Both artists and architects have used the single-family home to explore universal topics and expand their disciplines in new ways

For Kiesler, the architectural model was a generative tool in its own right—something that could have its own conceptual existence independent of the built project. Contemporaneous to the Endless House is Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House (1945–51), with its compact layout and transparent glass walls strongly contrasting in sensibility. In the Endless House exhibition, the models on display push their discipline in new directions: from a house engineered as a visionary structural shell to a hybrid collection of sculptural forms; from a house submerged in a pastoral landscape to a continuous interior blurring domestic divisions between public and private; from artist’s houses revised to embrace contemporary live-work habits to a testing ground for new fabrication methods incorporating geometric models and digital technologies.

Raimund Abraham, The House without Rooms Project, Elevation and plan; 1974
Raimund Abraham, The House without Rooms Project, Elevation and plan; 1974

As a ubiquitous presence in our everyday lives, profoundly tied to the experience of belonging, the house plays an outsize role in the cultural imagination. Artists evoke the house through familiar architectural types—the pitched roof, the shuttered window, the suburban lawn, the Victorian terrace house—to explore the complex social, political, and cultural imaginaries it embodies as an archetypal space through which individuals mediate their relationship to the world. Martha Rosler and Sigmar Polke draw on media and popular press to explore the house as a symbol of a middle-class, consumer-driven lifestyle. Rodney Graham, Mario Merz, and Haus-Rucker-Co depict the house as a self-contained world shaped by literature or memory. Anthropomorphic houses by Louise Bourgeois, Sandile Goje, and Laurie Simmons mine the cultural and gender roles that characterize domestic life. Performance acts—splitting, casting, and swinging—by Gordon Matta-Clark, Rachel Whiteread, and Vito Acconci publicly invert and make visible private interiors. Thomas Schütte and Kevin Appel appropriate architectural elements and styles, from pitched roofs to LA-modernism, to fashion fictive houses for a new set of users. Wearable, portable, and inflatable shelters by Lucy Orta, Andrea Zittel, and Michael Rakowitz highlight the precariousness of a fixed definition of home in today’s conditions of global migration and uneven urban growth.