For [Kiesler], a house was a not a machine but a total work of art. His Endless House, which he worked on for four decades and never completed, took the form of a womblike ovoid whose ceiling folds into the walls; a spiral staircase descends like a stalactite.
As airy drawings for the house attest, Kiesler never made it to the planning stage: His sketches are energetic, circuitous and at times incomprehensible. At one point MoMA commissioned him to create a full-scale model for its sculpture garden, but that went bust. Kiesler did, however, finish a smaller model for the museum’s 1960 exhibition “Visionary Architecture,” and as surreal photos here document, the model was itself an unstable work in progress. What began as an egglike form on a plinth metastasized into a bulbous, unruly assemblage. It’s as if, in Kiesler’s vision, life and building were so congruent that the house itself would grow along with its inhabitants.
Kiesler’s Endless House sets the tone here for contributions by postwar artists who interrogated the form and the meaning of the single-family house. This section of the show feels all over the shop, as if Mr. Gadanho, the curator, simply typed the word “house” into the search engine of MoMA’s collection database. But there are some prizes. Martha Rosler’s biting photomontage of a tract house visited by a Vietnam War-era soldier, and Sigmar Polke’s screen print of a bourgeois cottage festooned with flowers unearth the economic and political hypocrisies symbolized by the home, and the nuclear family within. Finest of all is a preparatory drawing for Rachel Whiteread’s “House,” a major destroyed sculpture that this British artist created by filling an East London rowhouse with poured concrete, then ripping off the outer walls, leaving a ghostly cast of its interior. In the drawing, from 1992, Ms. Whiteread has sketched the house’s glum facade on graph paper, then filled its spaces with white correction fluid: a foretaste of the sculpture’s act of creation through erasure.