No way, according to a provocative new show at The Museum of Modern Art in New York called “The Un-Private House.” Not that any of the 26 avant-garde designs at MoMA–some built, some not–are likely to become a suburban developer’s blueprint. What’s significant, says curator Terence Riley, is that they challenge the most sacred tenet of the single-family house: that a dwelling is a private refuge. With more people working at home, the line between public and private arenas has blurred. Huge societal shifts–more single households, empty nesters–are reflected at MoMA, where designs are shown via models, plans and interactive displays. One house, designed by Simon Ungers with Thomas Kinslow, is 2,500 square feet yet has just one bedroom (and a library for 10,000 books). A house in Atlanta, designed by the husband-wife architectural team, Mack Scogin and Merrill Elam for themselves, has merely a glass wall separating the bedroom from a second-floor outdoor lap pool–a visual merging of the private and public.
One of the biggest affronts to the seclusion of the home is interactive technology. Among the wilder designs at MoMA is “The Digital House,” by Gisue Hariri and Mojgan Hariri. This unbuilt project calls for walls made of liquid-crystal display screens for interactivity. “In the kitchen,” the show’s catalog says, “a virtual chef from a favorite restaurant” could help make dinner for guests who appear on screen in the dining room but actually live thousands of miles away.
No matter how futuristic some of these houses seem, there’s an old god of architecture lurking behind most of them. From Rem Koolhaas’s spectacular three-level house in Bordeaux to Shigeru Ban’s witty Curtain Wall House in Tokyo (two of the exterior walls are covered by long white curtains), the influence of Mies van der Rohe is clear. His houses with open floor plans rather than enclosed rooms, and his extensive use of glass, presented one of the first challenges to cozy notions of domesticity and privacy more than half a century ago. Now, at the millennium, we’re still a long way from widely embracing those ideas. We may live in a society where people tell all on national TV, but most of us still want to go home to a traditional house and shut the door.
title: “Burning Down The House” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-29” author: “Rickie Paris”
Homes’s last novel, “The End of Alice” (1996), about a Westchester County, N.Y., serial killer and his pubescent victim, had a complex relationship to Nabokov’s “Lolita.” Hommage or critique? Updating or one-upping? “Music for Torching” puts similar moves–with far more success–on John Cheever, who still holds the intellectual-property rights to literary Westchester. Homes’s setting seems east of (and downmarket from) Cheever’s Shady Hill, but she gives us a roaming dog, a roving-eyed husband and a babysitter who seem to have mutated from prototypes in “The Country Husband”; Homes’s novel ends where that story begins, literally up in the air. (For Cheever, a DC-3; for Homes, a chopper.)
Homes shows none of Cheever’s nuanced ambivalence about leafy, loony suburbia and the annoyingly provincial, thwartedly poetic souls who live there; for her it’s a zoo. One kid, as a neighbor confides, “bit a teacher’s fingers off, the index and–what’s the longer one?–the f–k-you finger. He bit them off and ate them… Imagine how Catherine and Hammy must feel.” But the self-absorbed Paul and Elaine don’t empathize; they feel little themselves but lust, rage and boredom; their cherished romantic memory is the time they smoked crack.
If Homes weren’t so smart, this might be just a crash-and-burn caricature of suburban angst–with some brief, fortuitous topical relevance during the national shell shock over the school shootings in Littleton, Colo. But her people suffer in part because they know they’ve let themselves become caricatures. “If anyone knew us,” Paul says, “they wouldn’t like us.” Homes uses misdirection to keep them–and the reader–worried about the wrong things: adultery, insurance scams, job crises. Something awful does happen, but the characters can’t snap out of their own concerns to pay heed to the warning signs. And Homes contrives to implicate us in their blindness.
As Paul and Elaine torch their house, Homes torches a whole genteel tradition of suburban fiction–Cheever, Updike–in which some center of stability persists among the smug, the adulterous and the merely boring. Her Gothic-anomic suburbia is neither more nor less “true”: fiction is fiction. But it’s liberating to see the dead wood of unearned uplift get the old chop-chop. “Elaine doesn’t want to celebrate women’s lives,” Homes writes. “She wants to smash her life, to pummel it into a powder.” Rock-and-rollers have known for years that such rage and despair can yield paradoxical exultation. What’s taken writers so long?
Music for Torching-Rob Weisbach Books. 357 pages. $26.
