Història en Obres - a portal on history of modern architecture

interpretative model

House in the MoMA garden. Southeast view

House in the MoMA garden. Southeast façade

House in the MoMA garden. Northwest façade

House in the MoMA garden. Southwest façade

plans

House in the MoMA garden. Plans

analysis

In 1948, eleven years after Marcel Breuer’s arrival to the United States, the New York Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) held an exhibition of the architect’s work and edited a catalogue with comments by Peter Blake. Probably due to this previous contact, Breuer was commissioned for another exhibition at the museum. The House in the Garden was staged at the MoMa’s sculpture garden between April and October 1949; it was addressed to North-American suburbia construction and intended for the nuclear family. After the show was finished, project plans could be bought for the construction of the house.

The body of the house, a 6 by 20 m (19,7 by 65,6 ft) rectangle, sits at a right angle to West 54th Street in an adjacent garden to the museum, simulating a hypothetical lot in a garden-city neighbourhood of any given North-American suburb. It was mainly constructed in cypress wood, not only the exterior shell, but also the plywood structural panels and ceilings. The building stood over a reinforced concrete slab and concrete footings. The exterior of the house was organized by means of variation of the floor tiling, low stone walls and wood fences. Breuer already tried this concept in the Robinson House (1946-48), although in this case, the ground plan composition recalled the earlier formative years in Weimar Germany.

The linear architectural programme, distributed in an elongated plan scheme, was a priory experimented rationale in other projects, such as the Hagerty House, the Chamberlain and the Cape Cod Cottages. Nevertheless, unlike these other houses, the MoMA House rested entirely over the floor and furthermore, the terrace was substituted by the exterior extension of the tiled floor, accounting for the use of planes and exterior walls. We therefore can say that Breuer joined certain aspects that were present in both of the house types developed in that decade: the bi-nuclear house and the elongated plan scheme house.

In comparison to the rest of his work, the use of the distinctive butterfly roof was very innovative. Breuer had used this type of roof for the first time at the H House—the Designs for Post-war Living competition entry, the Geller House I and in the Robinson House. Nevertheless, for the MoMa house, he exploits the full capacity of the height created by the asymmetric butterfly roof and locates the main bedroom in it—accessible both from inside the house and independently by an exterior stairwell built over the garage and buried 90 cm (2,95 ft) below the rest of the house. The nucleus formed by the living room, main bedroom and garage is distributed into intermediary floors; it spans a rich range of spaces very alike to his first house built in Lincoln. Though this spatial strategy was used by Le Corbusier in the Errazuris House (1937) in Chile, or in other examples in Latin America—notably in Brazil, it is noticeably developed within Breuer’s work as an inner designing mechanism.

The House in the MoMA garden materialized the fast maturity process reached by strong experimentation regarding the single-family North-American house, and its links with certain urban facilities: the allotted suburban parcels, the shelter by the banks of a river, or the huge building sites within luxurious areas disseminated close to large urban areas.

(M.C.)