happen?

House Housing responds in thirty-six episodes, spanning from the early twentieth century to the present. Ordinary artifacts generated by governments, industries, institutions, and individuals tell short stories that show how design, policy, finance, culture, and politics interconnect. As indicated by the project’s title, this multi-media history is untimely in two respects. First, it returns us to matters widely discussed in the aftermath of the 2008 mortgage foreclosure crisis—issues that are now re-emerging but which have not fully taken hold in professional architectural circles. Second, the exhibition’s non-linear chronology reveals surprising repetitions of earlier debates and actions. Tables turn as history repeats, differently each time, and House Housing shows concretely the many ways in which architecture participates in the making and breaking of these cycles.

On the occasion of the exhibition’s opening, Buell’s Assistant Director and the project’s Co-curator (with Susanne Schindler), Jacob Moore, will present on the project and discuss its themes with Pedro Abramo, UFRJ and Carlos Feferman (FAU UFRJ).