House Housing, "An Untimely History of Architecture and Real Estate in Nineteen Episodes", was recently exhibited at Columbia University's Casa Muraro in Venice. Staged as an "open house" organised and funded by the Buell Center, the exhibition responded unsolicited to Rem Koolhaas's call to exhibitors at the 2014 Venice Biennale to focus on Fundamentals by exploring housing in nineteen "discrete episodes." In narrating these episodes, brought together from across the last one hundred years in a mixture of domestic media, the exhibition brought together a collection of excerpts from global processes.
"In architecture, economic fundamentals are built from the ground up. The laws of real estate—relating to the acquisition of land, the financing of construction, the cost of building maintenance and services, profit from rent or resale, the value of equity, or the price of credit—inexorably shape any building component (like a window) and any build- ing type (like a house). They are visible even in the residential work of such singular figures as Frank Lloyd Wright, not least because the Greek oikos, or household, forms the root of the word “economy” itself. But look closely and you will see that what seems fundamental, basic, or natural is, like any other law, a historical artifact permanently under construction and subject to change."
Find out more about the project here, and discover the The Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture here.
